Affiliate programs have been around for many years. Joining good affiliate programs is a very easy way to start selling on the Internet. First off, you are selling someone else's product or service. That way you don't have to come up with a product of your own yet. Also, with every affiliate program I have been involved with, the mechanics of running the program are in place and in most cases run by a third party such as Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com). This way you don't have to worry about getting paid.

There are many good affiliate programs out there. Some will even provide a website for you to use in marketing their products or services. Most however, will require you to have your own website. To participate in an affiliate program is usually accomplished by placing a link or banner on your site that links to the affiliate site. The link would contain a unique ID that will identify you to the affiliate program so that you will get credit for any resulting sales.

Making money with affiliate programs is really just a matter of driving traffic from your site to the affiliate program site. Again it is all a numbers game. Everything on the Internet comes down to traffic. If you can't get people to come to your site, you will never make any money. It is just that simple.

I have tried dozens of affiliate programs over the years. I have had varying degrees of success with each one. The Amazon affiliate program (http://www.amazon.com) is very good and can be customized to compliment almost any website. Ebay (http://affiliates.ebay.com) also has a very good affiliate program that is managed by Commission Junction. Once you join Ebay's affiliate program, they will provide you access to several marketing tools so that you can create the HTML code to display Ebay auction items directly on your website. Then when a visitor to your website clicks on one of the items and subsequently wins the auction, you will collect a commission on the sale.

Probably one of the most successful affiliate programs around today is the Google AdSense program. It is free to join and very easy to set up on your website. The really neat thing about Google AdSense is that the links displayed on your site are relative to the content of your web page. Google evaluates each of the web pages that you have an AdSense ad on and customizes the links it displays based on your page's content. That way you are providing targeted traffic to the owner of the advertisement. They are willing to pay Google for this targeted traffic and Google is just sharing a portion of their advertising fee with you.

I have Google AdSense ads on about 25 of my sites. Several of them are making me a few dollars per day each. I am seeing a slow but steady growth of income from these sites. I have been experimenting with various techniques to increase the traffic to my sites and have seen a good deal of improvement over the last couple of months.