If you are promoting the wrong affiliate program in the right industry, it won't take long to get rid of your existing merchant and replace his affiliate program with a better one. But if you've got your feet in the wrong sector, then ........ argh!

Oh yes, anything can be sold on the net. Ranging from pure digital products such as e-book downloads or web hosting to hard physical realities of life like crutches. But within this range are industries with products that do well on Internet and others that don't.

So what is the right industry actually? It's a grouping of products or services which are heavily searched for and shopped by internet savvy consumers. And if you want to make serious money from your affiliate marketing efforts, you need to be part of one of these in the first place.

A scientific approach to spotting profitable online industries is through exploiting the free market intelligence provided by pay-per-click search engines. Two invaluable statistics that these engines offer are the bidding amount and monthly usage of a given keyword phrase.

Bid amount is the ranking factor with which Pay-Per-Click engines list their results. Whoever bids highest for a particular keyword is ranked No.1 and the list goes on in descending order. To help their advertisers search for popular keywords, they even provide usage statistics of keyword phrases i-e how many users have actually searched for those terms during last month.

Let's say you have come across some affiliate programs in two different industries ... stamps collecting and fitness equipment. What you should do is a quick search on Overture.com (world's largest pay-per-click search engine) for terms 'stamps collecting' and 'fitness equipment'. A remarkable difference exists in the amount of top bids that merchants are willing to pay for each visitor to their site.

Research a few more keywords related to these industries and this difference will be further highlighted. Now exploit the Keywords Suggestion Tool to find out the popularity of these keywords among web surfers. You'll realize that keywords related to fitness equipment are not only more expensive in terms of pay-per-click advertising but more popular according to usage statistics as well. So you know which industry you want your affiliate business website to fall in.

There's only scenario where keywords related to a particular industry are more expensive yet less popular with those of another one you are comparing it with. Online profit margin is much higher for the former one, making each visitor more valuable. It's fine to focus your affiliate marketing efforts on this sector.

The conclusion: Instead of wasting your time searching for affiliate programs that match with your existing geocities family homepage or link directory website, work the other way around - select the industry you want to become affiliated with, before anything else - and start making real money from your efforts.