How To Find Affiliate Based Niche Products And Services To Sell

The sole purpose of putting together a niche marketing website is to make money and to do this you need to sell products and/or services related to the theme of your site.

If you do not have your own product or service to sell you will need to find suppliers who allow you to sell on their behalf as an affiliate. The process is fairly simple; you join their affiliate program and use the special links they create for linking to their product or service from your website. For each sale you make from one of these links you will earn a commission. At the end of each accounting period your commissions are totaled and you are paid out.

There are thousands of merchants who allow affiliates to sell on their behalf, making the task of searching for reliable ones quite daunting. Fortunately for you this task has been simplified by those who created directories of affiliate programs, here are two of the better ones:

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com

This is a searchable directory of affiliate programs. No "adult", multi-tier (MLM) programs or known scams make it onto this directory and each affiliate program is rated by the people that use them. While useful, this system of ranking is only a guide as there are many programs that have not been rated yet.

http://www.lifetimecommissions.com

This is a directory of affiliate programs that pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions for life. What is the difference between the two?

- An affiliate program paying lifetime commissions pays you every time the customer buys something from the merchant, not just for the first purchase.

- An affiliate program paying residual commissions for life pays you commissions on all recurring fees your customer pays, such as monthly membership fees, web hosting fees or auto responder fees.

Both of these affiliate directories have search facilities. You simply type in a keyword related to the theme of your niche website and a list of related affiliate programs will be displayed.

There are also Affiliate Networks to consider. These are big networks which administer affiliate programs for hundreds if not thousands of merchants. The major advantage of joining an affiliate program through one of these networks is you are less likely to run into the problem of not being paid your commissions.

Three of the biggest Affiliate Networks are:

1) Commission Junction http://www.cj.com)

Commission Junction is part of ValueClick, Inc. and allows you to make use of one very useful feature... You are able to get your commission payments paid directly into your bank account.

- LinkShare http://www.linkshare.com)

Linkshare is one of the largest Affiliate Networks with an impressive number of merchants using their services. It is worth noting that they do not manage the commission payments for all merchants using their services.

- ClickBank http://www.clickbank.com)

ClickBank differs in that they only deal with merchants who sell electronically delivered products like e-books. They control all aspects of the purchase and automatically pay commissions twice a month.

Not all merchants have submitted details of their affiliate program to any directory nor do they use the services of an affiliate network, so if you are still unable to find a merchant with an affiliate program who sells products related to the theme of your niche website, it's time to hit the search engines for your research.

The process is very simple, go to the search engine of your choice and type in a keyword related to your niche and then the phrase +affiliate+program. For example, if the theme of your niche website was related to cheese, you would type cheese+affiliate+program into the search engine's search bar.

It would then be a simple task of going through each result listed until you found the perfect affiliate based niche product you could sell from your website. Before joining any affiliate program take note of these important points:

1) Most affiliate programs have a minimum payment threshold typically between $10 and $50. You will only be paid when your commission exceeds this threshold.

2) Small affiliate programs can be troublesome when it comes to being paid your commissions. Try contacting the affiliate program manager who in all likelihood is the product creator and webmaster all in one. If you don't get a swift response it's unlikely you'll be paid your commissions on time (if at all).