From my conversations with a lot of new BUM Marketers, it appears that most of them feel too overwhelmed by the amount of affiliate prorgams. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of experienced marketers’ and all their websites and emails about how they can make you rich.

Well, I am here to tell you that you should stay focused on a single plan and stick with it! (Atleast until you get your feet wet) While this sounds basic, the truth is, many get sucked into different affiliate programs and end up distracted!

I tell all new marketers to start with ClickBank.  Signing up as a ClickBank affiliate is free.

Once you’ve signed up as an affiliate, you can choose products to promote in the Marketplace section of the website. You are automatically credited with a percentage of any sales you make. The system keeps track of your sales by creating a link which contains your affiliate ID and the name of the product. In ClickBank’s terminology, this is known as a ‘hoplink’, and it looks like this:

http://yourname.productname.hop.clickbank.net

With over 35,000 products to choose from on ClickBank, it’s important to pick profitable ones to promote. Every promotion you do has a cost – if not in money, then in time. You obviously want to avoid promoting products that people don’t buy (ask yourself..would I buy this product?). 

Overall, ClickBank makes it easy to find the best products to promote.  Make a list of about 3-5 of the best products in your chosen niche, and you are ready to start promoting! It’s as simple as that.

A key to being successful, is looking at the priorities of a successful BUM Article Marketing campaign:

1. Quality of content – if your content sucks, people won’t read your articles. No readers = no sales.
2. Increase the traffic to your affiliate links, sales pages, or AdSense pages - focus on ways to bring traffic to your product sales page.
3. Persistance and trial and error – don’t get discouraged if you don’t make money at first. Learn from your mistakes.

When you pick an affiliate, it is important that you determine which companies you will profit best from based on the frequency that the product is likely to sell.

There are several types of affiliates and some will offer you more money from a sale than others will. Before you get hazy-eyed by dollar signs, however, remember, it’s qaulity not the quantity of money that the affiliate program offers.

For instance, if you promote an unknown product from a company that gives you $75 per sale and you sell 2-3 products a year or you promote a well-known quality product that sells at 2-3 times a week at the rate of $10 per sale, then you will make much more money with the $10 per sale product.

Often times large well known companies will offer a very small profit per sale because they are established and they have high quality product that are more likely to sell. Small, unknown companies, on the other hand, need all of the promotion they can get so they offer a higher pay per sale. Also, because they are unknown, their products are likely to sell less frequently.

The most important rule when picking affiliates to promote on your site is to pick products that would be of interest to those who would likely visit your niche site. Otherwise you will be promoting a product to a group of people who do not even want nor need it.