Part 1
The first thing you want to do if you don't already have one is to open an account with the Clickbank. Click Here
It should look like the screenshot below. Fill out the relevant details, choose an affiliate code and confirm your details with the email address you provided.
There are no hard of fast rules to become an affiliate other than giving them some of your personal details. If you want a quick look at Clickbank University Click Here.
Now the next thing you want to do is look for a niche that you're passionate about and/or can easily write about. You can easily find the subject you want to write about by doing a search via the Clickbank marketplace.
From there you have a wide and varied selection of choices.
For the purpose of this example I've used the Betting Systems niche and in particular Horse Racing. The one area I spend most of the time looking at is the gravity score. This according to Clickbank is the % of affiliates who've earned a commission in the past 3 months promoting the said digital product. You should should be looking for at least 15%.
The item I'm going to write about as means of this example is the one above and has a healthy gravity score of more than 28.17% which means that more than 1 in 4 affiliates are making commissions promoting this product. The other two things that are worth mentioning are the amount of affiliate commission you'd receive per sale and the rebill facility. You get $20.73 for the initial sale and $17.82 per moth thereafter which means its a monthly subscription service and therefore gives you a continuous payment whilst the person remains subscribed to the service.
If you're happy with any product you find in the Clickbank marketplace then you'd click the promote button and that would give you a unique code to enter in to article.
Your affiliate code would appear the box with the black dots and from there you'd press the create button.
You get a code like the one above top line (I've blanked out my own code) and from there you'd copy this and paste it to your article text and creating a contextual link. This will enable you to get an affiliate commission if someone buys the product through your link :)
The site I'm going to use for this example is in a niche that I'm very familiar with and one in which I can easily write an article about and that's the Horse Racing niche and appropriately called the Racing Expert.
Now that I've found what looks to be an ideal site to write about which will include my affiliate link, its time to find keywords/phrases to use for the title of the article, tags and for the contextual link.
There's a free tool called the Google Keyword Planner which seems to be quite effective and all you need to have is a Gmail account which is free. Click Here
I typed in Racing Expert and Horse Racing Expert in my keyword search.
You should be looking for two keyword phrases to concentrate on and with low competition. For the purpose of this example I'll use Racing Expert and Expert Racing Tips which have low competition and a monthly search of between 10 -100 for each phrase.