Affiliate programs are a very easy and effective way to make money on the Internet right? so how do they work?

Essentially, affiliate programs are a way that you can promote other people's products and get paid a commission for promoting them. You can get paid to promote almost any type of product and service on the web.

Most of the top companies on the web have Affiliate Programs. Dell computers, Amazon, Expedia, AT&T, Chase bank, Delta airlines and Walmart are just a few examples - did you know that you can be paid a commission to sell products online for any one of these companies?

The best thing about affiliate programs is that it is so easy to set up a relationship with any one of these companies. Normally in business you would have to spend weeks or months of meetings, proving that you are a worthwhile partner to be able to do business with these sorts of companies. However, an affiliate program allows you to get commissions straight away as a little guy,without all the hassle of meetings and forming that relationship.

There are thousands of affiliate programs that you can promote on the web. You have so many choices that you could pursue. The key factors for success with affiliate programs are the following:

Choosing the right affiliate programs. If you choose certain affiliate programs you will likely only be able to earn a small income because their payouts are small. Other affiliate programs have very large payouts and high earning per click (EPC). If you don't know what earning per click (EPC) is, it is the average amount that affiliates earn from each click to the site that they are sending money to. Some networks express it in earnings per one hundred clicks.

For example you could say an EPC of $57. This means you make $57 on average for every 100 visitors that you send to a site or 57 cents for sending one visitor to the site. Generally I am looking for affiliate programs with an EPC of $20 or more, which means I am making 20 cents per visitor. Usually, I focus on programs that have an EPC of $100 or $1 per visitor. When you are earning $1 per visitor you have potential for a lot more profit.

The second critical factor is getting the traffic to the affiliate program. We are going to talk about this more in other issues of the Ecourse.

The third factor is being able to pre-sell to the visitors of your site. Let's say that you have a website where you discuss different products and services, a comparison type of site. You can recommend the product that you think is most beneficial and then when people click through to the site after your recommendation, they are much more likely to buy.

How do you find good affiliate programs?

One easy way is to go to all of the affiliate networks and sign up for affiliate programs there. The major affiliate networks like Commission Junction have thousands of affiliate programs that you can join in all sorts of categories.

It also depends on what type of strategy you are pursuing with affiliate

programs. There are many different strategies and we can't go into all of them now, we'll talk about them in detail in some later issues of the ecourse. However here are a few strategies to get your brain ticking over with ideas:

You can promote affiliate programs directly using Google Adwords. You simply promote the program by creating your own ads. This is the quickest way to make money on the Internet as you can get started and in 1-2 hours have some ads up that are making you money. However, it is getting more and more difficult to make money with this strategy as there are too many people doing it. As with anything in life, if something is too easy to make money, everyone will start doing it and it then becomes more difficult because there is more competition.

One strategy is to focus on a particular niche area ? let's say you decide to do a site on car rentals. You could then join all the affiliate programs to do with car rentals. You can find many of them through the major networks, but you might also need to search on Google for something like - 'car rental affiliate program'.

Another strategy is to build lots of little mini sites on the Internet focusing on different keyword phrases that people are searching for and get free search engine listings in Google and other search engines. This is a great strategy because the traffic that you get is free. This is general called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is great and can make you a lot of money but it is also very tricky. It is not easy to get to the top of the search engines. It requires a lot of knowledge, and quite a bit of effort. Don't think that you can just read a book and do it ? normally it is going to take months of dedication to get there.

That's a few ideas, but whatever area you are involved in on the Internet you should definitely be promoting affiliate programs. Even if you sell your own product online you should still look into affiliate programs as a back end profit centre for your business.

Affiliate programs are one of the quickest ways to make money on the Internet.