If you choose to sell someone else's products, how will you know what to look for? After all, this is a new venture for you.

Or maybe it's not. Maybe you have been trying out some affiliate programs which have not brought you any money, or, worse, have not paid you for affiliate traffic you have sent them.

If you are new person, or person who is floundering in Internet Marketing, this article will offer you some simple tips for choosing an affiliate program.

This article doesn't cover getting traffic to your site, which is another huge piece of puzzle, and will be covered in a later article, but let's just start with choosing affiliate programs.

#1. You should find affiliate programs that:

a) are relatively easy to set up (code is either created for you or easy to create)

b) will pay you well. This depends on your definition of what being paid well means, but generally, for most beginners, and some novices, if you can see yourself being able to make more than $250/month, program is at least worth looking at

c) give you products which people actually use. There are lots of products in market which will sell, but do you really want to be selling pet rocks? If you do, please don't take offense. Most legitimate affiliate advice sites won't feature affiliate programs that are exclusively selling something like 8-Track players and tapes. While there are probably collectors out there who would love an 8-track player and cassettes, fact is that market is done with 8-tracks. The point is, there should be a genuine need for, or interest in, what you are selling/reselling.

Indeed, longer that I do business on Internet more I find that there are numerous free resources out there that can be amazingly helpful. I thought therefore that I'd put together a list of my ten favourite free business-building resources and exactly what they can do for you.

Ready?

1) Link Checkers

Visitors to websites hate "dead links" - links that don't got anywhere.

And because visitors hate it, so do search engines. They'll penalise you for dead links.

Therefore, by just making sure all your links work properly you'll look more professional, get better rankings in search engines and build better rapport with your visitors.

> http://validator.w3.org/checklink

2) Alexa

Alexa ranks websites by traffic. The smaller number of their ranking, more traffic they get.

You can use it to keep a running tab of whether your traffic is increasing or decreasing - and compare it to your competitors.

Another useful feature is to check out potential link partners. Someone emails you and asks for a reciprocal link. But if you're getting more visitors each day than they'll get all year then it's not a fair deal - you'll send them tons of traffic and get virtually nothing back in exchange.

> http://www.alexa.com

3) Google Toolbar

The Google toolbar has two particurly useful features.

Firstly by installing it on your browser, whenever you visit a website it'll tell you their Google PageRank. PageRank is Google's measure of how "important" a site is. A PR of 1-2 is typical for new sites. 5 is reasonable and 7+ is very impressive indeed.

By only linking to high PR sites (5+) Google will see you in a better light.

Secondly, is that Google Toolbar effortlessly lets you check "backwards links".

That way, you simply surf over to each of your main competitors, and use this feature to see which websites are linking to them. Then assess each website based on their PR and Alexa ranking to quickly come up with a powerful list of potential link partners. Easy!

> http:/ oolbar.google.com/

4) BetterWhois

You've got a list of potential link partners with high quality sites. Next visit each one to check for quality of site and that it's theme is closely related to yours.

Then find some way to contact them.

But what if you can't find one anywhere?