To any Internet Marketer these days an affiliate program is absolutely essential marketing method of achieving a decent e-growth. Allowing others to promote your products or services can be the most efficient way of selling your products as you only pay for successful results, whether these are leads, sales Or traffic.

Unfortunately with the hundreds of affiliate programs that are started weekly by merchants, Attracting Your fair share of affiliates willing to participate in your program is never an easy goal unless you are already experienced in such matters.

With this in mind there are several solutions catered towards announcing your program to the industry. The most obvious solution is offered by affiliate program submission services which submit your program to the relevant directories, in the hope that affiliate marketers will find and join your program. These can charge up to $300 (Usd) which may seem a bit excessive for inclusion in the majority of directories.

On the positive side they will present your program accurately and promptly to the correct editors, And these submission services are normally very well established and recognised as professionals by the editors of such directories. You'll find that most directories themselves recommend you use these services.

An alternative method is to submit your site manually to these affiliate directories. This will take a lot of time as researching these directories alone can be a mammoth task. You can easily spend a week just finding these directories & even with a complete list Of directories you'll discover that some will only accept submissions from the paid submission services. If your going to follow this route, Affiliatecrashcourse.com offers an ebook containing a list of such directories saving you days of searching though Google & Yahoo for the results. The majority of directories are free to list in, Offering you an upgraded spot for a small fee.

Whichever method you use to get your program listed whether its doing it manually, Or paying you will generally find that the main directories such as Associateprograms & Adbility will contact you within a few days. These are also the ones that will supply you with the most prospects. Some of the smaller directories will take months to list your program, I've known it to take up to three months to get a listing in some of these directories.

It's not an ideal situation especially when you launch your own program you'll want to atract some super affiliates, Those marketers already established with several successful web sites & massive mailing lists which can push your program for you. But in reality, they are not likely to be watching these directories for the release of your program.

However, one place where you can find these super affiliates is on Joint Venture Websites. A JV Site is where marketers present offers to each other in the hope of finding partners to promote their programs and if you use them along with the main affiliate directories you can give your program a successful launch. Additionally by listing In JV sites you are establishing some credibility for yourself with other marketers. These are marketers who you could find yourself dealing with time and time again.

Personally I subscribe to a lot of mailings from established internet "gurus" and you often see a few of them promoting identical offers. Believe me this is not a coincidence, I've saw announcements listed at JV Sites and within a few days everyone is promoting them including these gurus. Just make sure you research and develop your affiliate program properly before launching on A JV Site. If you do it badly they won't forget you - But for the wrong reasons.

Mark Kenny is an online entrepreneur who specialises in developing turnkey websites in niche and profitable markets. You can see a selection of the work he is involved in at: http://www.concept-casinos.com.