Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest way to make money online. There are some critical things you need to think about before trying to make money by becoming an affiliate marketer. An affiliate program is a contract between a person and a company. The company will be willing to pay a marketer to promote their products or services. It's as simple as that. If a person is a part of an affiliate program for a company, then they are a salesperson for that company. The big difference is, this is all done over the internet.

Individuals can make money fast with some affiliate programs. There are a lot of programs out there that are offered by companies which pay hundreds of dollars just for a lead, not even a sale. For example, many insurance companies offer hundreds of dollars for a lead because they have set up their sales strategy to convert leads to sales so well. Also, many web hosting companies (and other subscription based services) offer large commissions for leads because they know the customer will be with the company for a long period of time. If you want to make money fast, promoting large commission based products and services is one way to do that.

To start out in affiliate marketing, you need to put content on a website. Whether that be a free blog or an article service that will let you put affiliates link in your articles. There are many free blog services available on the internet. There are also numerous websites that will let you submit articles to them.

The best way to start an affiliate marketing business is to create your own websites and bring targeted traffic to them through pay per click marketing campaigns. You will first need to buy web hosting service through one of the many web hosting companies. Once you do that, you will be able to setup your website with the content you need to attract visitors and promote products and services.

After you have your website up and running, it's important to get targeted traffic to that website. With no traffic, you will go no sales or leads for the companies you are affiliated with. You can get traffic easily using pay per click advertising. There, you will be able to pick the keywords you want to bid on and start getting traffic. Once that traffic comes to your website, make sure have a good way to capture those leads, clicks, or sales.

OK, by now you should know what a buying keyword is, if not please read about Buying v Browsing Keywords first.  If you have already read it then it’s time to get cracking.

I will be showing you a variety of different methods of keyword research here and in this example I’m using the buying keyword “buy” along with a pretty generic word “stick.”

1.  Free Keyword Suggestion Tool From Wordtracker

Simply visit the site here and enter “buy stick” (without the quotes) and you should see something that looks like this:-




Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Again simply pop in your keywords and choose “show all” from the columns to be displayed drop-down menu.  You’ll find a great selection of keywords here to pick from.

Amazon

If you are wanting to promote products on Amazon then simply go to their website and make use of their search box which works a bit like predictive text.





Ebay

If the keywords you found above isn’t enough for you, you can enter your keyword at ebay and have a look at the related searches.  If you click on one of the results you will be led to even more keywords that you’d never have thought of in a million years!





Google Wonderwheel

This is a pretty fun way of researching keywords because it’s very visual.  A spider graph is created and you can keep clicking on different words in order to throw up even more!
 

Are all of the keywords above automatically “buying” keywords?  Unfortunately not.  Before you write an article about one of the keywords above you need to ask yourself a couple of questions?

What is the product?
Are there enough products or advertisers available that you can promote easily? 
What is the cost?

Let’s take “walking stick bugs” for instance.  Walking stick bugs are also known as stick insects and people who are interested in keeping unusual pets tend to buy them.

Doing a search on ebay and Amazon doesn’t bring up all that much.  All the products that I can see are items featuring images of the bugs, books about them or such like.  The person who wants to buy the live insects are not going to be interested in these products.  In terms of Adsense, the CPC (cost per click) is only 5 cents which is abysmal.  Personally I wouldn’t go with this keyword.

“Stick vacuum cleaners” on the other hand is much more attractive to me because there are plenty of them being sold on both Amazon and eBay.  The cost is pretty low which means shoppers won’t have to worry about the cost too much.  Also, vacuum cleaners are the sort of items that everyone has and needs to replace every now and again because they break down and they’re too costly to have repaired.

In terms of choosing an article title for this I would chose something along the lines of…

Where to Buy Stick Vacuum Cleaners?
How to Buy Stick Vacuum Cleaners
Black & Decker Cordless Stick Vacuum:  Buyers Guide

Also, don’t forget to throw in words like cheap, low cost and affordable into the article as most of the time other websites won’t target them yet you can get quite nice traffic from it.  However please make sure you don't go overboad with these words.  If you have an article titled "Cheap Stick Vacuum Cleaners" and then it turns out your only writing about them, people can get pretty mad.

Most people find that doing keyword research is the hardest part of making money online but it starts to get easier the more you do it.  Will you be able to make money with every keyword you choose?  No, not even the “experts” will get it right every time.  A lot of people simply use the internet to find out about products and compare prices.  They will then print off some details and take them along to their local shop and ask “can you match this price?”