Quite simply, an Affiliate Marketing Program (aka referral/associate/partner program) allows site owners to earn money by referring people to various products or services. In recent years, it has become a popular and exciting home business that you can control from your PC!

Most Affiliate Marketing Programs are free to sign up for business owners but you will have to go through an approval process, after which you will successfully be able to host ads or use link referrals on your website. In my opinion, while most online searches will yield ads for 'make money, get rich fast' schemes or multi-level marketing businesses, you should clearly steer away from these. These may misinform and misguide you about the truth of affiliate programs. Now, don't get me wrong, there are many legitimate and credible organizations out there, just be sure to do your research or that there is a real person there to guide you along, a Mentor!

A lot of people start with part time affiliate marketing and then proceed to doing it full time, since it promises a lot of success and monetary gains but the road is tough and requires a lot of hard work and input from your side. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you start an affiliate business:

1. Research the online marketing space to find out about popular products or niches, like dog food, clothing, and weight loss or fitness products.

2. After choosing the top-level products or services (like dog food in general), make sure you study the subject well. Or quite simply, just choose a topic of your interest.

3. Start writing content for the products. You could start a review site for different products, and review one product every week and tie that review with an affiliate site that would direct users to purchase the product or have banner ads related to the product.

4. Make sure to include search engine optimized articles with good content. A good quality article should have useful information, pros and cons about the product without an overuse of hyperlinks or ads. This will help search engines crawl your website and improve its listing, resulting in more users coming to your website.

5. Your pages should be neat, written in one standard font with good grammar. Users should not feel that they have been led to a website meant for making money.

6. Sign up with a reputed affiliate program, such as the Amazon referral program, which has set a benchmark for most affiliate programs.

7. Find products corresponding to your reviewed products and display relevant ads.

The percentages of people who actually achieve success with affiliate marketing vary because a lot of resources on the web give incorrect information. It is very important to create a good quality page to be successful.

it is my understanding that you should stay away from affiliate marketing programs that give you ready-made sites with products, since these never come up in search engines. An example of a bad quality page would be one that has very little content with hundreds of ads filling the page, especially pop ups and full page rollover ads. These sites count for very bad user experience and are often removed from search engine listings.

You don't need a lot of investment to start with affiliate marketing programs - start with creating a blog for product reviews and once you've garnered enough traffic, move onto a website or just keep using the blog. The key to making money with affiliate marketing programs is giving the user exactly what they're looking for.

So remember, an Affiliate Marketing Program allows site owners to earn money by referring people to various products or services. In recent years, it has become a popular and exciting home business that you can control from your computer!