Affiliate Program Directory and tips for finding and making money with affiliate programs

Affiliate Program Directory & Guide

Tips, information and resources for making money with your website as an independent affiliate.

Affiliate programs (also called associate programs) are a quick and relatively simple way to make money with your website. You don't sell your own product, instead you represent another company as an affiliate.

In this section you'll find some tips on how to find the programs that will work best for you, some ideas to maximize the visitor-to-customer conversion ratio and learn about the few companies that I've worked with that you might want to avoid dealing with.

There is no cost to join these types of programs. All you need is an established website and few minutes to apply.

15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer
There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business ~ and here is a list of 15 great reasons to become an affiliate marketer.

How do affiliate programs work? In a nutshell :
1) find a company or product that fits in with your website theme.
2) Join their affiliate program.
3) Add some specially-coded links to your webpages and newsletters.
4) Your visitors check out the offers that interest them.
5) You cash your checks.

A fairly common practice is to find a merchant or product that interests you and build a content-rich website around it.

Affiliate program types fall into two major categories: "Pay Per Sale" (or 'Cost Per Sale' / CPS) and "Pay Per Lead", (or 'Cost Per Lead' / CPL).

The other types of payment structures - "Pay Per Click/Cost-Per-Click" (PPC/CPC), "Pay Per Action/Cost-Per-Action" (PPA/CPA) and "Pay Per Impression" are just variations of the two categories... and there may very well be other variations that I'm not aware of.

These commission types are fairly self-explanatory, the CPS programs pay a flat fee or percentage commission for a sale. CPL programs pay a set amount for a name and valid e-mail or physical address.

Either way, your visitor must first click on your specially-coded link to reach the merchant's website.

I strongly recommend that you get some sort of tracking program to keep all your affiliate data organized. If you want a recommendation, it would be hard for me to find anything wrong with Affiliate Manager - it's easy to use, reasonably priced and will keep all the info you will need safe and secure.

There are two main resources for finding affiliate programs to join:

Affiliate Networks ~ These are the companies that manage the affiliate programs for online merchants. Once you are accepted into a network, most of the merchants they manage will allow you to join their programs with just a few clicks. Others will want to check out your website first.
Click here for more about Affiliate Networks.

In-House Affiliate Programs ~ these are the "one company and/or one brand" affiliate programs. Some companies just prefer to run their own affiliate programs. These type of programs can be a little hard to find, and are more time-consuming to apply to, but it's usually worth it.
Click here for more about In-House Affiliate Programs.

Read the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience, earned 436,797+ in 2002 and now earns MUCH MORE than that ... just by selling other people's stuff online!

In her down-to-earth, sincere and often humorous style, Rosalind Gardner guides you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing business on the 'Net.

Frequently revised and updated to reflect industry changes, the Super Affiliate Handbook now consists of 235 pages and 235 screenshots that will show you step-by-step how to become a Super Affiliate. , you'll learn how to pick the best programs, negotiate a commission raise and save time, money and effort on everything from affiliate software to web hosting.

To learn exactly how she does it, Click Here.

More Information:

Tips for finding the right affiliate programs for your website

Things you can do to get better conversions & make more with your chosen programs.

AffiliateMatch Directory

Track & protect your affiliate data with Affiliate Manager!

Not all affiliate programs/companies are equal: Below is a short list of companies that I will not work with again... and why.

Other Information:

This is a listing of companies I won't work with in the future. I'll tell you why in each case, but the ultimate decision to work with them or not is on you... the reason or reasons that made me decide to stop working with them may or may not be currently valid.

LeadCrunch ~ Tracking issues - and I suspect a much lower conversion ratio than it should have been.

TMP Express ~ Everything went great - until I got close to the minimum payout amount, then my stats dropped by about 90 percent (despite the fact that I had added their advertisements to even more pages because it was doing so well)... the affiliate service rep was abrupt and un-helpful - plus, my stats dropped to pennies a day and I never did actually reach the minimum payout, so I pulled all the ads.

PrimaryAds ~ After the "upgrade" to their system the whole thing went into the toilet... and the rep I talked to was rude and arrogant.

Catalogs.com ~ This is a favorite program of many people, but the way they handled their "affiliate database cleanup" and their subsequent short-lived partnership with ShareASale left me with a really negative feeling for this company. And they still owe me $84.35 for the final check, which Marifer said she'd send, but didn't.

123Refills.com ~ Tracking issues - at least two sales that I know of were not credited, so I dropped them.

Freeze.com ~ Spyware & Adware. Promoting this stuff to your visitors will not make you any friends.

99Flowers.com ~ This is a very popular program, with many fans, but errors in their affiliate management access prevented me from accessing my tracking data or updating my mailing address. When I asked them about it, they said it was fixed, but it wasn't.. then they blamed my browser...(Bulls**t) - and I never did get paid, either.

Juice ~ This is just too damn good to be true. In my opinion, it's either a bogus program or the creators have their heads in the clouds.

Gator ~ Spyware and Scumware. Don't promote this program at all. Use & promote RoboForm instead - it's a clean program that won't anger your visitors.

Bravenet ~ Actually, this is a good deal for start-up websites. My only complaint with them is the excessive advertising on all of their services. Much of it is aimed directly at your visitors and can get really annoying. (We don't want our visitors to get annoyed, now do we?)