Affiliate programs are one of the web’s most effective marketing techniques. An affiliate program is when you put an ad on your site that has encoded into it your site code that tells the affiliate company that a customer was referred to them from your site and you get a percentage of the sale. They may be as little as 1% or in some cases over 50%.

These programs can be good for both the web site and the person offering the affiliate program as both may gain. Some referrer site can make money with no product or storage place, no risk and in some cases they do not even have a web site.

Affiliate programs are usually great for the seller as they can be on hundreds or thousands of site and they do not have to pay anything unless someone purchase one of their products.

In general it is best not to put too many affiliate links on your site and this can be damage your credibility. It is important that visitors see your site as a valuable resource and not just a site trying to sell them something.

It is best that you only give links to product you have tried and liked or are from respectable companies. In general it is a good idea not to recommend a product that you do not know anything about. It is not a good idea just too constantly try to send visitors to your site to affiliate programs.

When you write an article for your own site in general it is best to avoid mentioning an affiliate link in the body of you test unless that is what the article is about, as it can seem like you have a vested interesting in recommending that site.

Affiliate links should usually be put on side bar or in a resource area. The way I do it is I reserve the usually use the left site of a page for menus and the left side and the top of the page for advertising, but the middle area is usually totally free of any advertising.

It is usually best to link to affiliate partners with a text link as banners are often ignored as obvious advertising. Plus banners take longer to download.

The general rule is to only include affiliates that are related to the subject on your web site and that your visitors would actually be interested in.

If you link to unrelated programs they will not usually generate good leads and will not usually be a good source of income, which means they will just be taking up space but won’t give you much of a return.

It is often best to sign up with an affiliate program that deals with many companies at one time such as LinkShare.com, Commission Junction (www.cj.com) or ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com). These sites enable you to deal with many different companies but you only have to deal with one consolidated account to check all of them

It is usually a good idea to use an affiliate partner that give long time cookies, so you can get the advantages of sales done by that company for a long period of time. This allows an affiliate company to know that a customer was referred from your site. Some cookies last for three months. This means if a customer was referred by your site even if you do not purchase today you will get a commission from them if they purchase sometime within the time that the cookies last for and you will still get a commission. For instant Zeus, who is an excellent link referrer program offers a three month cookie. Some programs have unlimited cookies but not many of them do this. But a 90 day cookies is considered to be really good.

Links that go directly to product pages usually get better results than links that go to the main Home page. So usually it is best to advertise selected products. If they are directed to the home page they will have to find their way to the product page and may get lost on the way.

Amazon prefers that you have links to direct products because there is usually a greater return on sales; therefore they offer higher commission than when customers are directed to their home page.

My Experience with Affiliate Programs
Until the Google Adsense program came along for most sites you could not expect too much from Affiliate programs.

Unless you are getting or planning to get (aren’t we all) an extremely large amount of hits (over a million a month) as a rule affiliate programs will not get you much return.

I signed up to a bunch of them including Amazon, Commission Junction and Link Share and did not get much return from any of them. But at least Amazons gave a steady return.

Some of the Major Affiliate Programs
Some Affiliate Programs that offers affiliates from an assortment of websites. By signing up for these programs you sign up just once and you have access to many companies to offer their products.

1. Commission Junction (http://www.commissionjunction.com) - Represents a wide assortment of well-known companies
2. Link Share (http://www.linkshare.com) - - Represents a wide assortment of well-known companies.
3. Amazon Associates (http://www.amazon.com) - Has plenty of good products but unless you get a real lot of page views most likely you will not make much (over $100 a month).
4. Clickbank (http://www.clickbank.com) - Represents a large amount of Ebook publishers and software.
5. Google Adsense (https://www.google.com/adsense/?hl=en_US&sourceid=aso&subid=us-et-ads) - This is the first program I used where I made substantial income. They present on your site an assortment of text or graphic ads that are specific to your subject matter. To read a detailed article on Google Adsense click here.
6. FastClick.com (http://www.fastclick.com/) - This is a program like Google Adsense which is known to get good results.

Clickbank
Clickbank represents an assortment of companies that sell web based products that customers receive as a digital product such as ebooks or software, which is downloaded from the Internet. Clickbanks sell through over 100,000 affiliate sites. This programs give some excellent commission (some over 50%) so you do not have to make many sales to make something.

After signing up for Clickbank you just put a link to your site and Clickbanks deals with the merchant and processing the order.

You just check out what is offered and choose the sites that sell what you would like to offer. The basic policy is that the highest money making sites are listed on the top of the categories.

If you want to sell an Ebook on Clickbank they charge $49.95 to submit your product, then $1 per transaction and a 7.5% processing fee.

Selling Affiliate Products without a Web Site
To sell some affiliate products you do not even need your own web site. You can use Google Adwords and link someone directly from Google and you can make income from sales from these sites.

You can just have an Ad Heading, Description and URL link.

Ad Title
Description 1
Description 2
Web address of the affiliate company that includes your affiliate ID.

When you advertise using Adwords it is best to make your description clear so people understand what the product being advertised is so you just do not get people who are curious and not buyers.

Your ad will come up when people search for the keywords or keyphrases that you have bid on at Google. You should bid on words that you believe people will type in to find the product you are selling. Some words will be much more expensive than other.

Usually keyphrases are cheaper and can often be more effective. A competitive keyphrase like DVD player may cost $1 or more per click. You can choose an assortment of keyphrases or keywords and if some are more effective you can drop or add them as you like. With Google you can choose the amount that you want to pay a day and the maximum cost per click that you want to pay.

There is also a tool on Adwords to help you choose keyphrases. When you enter a keyword or keyphrase then the tool will suggest other similar options that you may consider choosing.

You have to pay attention to result for what you pay versus your conversion rate. For competitive words that will bring in a good profit there will often be plenty of people bidding for the same words you may want who are selling the same product as you. This competition can bring the bidding to near a break even point.

You are looking for a product that has a good profit margin with not too much competition with a good amount of profitable word phrases. You want to find words that get a good amount of searches but not too much competition, and that you do not have too bid to high a price per click.