Many people start out by trying to sell Internet marketing products. Why? Because they bought an e-book by a successful Internet marketer, who pointed them in that direction. A big mistake. You see these big Internet marketers have many ways of marketing that you don't and that is one reason why they are successful.

So how do you set up a niche affiliate marketing program? To start, you choose a market where there are a lot of products being bought, and a lot of competition. This shows that there is plenty of money there, and that is essential for you to be a success.

Use Amazon.com to find markets

To find how popular a market is you can go to amazon.com and look up the best sellers in that area - just type in the phrase you are interested in. This is a good way of finding niches. The lower the number, the more popular the market. You could also go to EBay and look for hot products, and see if there are many in the area you have chosen.

Next, go to Google and type in "weight loss", and you will find how many web pages show these two words together. This shows you the amount of competition for that key phrase. Leave the " " out, and you will find how many web pages include those words, but not together - this is not useful.

This is a huge market, so next we could consider "healthy weight loss" or "rapid weight loss" or "weight loss for teenagers" or "weight loss for mothers". We are now getting into some niches, and this is where you start with a niche affiliate marketing program.

At this point you need a lot of keywords to use in your marketing campaign, whether you are setting up a website, writing articles or doing pay-per-click advertising. Here the best tool is the free Google Keyword Tool found in Adwords. You can build a list as large as you like by typing in different key phrases, and then searching the database of the Google Keyword Tool.

Once you have this list, which you can export in a text file, yo have started your niche affiliate marketing program, and you can start marketing.