How to Find Affiliate Offers to Promote: 3 Essential Tools

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In this post I’m going to cover why offers are the foundation of marketing, and how to find affiliate products to promote. So let’s get into it!

What Exactly is an “Offer”?

First of all, it’s very important to understand what an offer is. It’s a word that we use all the time and sometimes we use it carelessly I think without understanding really what it is. Simply put, an offer is a bundle of benefits.

It’s important to understand that because when you are asking somebody to pay for a product that either you are promoting as an affiliate or that you have created yourself and are selling on your own site, you are asking somebody to exchange their money for the bundle of benefits that you are going to give them, whether be in your e-book, or in your audios or videos or software, whatever you are selling on your site.

So your goal basically is to craft an exchange that is perceived as valuable to your niche audience. And what you want to do is you want to make an offer, a bundle of benefits that is perceived as more valuable than what you are asking for your audience to exchange.

So to put it another way, when you go into a store and you are looking to buy a pair of running shoes for example, if the running shoes cost $100, the company that is trying to sell those shoes to you has to create in your mind that this is an exchange where you see the running shoes as more valuable or at least as valuable as $100 – otherwise, you are not going to exchange your money for those shoes.

So the perceived value of your product has to be higher than the price you’re charging for your product. This is an extremely important concept: marketing boils down to an exchange of value, so when you are creating your product (or choosing an affiliate product to promote), always keep in mind that the value you are offering the bundle of benefits has to be significant compared to what you are asking from your audience.

The Biggest Mistake Made by IM Newbies

The biggest mistake that newbies make when they’re choosing affiliate products or creating their own offer, is they get into low price offers. And this is one of the quickest ways to kill your business and to kill your momentum in developing an online business.

If you choose low priced offers, it might seem like the best way to go because you are going to get easy sales but even if you get easy sales, you are not going to make much money or you might even lose money. And that’s obviously not great for your self confidence!

Should I be an Affiliate, or Sell My Own Product?

One question a lot of IM newbies asks themselves is “should I be an affiliate or create my own products?” A lot of people just jump into affiliate marketing. I strongly suggest that you consider creating your own product.

Here’s a question to ask yourself when deciding between being an affiliate or creating your own product:

Are there already several good products out there that solve your niche’s problems? If there are several good products, then I would try being an affiliate for those products first.

3 Tools to Find Affiliate Offers to Promote

So now I am going to get into how to find affiliate products to promote, once you’ve determined your target audience’s needs. Here are the top three websites that you can use:

Offervault.com

Offervault.com is basically an aggregator of offers from affiliate networks, usually what are called “CPA” or cost-per-action offers. So what Offervault does is to aggregates offers from all the affiliate networks and put them into one website for you.

So let’s go over to it right now. Okay, so here is the interface once you log in. Offervault has a free membership, so all you have to do is go to the homepage which is offervault.com and you can sign up for free for membership.

Once you are inside, you can see that they have weekly training webinars and they are really good, they are free and they are often of high quality, they are a great source of learning as well.

At the time I logged in to Offervault, they had 37,000 offers in their database, pulled in from dozens of affiliate networks? The offers are categorized by:

Name of the offer
Amount of the payout (i.e. affiliate commission),
Type of offer (whether it is lead or pay per sale or pay per click),
Category or niche
Name of the affiliate network
The last time the offer was updated.

Something else that Offervault has is a keyword list. So you can click on this and you can get an immediate list of keywords that you can advertise on if you are doing pay per click advertising.

Okay so I am going to go up here, I will just give you an example. Staying with the trend of snoring, I am going to type in snoring here and I will see what offers there are. Click search, so 28 result, okay I am going to voluntarily sort it by pay-outs from highest of those here.

So you can see there are quite a few things here. MySnoringSolution.com pay-out of $46 and it was recently updated. MySnoringSolution.com is actually hosted by a number of different affiliate networks so you can see that one company might go with a few different affiliate networks and offers through there, you get greater coverage.

So this is quite useful. Then if you actually want to sign up for it, I will just show you here if you click on here. So click on the offer name, you will go through a larger description of the offer, okay? There is the offer name, the description of the offer, the details which network, how much it pays out et cetera and then you can actually click down here to see the landing page and the key words that are associated with it. Here is what the landing page looks like, you’ve probably seen those around and here is a description of the networks, the affiliate network.

You have to be careful when you are signing up with affiliate networks. Sometimes they are fly-by-night operations. Fortunately, I think Offervault handles most of the bigger, more secure ones. So that’s offervault.com, which is a very useful resource for seeing what kinds of offers are out there. So once you’ve done your niche research and you know exactly what your audience is looking for, come here and start doing some searching and you will find a good niche.

Clickbank Marketplace (Clickbank.com/marketplace.htm)

So the next, what I am going to go to is go to Clickbank.com, and I have already gone to the Marketplace, it’s just clickbank.com/marketplace and the market place is where they list all the offers that they have that people have created.

As I mentioned before, clickbank is the largest online retailer of digital products so in other words, products that can be downloaded, e-Books, software, things like that. And as I mentioned before, you can search for products here in the search bar or you can go down here and you can look on the right hand side and you can browse the categories.

Okay so if we click on – let’s try a different one this time. If we try education for example, we will go here and the way Clickbank does is they sort it by popularity automatically. You can also choose by other way. So I will just go to this quickly, average dollar per sale as it suggests. When a sale is made by – when sales are made by affiliates, how much they get paid by the person who actually created the product and they are selling it. Initial dollar per sale, this is in the case of recurring product. So there is a membership website for example that pays out an affiliate month after month. If you make one sale for them, they will pay you a percentage for the monthly membership fee. So this is what the initial sale value is. This is the average percentage of the sale that the affiliate is paid.

So if – a lot of merchants will offer 50% or 75% of the sale value as a commission. Average rebill – as I mentioned, membership sites will rebill month after month, a monthly membership fee, and this is what the average amount is per month if the affiliate gets for a certain offer and this the percent of the rebill. So that’s 50% or 75%.

“Gravity” is a unique measure in Clickbank. Gravity is the number of distinct or separate affiliates that have made at least one sale of product over the past 90 days. So I will give you an example here. In this case, a human anatomy or physiological study course, this one gives you a 75% commission. So the initial sale is $24.86 – that is what you will get as an affiliate if you had a link to this product on your website and a visitor to your site clicked on the link, went to the sales page for this product and then bought it, this is the commission that the merchant would pay you.

The merchant is paying out 75% of each sale, and gravity is 36.92 – so in this case, it would mean that around 36 separate affiliates have made at least one sale of this product in the past 90 days, which is a good indicator.

And the reason that “gravity” is not an exact number, is because gravity is weighted based on recency. So if a lot of affiliates have made some sales more recently, say the past week, the gravity would be higher. If more of the affiliates have made sales say two months ago and fewer had made them recently, then the gravity would be lower. So it’s not exact.

How to Choose Affiliate Products on Clickbank

So what do you want to look out for when you are choosing affiliate products? Well there are two schools of thought. The first is, you should look for products that have a high gravity. So in other words at least a gravity of 50 and then you know that a lot of affiliates are making sales and therefore it is a safe market to get into because it is a proven market, people have already made sales as it is.

The other school of thought is that you should go for a lower gravity because with a higher gravity like 50 or above, there’s going to be a lot of competition by other affiliates. So it’s going to be harder for a newbie to get into it.

It’s up to you whatever you feel more comfortable with, but I would tend to look into the ones with the lower gravity because I know from my own products, that a low gravity does NOT mean that a product doesn’t convert well.

So gravity is not the most important indicator, what you have to do is look at your niche, what your audience wants, and then find a good match for the products. So it’s meeting the need with a solution basically.

So I’ve covered gravity on Clickbank, and obviously you want a higher average dollar per sale if you can. Let’s just look here quickly again. Average per cent per sale, the higher average per sale; the more keen the merchant is to work with you and to share the revenue basically. So if you’ve got a merchant who is only willing to say, to give you 25% of the sale, they are probably not too keen on working with affiliates, they might be a little greedy, you want to go with merchants who give you a higher percentage per sale because that shows they are keen to work with affiliates.

Commission Junction (CJ.com)

The last site I’m going to cover for finding affiliate products is Commission Junction (at CJ.com). Commission junction handles a lot of physical products. So if you want to become an affiliate for physical products, you can look at Commission Junction.

I am going to cover CJ right now, and I have already logged in as I mentioned before in a previous video, in order for you to get an account you have to first sign up and you have to fill in a form. So go ahead and do that.

When you are in the account, you click on “get links”, and it gives you a list of all the categories of products that Commission Junction is an affiliate network for. So let’s just click in here, we will go and choose “financial service”.

When searching in CJ, the most important filter in my experience is “three month earnings per click”. What this means is over the past three months on average, how much have affiliates earned per click.

Another way to screen products in CJ is to look at the “network earnings” bars (the more bars the better). You know four out of five bars is very good in terms of earnings. So five out of five is outstanding.

Another column in CJ shows you if the merchant pays per sale, per lead or per click. Sales is quite straight forward. A “lead” can mean that person fills out a form and you get paid every time a person completes a form.

So that’s Commission Junction. Again, what you are looking for is a great match between what your audience is looking for and the solutions or the products they have in here.

So in this video we’ve covered offervault.com, we’ve covered click bank and we’ve covered commission junction. In the next video I’m going to tell you how to create your own product!

Need help taking your online business to the next level? Then consider joining my Niche Sherpa Video Coaching Course, or take a look at my One-On-One Coaching Program!

About the Author Moe Muise

I've been making money online since 2009 and have a passion for research. My focus is niche research: finding profitable niches, keyword research, and competition analysis, as well as creating outstanding content.

How to Find Affiliate Offers to Promote: 3 Essential Tools

About the Author Moe Muise

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