You?ve probably already come into contact with products and internet stores that have affiliate programs without realizing it. Start keeping your eyes open and you?ll begin seeing them everywhere ? these are often excellent people to work with. You’re already familiar with their products and (probably) have had direct personal experience with them. Nearly every product that is sold on the internet has an affiliate program.

If you use something that sells online and you love it, scroll down to the bottom of their site and see if they have an affiliate link. If you don’t see a link on their site, use Google to search for the name of their company (or product) plus the word “Affiliate” You’ll find out if they have an affiliate program with their company. If you don’t find one, send them an email and ask if they have one. If they don’t, you can easily explain to them that you have a website that would be complimented by their product, and you would love to be an affiliate for them. If they are interested, they can simply sign up with Share a Sale (this is not free, but very worth it in the long run, because of the number of sales they will make from affliates).

There are also a few large groups of affiliate programs that make it simple for you to seek out and join many different affiliate programs without having to do much of the research and legwork that you?d find yourself doing. Two widely respected and well established such sites are ClickBank and Commission Junction.

The two sites are free to join as affiliates and have lots of detailed information
on how to use them. The single largest difference between the two sites has to do with the types of products that they offer. ClickBank deals ONLY with digitally distributed products that can be downloaded by the purchaser. This is a benefit for the affiliates because the percentage of the sale that you get to keep is considerably higher. This is also the easiest way to begin moving into producing and selling your own products ? when you develop a digital product, such as an eBook or an audio or video, once the work is done there are no costs associated with producing or storing those goods! Every time a sale is made, the transaction is 100% profit. This allows many of the affiliates that sell digital products to make upwards of 50% to 75% of each sale.

ClickBank also allows you to begin selling products with NO webpage whatsoever. You can identify products and get a special coded link that sends visitors to a sales page set up by the vendor. The vendor will do the selling, collect the money and deliver the product, all you have to do is send people to the site. You can share your link with your friends, put it on Facebook, even begin buying advertising in certain markets, all the work besides sending traffic to the site has been done for you. The downside to all this should be obvious ? it’s easy, so lots of people are doing it. This makes it hard to find a good product that sells, but that has limited competition for you to fight.

Commission Junction operates in a similar manner, but you can work with affiliates that sell actual durable goods as well as digital products. The range of companies that you can work with is obviously much expanded, but more of the work falls on your shoulders. Since the products vary so widely, you may need to set up a ‘review? website that you can send some traffic through ? more on this later. You will make a lower percentage of commission on the physical products, although you can stand to make more money overall since many of the products cost much more than a simple eBook download.

Both programs have strengths to offer ? there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be involved with both to start out. Once you have your accounts set up, you can search through thousands of different vendors and products to find the ones that you?d like to sell. It can be somewhat overwhelming, so it’s best (especially at first) to think of categories that you’re generally interested in already. Home and Family products are always popular and you most likely have some direct experience to pull from. You can search or browse the different
products ? take a look and see what catches your eye.

Here are some other places you can sign up to be an affiliate:

1. Amazon Associates: Amazon Associates earn up to 10 percent in referral fees for revenue made through blog links.
2. Chitika ShopCloud$: With ShopCloud$, you can list popular products in a tag cloud format.
3. WidgetBucks: These shopping widgets offer popular products, lots of relevance and plenty of customization.
4. LinkShare Corp.: LinkShare’s affiliate program will hook you up with programs for companies like Apple Inc., Dell and Disney.
5. zanox: Set up a zanox online shop, choose your products and earn a percentage of every sale.
6. uSuggest LLC: Suggest relevant products to your readers and get paid for doing it.
7. Chitika RPU: If you’ve discussed a product in a post, make money by putting a link to the product at the end of your text.
8. Auction Ads LLC: Place relevant eBay auction ads on your site to earn money.
9. Recommendations: If you’re a fan of a particular product or service, why not ask them directly to pay you for linking to their site?
11. Chitika Linx: Chitika’s Linx identifies keywords in your blog’s content and links them to paid product listings.
12. shareasale.com: Sign up with this network and choose which merchants you’d like to promote.
14. iTunes Affiliates: Keep your readers up-to-date on new releases and earn a commission on revenue with the iTunes Affilliates program.

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