The first thing I want to do is show you what Affiliate Programs are all about, what they are, how they work and why it is important for you to know all about them in your quest to make money from the internet. So here goes. Now, if you’re anything like I was when I first got into internet marketing, you don’t already have a website and product to sell or you really can’t be bothered to have to create one…or you haven’t got the skills (HTML) to build one…the next best thing is to find someone who already has a good website/product…and then become business partners with them and arrange a deal where you sell their product for them in return for an agreed commission (percentage of the profits) for each sale that you make on their behalf to customers. And if you already have your own website/product, then what you will need to learn how to use Google AdWords as an advertising tool to sell a lot more of your product effectively and make BIG money online…the easy way. So an affiliate program is an arrangement between a website/product owner and an “individual marketer” (in this case, YOU)…in which the marketer sends traffic (potential customers) to the website of the owner…and if a customer that you send to the website buys the product from the website, the marketer (YOU) gets paid a commission of the sale by the website owner. So really, your only role in this affiliate arrangement is simply to find an effective way of sending QUALITY traffic (i.e. customers who are most likely to buy the product being sold) to the owner’s website and the owner then does everything else involved with the sales process. The website owner takes the orders from the customer, processes the payment, sends out the product to the buyer, deals with any queries and customer service in connection with the sale AND then sends YOU your commission checks from the sale. You can see why I call it making money the easy way! There are affiliate schemes for every kind of product you can imagine; basically anything which can be sold on the internet through a website…can be sold by an affiliate scheme. And if you’re wondering how it is possible to keep track of the sales so you can know exactly how much commission is due to you…most website owners that participate in affiliate schemes have top-of-the-range “tracking” software that records each sale correctly so you get paid the right amount of commission. And if you’re thinking you’d have to approach individual website owners yourself to arrange these schemes, you won’t have to. You see, affiliate programs are very common these days all over the internet and you won’t have to approach any website owners directly if you don’t wish to do so. There are companies on the internet (known as Affiliate Networks) that are in business just to help you…handle the whole process of finding website owners who want to find affiliates like you to do affiliate deals with. The biggest advantage of joining affiliate networks is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to find different website owners selling different things using different tracking software with different affiliate payment procedures. Once you join one of these affiliate networks, you deal with just ONE company: all your records of sales, tracking and accounting is done in the same way, even if you’re selling products for several website owners. For example, you could be selling books for one website, selling home electronics products for another, selling gardening equipment for yet another website…and so on. As long as all those different website owners are registered with the same ONE affiliate vendor you’ve joined, all your commissions from your sales of these different products and website owners will be accounted to you through a single account. This makes running your affiliate schemes very easy indeed. Also you could track which products are selling best for you: if you find that your sales of gardening equipment is performing better than your other products, it will be easy to stop promoting the “slow moving” products and indeed finding more websites selling gardening products and sign up to those instead. Joining an affiliate network is fast and easy and usually takes just minutes, filling a simple form on their website. All you have to do is sign up with one of these Affiliate Networks and you will instantly have access to, and be able to start affiliate programs with ANY website/product owner on their list, (in most cases it’s 100% free to join these affiliate network companies). These companies make the process of finding website owners with good profitable products to sell very simple indeed. They will normally display a long list of website owners with products for you to sell, made available on their website so that within just a few minutes of you signing up to their network…you will be able to become an affiliate of any website owner/product you choose from the list, ready to start sending your traffic to that website and making your sales almost immediately. So joining one is well worth your while. So let’s now take a look at which ones are best for you to join. Resource Box Wan Su is the webmaster of http://superb-affiliate-marketing.blogspot.com which provides information, tips and ideas of how to make money online. You can also visit his blog to find out more ways to learn affiliate marketing.