A Theme-Based Website, Part 3- Choosing Affiliate Programs

In parts 1 & 2 , I determined that developing a theme-basednsite is a great way to generate income. It's going to be anWining situation for the search engines, my visitors, mynmerchants and ME. I've chosen a theme that I know (or cannfind out about) and love. I've found lots of keywords thatnare related to my theme and have lots of ideas for goodncontent to offer my visitors. Now I need to find merchantsnwho sell products, programs or services that arenappropriate for my site and will fit with my content.nnOnce again, I'm going to look at my list of keywords. nSince people are going to use these words to search and nI've used them to write my "keyword focused" content for neach page of my site... it only makes sense that the nproducts and services I want to represent should also be nrelated to these keywords. That will help me to seamlessly nrecommend the product within my content and really use my ncontent to resell. nnThere are several ways to find merchants. nnTechnique 1: I'll do a search on my keywords at severalnof the engines - Google, AltaVista, Overture, or any ofnthe others. Then I'll have a quick look at the first ten nor twenty listings. If I use SiteBuildIt!, the Manager willnautomatically show me ten related sites for each keyword.n(You can take the quick tour of SBI! at...nhttp://quicktour.sitesell.com/assist3.html ) Wherever younget the listings, some will be merchants, whilenother is content sites. (Of course some are alwaysnirrelevant. Lots of room for my theme-based site!) nI'm going to take a look at the merchants' sitesnand see if they have something I'd like to offer mynvisitors and if they have an affiliate program. If so,ngreat. They go on my "keep in mind" merchant list for thatnkeyword. Next I can explore the content sites. Maybe I'llnfind ideas for content, but I'm mainly here to see if THEY nlink to any merchants. If so, I can click through and see nwhat I find. Can you see the beauty of this? I'm going tonhave content ideas and possible merchants all organized bynkeyword. That's going to make things pretty easy when I gonto build my "keyword focused" pages, no?nnTechnique 2: I'll do a search for each of my keywords,nplus the word "affiliate", like this... +Italian winen+affiliate. Or I can try this... affiliate wine. Whatnwill come up are either merchants with affiliate programsnor content sites that are affiliates. Again, for thenmerchants, I'll see if I like their product and affiliatenprogram. For the content sights, I'll check their links. nnTechnique 3: Now I'm going to check the directories. nThere are a lot of affiliate program directories out nthere. I'll check with a few of the best, likenAssociatePrograms.com, Refer-It.com, CashPile.com andnAssociate-It.com. The directories list programs byncategory, so I'll go right to the categories that fit mynsite theme and see if there is any program I like. nThey often have reviews as well, which I'll check.nnTechnique 4: One more thing I could do is to joinnaffiliate networks. These networks provide merchants withnaffiliates and vice-versa. It's a good place to getnexposure to a wide variety of merchants. I'm sure to findnsome I haven't run across already, so I'll check to see ifnany programs are featured that will work for me. I cannjoin Commission Junction, BeFree, LinkShare, and/ornClickTrade. nnThat took a bit of work, but now I'm ready to narrow downnmy choices and weed out merchants with less than greatnproducts, or poor affiliate programs. I'm going to benpretty particular. The products I choose to represent willnreflect on me. And the quality of the affiliate programnwill be reflected in my commission checks. I want mynvisitors to be happy and come back to my site. And I wantnfair compensation for delivering such valuable, presold ncustomers to my merchants' sitesn