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If you own a high-traffic website, you can earn a fat amount just by giving links of merchants' online stores on your pages. The idea is that you get a commission for every sale that the merchants make via your site. And some merchants even pay for clicks and leads, not only sales.

Affiliate marketing is a big success story now and its marketers are making good money with it. You needn't bother if you do not have a website, you can also earn by becoming an affiliate of any other good company. But yes, owning a website always helps because you can optimize it independently and try for a good search engine position yourself to get back huge affiliate income.

How to find the best affiliate programs?

Be focused right from the start. Go for only those affiliate programs that are related to your website's content. It's important to give maximum value to your visitors. They come to your page with specific interests and therefore the affiliate programs of your site must be commensurate with your visitors' needs.

What to look for while choosing an affiliate program?

A major determiner for the right affiliate program is the product or service it offers. It's useless joining any program which you can't use or which offers lousy services. Look for the affiliate networks first. These are particularly helpful if you plan to run multiple websites. Typical affiliate networks offer many different programs for a webmaster to join. Majority of these allow you to look into the merchants' directory before you join. Three of the leading affiliate networks today are Link Share, Commission Junction and Click Bank.

Secondly, never invest time on an affiliate program which has a low commission rate. Also, keep a tab on the dollar figure, which you will earn after every sale or action. For instance, 20% commission on a $100 item comes to $20, whereas a 50% commission on a $5 product is as meager as $2.50. So know the payment details well. This will help you decide whether to progress.

Does the company offer tracking?

In affiliate marketing, it's very important to be able to check the stats'which ads are doing well, which are falling flat, the number of click-through and sales, etc. All standard affiliate programs have this affiliate tracking, allowing webmasters to see the stats anytime they want.

Where to place affiliate links on a website for best results?

Experience says that placing ads above the fold of websites performs best as also in content. Google's AdSense program is a great way to feed in content, as Google delivers related ads. Some webmasters place Google ads to the left of body-text, along with placing them some paragraphs below. This is quite a successful technique.

The above questions will be of great help when you start looking for the right affiliate program. If you are already efficient in finding the perfect affiliates, you can start working them into your website right away!