Affilitate Programs

What is an Affiliate Program? Basically, affiliate programs are systems in which an online merchant Web site pays an affiliate Web site a commission to send them traffic. If a link on your affiliate site brings the merchant site traffic or money, the merchant site pays you according to the Affiliate agreement. There are two basic types of affiliate program payment arrangements:

Commission-per-sale : In these programs, the merchant site pays an affiliate when the affiliate sends them a customer who purchases something. Some merchant sites pay the affiliate a percentage of the sale and others pay a fixed amount per sale.

Pay-per-click : In these programs, the merchant site pays the affiliate based on the number of visitors who click on a link to come to the merchant's site. They don't have to buy anything from the merchant, they just have to land on the merchant’s site via a link on the affiliate’s site.

I have several good friends that are currently averaging anywhere from $100 to $1000 per month as affiliates. They have spent a long time developing their sites promoting specific products or services. It is very important to remember that you do not earn money overnight. It may take weeks or months or sometimes a year to build affiliate sites that work. But the payoff can be very rewarding.
One of the larger affiliate program sites out there is http://www.clickbank.com/ I’ve used it myself with moderate success. As with anything there are pros and cons to Clickbank.

The good things are it is pretty easy to use Clickbank. Once registered you just need to insert your affiliate name into a URL to be activated for the product The commissions are very good. Some pay out up to 70% of the value of the product.

One of the problems with Clickbank are that some of the products are a little questionable. You have a lot of get rich quick programs and the like. You need to be sure to check out the product before deciding to promote it.All in all affiliate programs can be a very good way to make money online. They are much more time consuming and involved than some other methods but if you can be successful at it can provide a pretty good cash flow.