You can place their ad on your website. You can recruit others to sign up or they can even purchase products and services from the site offering the program. These programs pay in many different ways.

Some will pay per click. This means that you will earn a wage from the affiliate program each time someone visits your site and clicks on their ad. Google AdSense is an example of the pay per click program. After your website gets approved by Google all you have to do is paste the adsense code in relevant places on your website. Each time a visitor clicks on those ads, you get paid.

Another payment method is pay per lead. This means that you need to get someone to signup for whatever your affiliate is offering. Most Credit Card companies and Insurance companies pay their affiliates this way.

There is also pay per sale. This means that you get paid a portion of the sale being made. This is the most common and the most rewarding type of program. You can receive high commission percentages. Commission Junction and LinkShare are two great places that give you the opportunity to become affiliates.

These are also good places to find pay per lead programs. The best combinations of these programs are found at ClickBank and Google AdWords. ClickBank has thousands of items that you can choose from. Their main product though is ebooks.

It does take time to strike the right balance of effective keywords and their respective pay per click cost. When you grasp the concept it can be very rewarding. Initially it may seem like a lot of work; but steady traffic is the key.

The best traffic is targeted traffic. Visitors who are interested in your product are the ones who you can more readily convert into buyers. You do this by placing your themed articles and ads in ezines and interesting special reports. The visitors who follow those links may be doing so with the intention of making a purchase.

You must at the very least, write two interesting 500 word articles per week. Consistently writing like this can easily draw 100 targeted visitors per day to your site. Every 100 visitors averages out to one sale. If you can manage 1000 visitors to your site, that translates into 10 sales which is really good. If you have steady traffic visiting your website it is easy to place an affiliate ad and start earning immediately.