A Quick and Dirty Guide to Selecting the Right Affiliate Products

A lot of you put a ton of time and effort into building your blog and learning the ‘secrets’ of marketing but you’re not getting far because all of that work isn’t paying off.

Reality check: Your marketing may be spot on, it could just be the wrong product.

People buy for numerable reasons but they’re only handing over money if it’s a worthwhile purchase.

The purpose of this article is to give you a quick and dirty guide for finding and promoting the right products for your audience.

Why People Buy

There are two ideas behind why people buy:

• The product has a logical place in their lives
• The product fulfills an emotional need

Consider the purchase of a computer. A logical buying decision from someone, such as a tech-focused individual, is focused around how the computer will become a worthwhile tool for their work. On the other hand, someone that buys on emotion, such as a young college student, may be seeking something that allows them to connect and share experiences with their friends.

There are many other factors of why people buy the products they desire but the underlying principle is that the product has some kind of value – enough of a value that people will exchange money.

Unfortunately, you have one major hurdle: Information products can rarely show value.

Huh? Well, think about it.

Information, something you can find for free by doing enough Google searches is now packaged into one place – an eBook, video series, whatever. To a person that’s tech-savvy, why should they buy information they know is free? What if they’re not tech-savvy? Well, they may seek that information in traditional sources like books, DVD’s, and personal training/tutoring.

Packaging these concepts together, it really comes down to understanding your audience first and foremost.

Once you know who is buying – you can find what they’ll buy.

Finding Profitable Affiliate Products

Each niche has its own tactics for generating sales. You may already be attuned to reaching your audience – you just haven’t put the right product out in front as of yet.

Here’s the best course of action, in my opinion:

• What do you use? Take a look at the products you’ve purchased and ask yourself whether it’s something your audience could find value in. To make things smoother, you already have experiences with the product which will make your task of explaining the benefits even easier!
• What’s the competition selling? Maybe there’s a reason you keep seeing the same products promoted across the blogosphere? Dig through the sales page and find the affiliate program behind these products – become an affiliate for it, as well.
• Ask your audience. Simple enough, right? How about you just flat out ask your audience what they want to buy. There will be enough people that pipe up and share what they want from you – you just haven’t asked that all important question.
• Work with the gravity. Most affiliate networks will have some kind of ‘gravity’ filter that shows what products are pulling in the dough. Like your use of your competitors, you can use the marketplace to help determine the worthwhile products in your niche.
• Diversity. Don’t settle on a single promotion – get busy finding a wide range of products that touch on the different levels of your customers. Have a product for the novices, intermediates, and experts. Give people options. Don’t just funnel them into a single program.

Combine all these.

Each time you roll out a promotion, test it. Run a small scale PPC campaign to see the response. Drop mention of the product in a tutorial post and track the results. Send out a segmented email blast for feedback on the promotion. You know these techniques so just make it part of your routine.

If you’re still stumped then check out this post on finding profitable niche and that post – they’ll definitely help.

Over to you. What techniques do you suggest for finding the right affiliate products to promote?