What is an affiliate program and how can it make you a lot of money? An affiliate program is a program in which you sign up and allow links to be placed on your website. You get paid for each and every click on each of the links. It is also known as pay per click. There is also pay per sale and pay per lead.

Affiliate programs can be an absolute gold mine and an easy way to make money with little effort. Basically, you would allow advertisers to place an ad on your web site and any time someone clicks on that ad, they will be directed to the advertiser's web site. You will in turn get paid a commission for each and every click that is generated on that advertiser's ad link.

This process can be personally monitored at both ends of the spectrum. On your end, you can check the exit page on your server report and on their end it can be monitored on the referring domain report. However, this is not necessary because most affiliate programs that you join will have a member's area where you can log in and check your statistics. An affiliate program like for example Google's Adsense, acts as the facilitator between you the affiliate and the advertiser. They (Google) are responsible for rendering payment.

As an affiliate you can also get paid for each lead that you refer to the advertiser. In addition, you can also make commissions based on the number of sales that you've generated. This is basically the gist of being an affiliate. Affiliate programs have to be the easiest way to make money on the internet.

Once you've set up your affiliate system which includes having a content based website (which you are responsible for driving traffic to) and or a subscriber's list, your affiliate business runs on autopilot. All you have to do is sit back and watch the money pour in. Because your affiliate system is running automatically, you are afforded the time to do the activities that you enjoy, whatever they maybe.

Before joining up with an affiliate program it is important to make sure that you only promote products or companies that compliment the products that you offer on your site. You would not want to have affiliate programs or products that compete with the products that you sell.

Also you want to perform a due diligence check on the affiliate program that you plan to sign up with. The reason being, you will be associated with that company or product and assumed to have the same beliefs and values as they do. If they do something wrong, it will reflect on you as well.

If you select your affiliate programs based on your product line and your values, you will boost your revenue. Is there any wonder why affiliate programs are the ultimate gold mine?