How to make money from your website

You can use free affiliate programs to earn money from your web-traffic.

If you have a website with some traffic, you can make money by having links to merchants' online shops on your site. If someone goes through your links into the shop of the merchant, and buys something, you earn commission from the sale, between 5% and 40% depending on type of merchant. Some merchants also pay for each click or each lead. A lead is a new visitor to the shop that asks for more information or prize offers.

People or companies having these links on their web-sites, are called affiliates, and the links are called affiliate links. The administrative infrastructure by the merchant that the affiliate register into, in order to get the linking code, is called an affiliate program.

To register into an affiliate program is usually free, and through the program you get freely all you need to make the linking code, to monitor the traffic through your links, and to see what commission you have earned.

An affiliate program is not a MLM program, since the affiliates only earn from sales, leads or clicks.

However, in many programs you can recruit other affiliates and earn some commission from the sales made by the recruited affiliates too.

There are also common networks operated by third-part companies where several merchants use a common software and administrative infrastructure to recruit affiliates and monitor the traffic from affiliates. These are called affiliate networks. Both the merchants and potential affiliates register into the network, and the affiliates can find links to the online shops of hundreds of merchants to use at their web-site1.

Use this checklist to get some basic answers about an affiliate program before you commit your time and energy to it:

Go to the Web site that offers the program and red he affiliate FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and legal agreement. If it doesn't have a FAQ or it doesn't have clear answers to obvious questions, you should be a trifle suspicious of its intentions. All the legal agreements are more or less obscure to nonlawyers, however, so that's no true indicator of the program's purpose.
Find out exactly what the program pay for. Does it pay for someone to just click a link of your site? Or does it pay only if that person places an order?
How much does the program pay and how often does it issue checks?
What's the minimum amount that you can earn and still get paid?
How good is the program's support? Does it provide you with nothing besides an advertising banner?
Can you monitor, in real time, how much the program owes you?
Does the program list others who are currently signed up for it? If so, go to those Web sites and e-mail the Webmasters to ask them how satisfied they are with the program.
How long has the program been in operation? Are there any complaints filed against it with the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org), Direct Marketing Association (www.the-dma.org), or any regulatory agencies2?

1 Holt, Knut. http://www.articlecity.com/articles/business_and_finance/article_6010.shtml
2 Crowder, David. Building a Web Site for Dummies. Wiley Publishing Inc. 2004, p.230-231