From my years of experience coaching people online, I’ve found that one of the most common stumbling blocks for people, is knowing how to find good affiliate programs.

In this post I will help you overcome this, by sharing with you a sneaky little trick that involves some spy work and using the popular social media site called “Hubpages”.

It’s no surprize that a lot of affiliates use Hugpages, as the domain has authority in Google, and it’s pages can rank quite easily. This makes Hubpages a great place to do some market research to find some good affiliate programs.

Let me explain what I mean exactly. If you head over to www.hubpages.com and click on the “topics” tab across the top, you will then be taken to the categories within the site.

What I like to do then, is browser through the categories looking for pages that have been set up by affiliates. For this post I will show you an example I did which took me all of 5 mins to do.

Under: “Home, Family, Parenting” ==> “Home Furnishings” ==> “Garden Furniture”, you will see a Hubpage called “Vintage Garden Furniture”

It’s very clear that this Hubpage is targeting the keyword phrase “Vintage Garden Furniture”, so what I then do is check out the search volume of this keyword phrase and also the SEO competition for it. (see the images below where I have displayed this).

This phrase gets 3600 searches a month on exact match, and there is hardly any SEO competition for it whatsoever. If this is your Hubpage, then I do apologize, however these are the disadvantages of using these kind of Web 2.0 sites, because everyone can see what you are doing.

Here the key advantage of this rather sneaky technique, most people use sites like Hubpages because they know that you don’t have to do as much back linking on the pages to get top Google rankings. The reason for this is because as I mentioned above, the domain of Hugpages.com has authority in Google. Authority sites require little no backlinks, just look at Amazon.

However it is not hard to out rank this kind of sites if you do a little backlinking to your website. So for this example you can easily ride on the back of this persons great keyword research, build a page targeting that keywords and just go better SEO than them!

This particular person is monetizing this keyword phrase with Ebay, which is not a bad option for this kind of phrase, however I know that Ebay are strict to join as an affiliate marketing expert. Therefore all you need to do is rinse and repeat what I just did for all the categories and sub-categories on Hubpages until you find a product that Amazon or Clickbank have, and you can affiliate yourself with.

This is not the only way to find good affiliate programs and products, but you would be amazed how many great keywords you can uncover in minutes by using the strategy, because essentially you are working smarter and not harder, which is what I like to do!

Enjoy

Matt Carter