How to Get Ideas for Affiliate Sites

There are lots of ways to get ideas. Here's one.

1- Go to Commission Junction and log into your account there.

2- Click on "Get Links".

3- Click on "Advertiser List"

4- Click on "3 month EPC"

5- Scroll past all the new programs (the ones that say "new" in the 3 month EPC column)

6- Take a look at the top five or ten programs based on EPC. (EPC stands for earnings per 100 clicks, which will give you a good idea that these programs are profitable.)

7- Do a search for some of these product names in Google and Overture.

8- Take a look at some of the sites that are buying ads for those phrases.

9- Think about how you could make a similar site that's better. Maybe you could make a better designed site, or maybe you could add better content.

10- Start working on a site and brainstorming keywords to market under.

Here's an example of me going through this process:

Right now, the top 3 month EPC is for a program called Mortgage Intelligence. They're apparently an English company that pays 11 pounds per lead.

I do a search for "mortgage intelligence" in Google. A lot of the advertisers here are actual merchants rather than affiliate sites, like eloan.com or lowermybills.com. But one site that isn't is mortgage.best-loan-guide.com.

Taking a look at the site, I can see that what they've done is provide a directory or guide to different kinds of loans, which is apparently a pretty lucrative market, based on the EPC that Mortgage Intelligence is showing. They've got sections set up for debt consolidation loans, home improvement loans, car-buying loans using a home equity loan, etc.

Brainstorming ways to build a loan directory is as simple as going to a keyword suggestion tool and typing in "loan" to see what comes up. Here's my list:

• Home Equity Loans
• Car Loans
• Home Loans
• Payday Loans
• Student Loans
• Bad Credit Loans
• Boat Loans

Something else I noticed was that one of the keyword suggestions was "florida home loans". So under Home Loans I could easily have 50 sub-pages, 1 for each state. Same thing for all the other keywords. So I've got the beginnings of a 350 page loan portal already. All I have to do at this point is find additional affiliate programs who will pay me for leads.

Then it's a simple matter to build the 350 page site and start working on getting links so I come up in the search engines for free. Or I could create a really big list of long-tail loan phrases that don't have a lot of competition in Google Adwords, buy cheap traffic, and make a profit on my commissions.

And that's just one idea. The 2nd merchant in CJ under the list of merchants in order of EPC is Citibank Business Cards. You could follow the same thought process to start putting together a credit card portal site. Then there are several more loan and credit card providers, but also insurance providers.

Should be an easy matter to build a portal about insurance and make a lot of money too.

The only problem with getting ideas this way is that you're choosing lucrative affiliate programs, but since they're lucrative, you also are picking out extremely competitive areas to market in. So you've got to be smart about promoting them. I'll cover how to compete in competitive areas in futute blog post.