When searching for the best converting affiliate programs, there are many factors that go into determining your success. As an affiliate marketer, you want to find a campaign, or preferably, campaigns that provide a solid income while you incur low costs. Your campaigns can be profitable with major differences, from markets, to niches, to promotional tools. Some can have no promotional costs (more on this later), and you may spend 1000's per week advertising others. The diversity of costs can be traced to one simple factor, your profits need to be greater than your costs. In the first campaign mentioned above, any sales will make it profitable, while in the second campaign, you will need a lot of sales, or a high priced product to offset the cost of your advertising.

Lower cost campaigns, such as a no promotional cost campaign, are a little more time consuming to set up and test. When you are trying to uncover the best converting affiliate programs, you can test them very simply by doing "bum marketing". Bum Marketing is a marketing style where you use article marketing, Squidoo lenses, Hubpages, blogs, videos and other free resources to promote your product. Some of these resources have built in tracking so you can track how well different keywords convert. If you begin seeing traffic and start converting sales, you have found a successful campaign. Once you find a successful campaign, it is time to start digging deeper and finding more quality keywords to promote. There are many great tools available, many of them are free, that will help you to find more, especially "long tail", keywords to help you expand your campaign. You can find great, free, tools at google to help you with keyword research. These best converting affiliate programs can be difficult to find, but when you do find them, you need to take advantage and squeeze as much profit out of them as possible. Capitalizing on these best converting affiliate programs will take a little bit of time and research. But knowing that you have a winner makes it much easier to accomplish. Once you find that winner, keep tweaking and adjusting and you can see a great return.

The second way of finding the best converting affiliate programs takes a much bigger investment. Prior to kicking off your campaign, do a ton of research, keyword research is incredibly important and, many times, will be the difference in your success. After finding a strong niche, search through programs or products until you find one that you feel can be the best converting affiliate program. As I stated earlier, you will need to make an investment. Start up a Google Adwords campaign with heavily targeted keywords. Monitor your costs and sales on your heavily targeted keywords, and tweak the campaign accordingly. If you have found one of the best converting affiliate programs, you can make a lot of money fast. Very rarely is this an effective marketing style as the risks outweigh the rewards.

I feel that the best path is to have a happy medium where you combine both efforts. I like to start with option one, and then when I find the best converting affiliate program in that niche, expand my efforts to include option two.

Remember, research is extremely important. Now find that best converting affiliate program and make some money. Here are two programs that will help get you started, Acme People Search and Wealthy Affiliate University.