My affiliate manager told me some great news the other day. Out of 12,000+ affiliates at Azoogle, I am in the top 10! That’s a pretty nice group to be in, especially considering I have only been into affiliate stuff for about 6 months. I guess I am doing something right! I plan to try to give as many tips as I can on this blog to help other people improve their results too.

When looking for a new affiliate offer to start testing (which is a never ending process), it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of offers out there. But you should be able to narrow the field down quite a bit based on your preferences. Each person has their own needs, but here are some things I avoid when choosing offers to test.

1. High competition offers. If I have read about it on a forum, or I hear it’s a “hot offer”, I keep looking.

2. Seasonal offers. I try to stay away from them. With the time it takes to set up a campaign properly, I want something that is going to covert all year long, not drop off to 0 after a certain date. Of course each group of keywords has peaks and valleys which you should stay on top of. http://trends.google.com is a good place to start.

3. Trademarked term offers. These are tough with all the restrictions on keywords and ad copy that you can’t use. So I pass these by as well.

4. Super high payout offers. If you pick the highest paying offers in a CPA network, most likely everyone else will too. This goes back to #1. There is plenty of money to be made with lower paying offers.

5. Low search volume offers. It’s important to do a lot of research on monthly search volumes for the keyword set you are using. If the volume is too low, it’s not worth building a campaign around. Of course the key is to balance a good search volume, with a relatively low competition offer. These niches are rare, but they are out there.