Affiliate marketing has always been a very lucrative way to earn money on the Internet. It does not require too much start-up capital and the basic concept is easy for everyone to grasp. The basic concepts of SEO and link building are available all over the Internet. The person’s skill decides whether they will become a successful. The first problem which most new affiliate marketers face is deciding what to promote. Finding great affiliate programs is not tough if you know where to look.

The advantages and disadvantages of directories like Hubpages

Web2 directories like Hubpages are very popular with a lot of affiliate marketers. Hubpages is an authority site and its pages are usually given a lot of weight by Google’s ranking algorithms. It is often much easier to rank a Hubpages article on Google than ranking pages of your own blog or website.

While it is relatively easy to push your hub high on Google search results without creating many backlinks, these directories do have their disadvantages. The main disadvantage with using such directories is that you are leaving your strategy open for everyone to look at. This weakness can be exploited for finding great affiliate programs and finding the keywords that these articles are targeting. Directories like Hubpages are good places for finding great affiliate programs.

Methods of finding great affiliate programs on directories like Hubpages

1. Go to the directory, for this example, go to Hubpages.


2. Most directories have articles classified in categories. In Hubpages, click on “Topics” on the tab menu at top of the page. You will get a list of categories. Click on a category to open the subcategories. Keep drilling down until you find a list of articles and look at the titles.


3. One of the principles of ranking a page for a keyword is to include that keyword in the title of the page. Look for articles with titles that include phrases that look like keywords. This will help you find pages that are published by affiliates.


4. Say, you find an article called, “Great Patio Furniture”. This looks like a keyword. You could open the article to see the product or website that the page is targeting to reconfirm this. Finding articles such as these is the key to finding great affiliate programs.


5. Now you have a product, a keyword, and probably the author id of an affiliate marketer. These are all very valuable resources for finding great affiliate programs. The best part is that all this can be done in a few minutes.


6. Now go to the Google Keyword Tool and look for exact matches to the keyword to assess the search volume.


7. If the search volume is good enough to make it worth the effort, check the SEO competition for that keyword by searching for that keyword (within quotes) in Google. If the number of results is not too high, you have eliminated a poor niche. Now if the product that the keyword is targeting qualifies in terms of the commission percentages, or any other criteria that you apply, you have just found a great affiliate program.

Just repeat this process and you will succeeded in finding great affiliate programs to work on along with the keywords that you should be targeting. The chances that the authors of these articles are good affiliate marketers themselves is very high. You can just look at the other articles they have on Hubpages and this will make your search a lot easier and more rewarding.

The next task is to outrank those articles on Google for the same keyword. Though directories like Hubpages are authority directories, you can outflank them if you build a lot of backlinks and use other SEO techniques. That is the crux of the process. Finding great affiliate programs that others are working on and doing better SEO than them.

There are plenty of paid and free tools on the Internet that allow you to spy on what others are doing, but the method we have outlined above is easy and free. In short, instead of working hard, you are working smartly. This does not mean that hard work is not required, but why reinvent the wheel if the technology is already available.

Finding great affiliate programs is easy if you know where to find them. One of the methods that you should apply is scanning through the article titles in authority article directories like Hubpages to identify the articles set-up by affiliate marketers. Find the products and keywords they are targeting and do your own keyword research. Once you confirm the usefulness of the keyword and the product from a marketing point of view, you can think about promoting those products and you have succeeded in finding great affiliate programs to work with.