Apart from the obvious ways of making money online like selling stock items, there is also a financially safer way turn a website that is in the RED to being in the BLACK. This well known way is using affiliate programs.

The simple way to describe an affiliate program is that it is an arrangement with another site to receive a commission for marketing their products and sending traffic to their site. The amount paid could be based on the amount of traffic sent to the merchant's site or the amount of sales the traffic send make.

Order of events

1. Customer visits your site
2. Customer clicks link on your site and goes to merchant's site.
3. Merchant makes money from Customer
4. Merchant pays you a commission

This shows that there are at least three parties in an affiliate program transaction:

• The customer
• The affiliate site (you)
• The merchant site

Types of affiliate program payment arrangements

• Paid-per-sale (also called cost-per-sale)
  An example of this is Amazon.com's affiliate program. When a customer that visited your site, purchases something at Amazon, you are paid a percentage of the profit or a set amount.
   
• Paid-per-click (cost-per-click)
  In these programs, the merchant site pays you based on the number of visitors who click on a link on your site to come to the merchant's site. They don't have to buy anything, and it doesn't matter to you what a visitor does once he gets to the merchant's site.
   
• Paid-per-lead (cost-per-lead):
  Companies with these programs pay you based on the number of visitors you refer that sign up as leads. This simply means the visitor fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.
   
• There are many more as you could be paid really on any action of your visitors, but these tend to be the best and most reliable.

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks, or "affiliate brokers," act as mediators between affiliates and merchant Web sites with affiliate programs. They track all activity, arrange all payment, and help affiliates set up the necessary links on their Web site.

Linking Methods

There are many ways to link to a merchant site, some are better than others.

• Text links
  The advantage of text links in an affiliate program is they are ingrained in the content of your site and so don't look so much like advertisements. For a lot of affiliate sites, this is the most natural way to link to the merchant site.

   

• Banner links
  These links appear as boxes, usually containing words and some sort of graphic element. They may be the best choice when you think a text link doesn't do enough to attract visitors.

   

• Search box
  This type of link allows visitors to search an online database on another site. The results of the search are links to other pages on the site.