Picking the right product to promote is essential to succeed with affiliate marketing.  There are thousands of affiliate products out there, but not all of them will make you money.  Some products are horrible and don't work as promised.  Another product might be fantastic, but its landing page is bad so nobody is buying it.  To make money as an affiliate marketing, you need to find a product that's proven to make money for its affiliates.  Why sell something that nobody wants to buy?

To find our product, we are going to look at the Clickbank network.  Although there are several excellent affiliate networks out there, Clickbank is one of the best for beginners.  They have an enormous selection of affiliate marketing products to sell, they always pay out on time, and it is easy to get accepted into the network.  Unlike other affiliate networks that make you apply to promote specific offers, Clickbank lets you promote every offer on their network right away.

The first thing to do when choosing a product to promote, is to decide a niche.  The best way to do this is to brainstorm and write down five or ten areas you think you would enjoy researching about.  When promoting a product, you will be spending a lot of time with it, so make sure the topics are something you can have fun with.

Once you have your topics, visit the Marketplace section in your Clickbank account.  Clickbank has its products divided into categories, so select an appropriate category and do a search for each of the topics you have written down earlier.  In the results, you will see a list of products that Clickbank sells that best match your search term.  Underneath each product description, you will see a number of different metrics.  

The key thing to look at, is the product's gravity score.  Gravity is a Clickbank formula that tells you how many recent sales affiliates have been making with this product. If many people are making sales with this product then this says you can probably do well selling this product as well.  As a rule of thumb, try and pick a product with a gravity score over 45.  The other metric to look at is the dollars per sale.  If you are going to use pay per click marketing to drive traffic to your product, then pick a payout greater than $30 per sale.  This allows you to cover your advertising expenses and still make a decent profit.

Using the two metrics talked about above, note down a list of products that meet these criteria.  Now pick the one that you would be most interested in researching about and promoting.  You already know that other affiliates are having success making money with these products, so the key here is picking the product that will keep your interest so you can promote it successfully.  This is the first step to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.  The next step is to join a site like Dominate IM and learn from some affiliate marketing gurus on how to setup your sites and promote them effectively.