Becoming an affiliate and marketing products and services online in return for sales commission is a simple process that takes just minutes to set up. Online marketing is often brokered by marketplaces that serve as platforms for publisher affiliate programs.

Clickbank is one of the biggest marketplaces for e-products and affiliate programs. The affiliate programs are simple to join but to make money you need to steer away from the pitfalls that can quickly drain your money and time.

To make money online the need to identify printable programs is imperative since you will (or at least should) be putting some effort into marketing the chosen program - otherwise you won’t be successful.

If you choose the wrong program.. the lame product or the passé offer that has multiplied itself into countless clones throughout the web.. your money and time will effectively be wasted.

The Clickbank marketplace has some basic statistics you can use to find a suitable program. The “Payout stats� tends to draw attention. For a popular product it might look something like:

“PAYOUT STATS: $earned/sale: $ 29.00, %earned/sale: 75.0 %, %referred: 80.0 %, gravity: 390.00�

    * The first part: earned/sale $ is the average amount earned per affiliate for each referred sale net value, meaning what you can expect to get for a sale
    * The second: earned/sale % shows how much of the total sale value you will be getting
    * The third: referred: % shows how much of the publishers sales comes from affiliate programs (not a very dependable figure)
    * The last one: gravity: 390.00 points to how popular and effective this affiliate program/product is in relation to affiliate sales. It is based on a number of variables such as affiliate popularity, sales value over x-time, etc, and is not a absolute number of how many affiliates are making sales, rather it is a weighed number against the variables…. In short it points to how many sales have been made.

But all of the above only serve as indications. Much more important is the actuality or freshness of the product and the affiliate support / resources supplied by the publisher.

The most important parts to focus on are the publisher support – do they supply marketing tools, give-aways, banners, sales letter etc you can use? What do the landing pages look like? Some supply brandable landing pages which are a cool feature and easy to implement.

All landing pages MUST BE UPDATED. There are loads of publisher programs you can join as an affiliate that have landing / pitch pages that are copyrighted 2005, 2004 or even earlier.

What does this tell the shopper you have managed to funnel to the page? Do you think they will bring out the credit card and send you some money?

Bottom line: Think as the end-consumer in all instances and you will reap the profits. Be dazzled by the bright lights and you will not.

John Bowman writes for http://www.ibseo.com on topics of how to make web money, online marketing tools and simple seo tactics.