Here's an easy, effective method that anyone can use to make some quick affiliate marketing cash. All it takes is a bit of free time, a free blog that takes just minutes to set up, and a little information about the latest current events in the news.
Note: in order to use the method I'm about to show you, you should already be signed up with an affiliate marketing network - preferably one that has a selection of CPA (cost per action) offers, such as Azoogle Ads, Clickbooth, or NeverBlueAds. You'll need to be able to quickly select offers to promote based on current events in order to make this work. You can search online for more information about CPA affiliate offers, but the jist of it is that you can get paid from these offers without your customer having to actually "buy" anything, so you'll make more conversions then you would with a standard offer. However, this method can also work with a more standard affiliate like Clickbank, it's just that your conversions will be lower. Okay, so once you've gotten that out of the way...
Step 1. Go to Google Trends and find out what topics are "hot" and in the news today. (If you're not familiar with Google Trends, it's a service offered by Google that shows what topics people are searching for on a given day). Make note of a few topics that are in the "hot trends" category. Once you've identified some phrases people are searching for, go to the regular Google search engine and check to see what competition there is for that phrase. For this example, I'm using the phrase "South Park Fish Sticks", because that's one of the topics that came up when I did a search in Google Trends just now. When I search for this phrase with quotes as above, Google returns only 10 websites. That means that only 10 other websites are ranking for that exact phrase in Google, so I should have a pretty good chance of ranking highly for it. In general, you want to only focus on phrases that have under 10,000 results when you search using quotes. while it's true that people searching for this phrase won't be using quotes when they search, i've found that as long as there's a low number of exact matches for it, I can usually still rank very highly.
Step 2. Choose an affiliate offer that will appeal to people searching for that topic. As mentioned above, CPA offers will usually have the best chance of converting into commissions off this type of "trend traffic", but you should decide based on the type of visitors you think you'll be getting based on the hot topic. For our example above of "South Park Fish Sticks", referring to the cartoon South Park, I would look for an offer that relates to the show, such as a ringtone offer that pays me when someone submits their contact information through my affiliate page. If I'm unable to find one, then I'd just use a very general offer that appeals to a lot of people, such as an offer to win a new iPod. The only time I'd use a niche-specific offer is if I had a good reason to believe the visitors would have a strong interest in that offer. For example, if I knew the visitors would be interested in information on weight loss, then I might promote a healthy weight loss guide from Clickbank.
In addition to your blog title, post titles and URL, you can use social bookmarking and other methods to help ensure a high ranking for your new "hot topic" blog. Ultimately, you want your blog showing up on the first page of results when people search for the topic. Because you're building your site around a sudden trend, rather than an established topic, ranking well can be extremely easy even for a new site.
Step 3. Build a website around the affiliate offer and search engine optimize it so that it achieves good rankings. Free Blogger blogs work great for this. Basically all you need is to use the "hot topic" search term in the url of your blog as well as in your blog title. Then make a few short posts about the "hot topic", remembering to include the search terms in the blog post title and in the body of the post. Within the actual post, you can include a link to your affiliate offer, and when people click on your link and perform the required action (sign up, submit, etc.), you'll get paid.
Step 4. When people search for the "hot" topic, they'll come across your site and if you have the site monetized well, you'll likely make affiliate commissions.
Step 5. Repeat it again with another "hot" topic. By nature, this is a profitable but very short-lived method for making money. Usually, either the trend will begin to die out and your site's traffic will diminish along with it, or more sites will be indexed in the search engines and your site will be bumped off the first page of results (unless you do additional SEO to maintain your ranking). Either way, if you continually keep searching for trends, you can continually make money from this method by setting up site after site.
So there you have it - an easy, fast and free way to make money just by paying attention to what's in the news. Not only is this a great way to earn affiliate cash, but it can also be a lot of fun!