If you’ve got a website or a list (or, ideally, both) then chances are that you’ll need products to promote to it. After all, earning even a bit of pocket money from those promotions could turn your hobby from something that costs money to something that earns money. Or it might even take over as your full-time income source.

The best way is to sell products for commission – a bit like normal retailers do, except you’re not investing in stock.

Instead, affiliate products allow you to act like a commission-only salesman:

You get paid every time someone you introduce to the merchant makes a purchase. Sometimes you even get paid for introducing a lead – you need to check the individual terms and conditions to find out if that’s the case.

Places like Amazon are a good place to find products to promote, especially if your market lends itself to selling physical products or Kindle books or MP3 downloads.

But their payout isn’t particularly high so it can pay to look elsewhere.

Lots of sites have affiliate programs.

Some of them are very up-front about it, others are more covert so it can be a voyage of discovery trying to find the affiliate program, applying for it and waiting to be approved.

Often the best place to start is with products you’ve already bought. You know the quality, you can speak from experience (which comes through in how you talk about the product) and you can treat your review along the same lines as if you were talking about the product to a friend.

The next place to check is on sites in your niche.

Some sites will have a link that says “affiliates” or “webmasters” or even something as blatant as “earn money”.

Others are more discreet about their affiliate program and you have to use Google or the sitemap to find out whether or not it exists.

You have to decide on an individual site basis how brazen they are about their promotion of their affiliate program is – it’s down to your choice and I’ve had success promoting a mixture of styles.

You also need to check that the site you intend to promote isn’t fly-by-night.

You can do this by checking the WhoIs details to see how long the site has been in existence and also the WayBackMachine site.

Those two checks will give you a good idea as to whether the affiliate program has been working for a reasonable length of time and whether the focus of the site has been reasonably consistent over a decent period.

The next thing to check is the affiliate program the site is using.

There are lots of different programs around and each have their pros and cons.

I look for programs with a relatively low minimum payout – you don’t know ahead of time how many sales you’re going to get or even if their sales page converts for your traffic.

My personal ideal is no minimum payout level, just a time delay of around 30 days to allow the merchant to have confidence that the sale will be permanent.

Once you’ve done that, it’s a matter of testing and tweaking to find out how the products you’ve chosen to promote react to the way you’re promoting them.