By Rebecca Habel

Before you will make money online finding and selling hot affiliate products, you need to understand what people want. You need to find a hungry audience and offer to feed them what they want. It's not enough just to provide food. For example, if someone wants fish, you are unlikely to sell him steak or ice cream.

Finding and selling hot affiliate programs isn't all that difficult if you follow a few rules and do your due diligence. Spending time doing good quality research is the key to your success.

You need to find out what demand there is for a certain product in the market, then examine your potential competition to find out if the market is already saturated, or if you have found yourself a viable niche.

"What should I sell?" "What products do people want?" "What's selling well now?" "How can I find a hot product?" These are questions many people ask and they are good questions to ask when starting your research. Going out and finding a product that appeals to you is not going to work, unless you just happen to like what is hot.

Before you even look at a product, you need to find a niche of people with a problem they will do anything to solve. You need to understand your potential customers before you should even think about products.

Your potential customers must want and desire to have the product you would like to sell them. A person must want a product. If they want a product enough, they will justify the need for the product. Want is a desire to have something, regardless if it is truly necessary to the function of the potential buyer's life. Need is an essential. Everyone needs food and shelter, but some people want their shelter to be six bedrooms, three bathrooms, a pool, Jacuzzi and so on. Workers need transport to get to work, but some workers will want a Ferrari while others will happily catch a bus. That is the difference between want and need.

Your potential customers have a problem they want solved and they're happy if you can help them solve it and will reward you for doing so.

Your potential customers have to perceive value in your product. The product has to fit into their wants, solve their problems and they need to perceive it's good value to them. That doesn't mean the product has to be cheap, in fact, it may be the very opposite. People pay extraordinary amounts of money for products and services they perceive to have a very high value to them.

Once you've looked at your potential customers and addressed their wants and solved their problems, you can consider the level of competition your product will have. Affiliate products are not unique to you; others will also sell them, so you need to see if you are able to capture enough market share to make the product viable for you. It's important then, to choose a niche where you can gain substantial market share, dominate or challenge the others competitors in the same field.

You must also look at the viability of the product for yourself. If it solves your customers problems, it must also solve your need to be profitable in business. Where you have competition you must do this well and perform equally or better than your chief competitor, or they will push you to the side instead.

The next factor that you need to consider when you are finding and selling hot affiliate products is to discover the general buzz around the product. If the public is generally interested in the product then it is a potential winner. However, if there is a massive amount of competition, the market may already be saturated. Likewise, if there is little interest and little competition, then that product may not be profitable for you.

More research will lead you to determining when your are finding and selling hot affiliate products is exactly what your competition is doing with similar products. If you find a large number of competitors heavily advertising the product, then it may be lucrative enough to support the sales effort. A lack of competitors or lack of advertising suggests the product is not a big seller.

Finally, you need to analyze and evaluate all the information you've gathered. Compare the demand, competition and advertising of the product against the interest, desire and wants of the potential customers.

You must check that you have high demand, or you won't have enough interested buyers to provide you with a good profit.

You need to compare competition. Too much means that your market share (profits) will be limited as it's shared by a large number of sellers. Not enough means that the product is not likely to be selling well.

High advertising drives up the cost of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, which makes it less profitable per sale.

Finally you must compare the general interest in the product by potential buyers because if the interest is low, the demand is low, and your profits are not likely to be good either. If there is still high competition even with low demand, this is a product to be avoided as your competition will be fighting harder for the lesser number of sales.

Taking the time to do your research properly can save you a lot of time and money later on, as you will know before you take on a product if it is worth the time and effort you will need to promote it successfully.

To find out more about finding and selling hot affiliate programs, get your copy of "Simple Affiliate Secrets", where you can learn how to create big affiliate incomes using tried and tested techniques.

Rebecca Habel has over a decade experience in web design and marketing and is the owner of Rebecca's Resource, where website owners can learn to create online profits. For more information, visit her blog to find articles on all aspects of marketing your business online.

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