Have you heard of the term affiliate program? If youre interested in making money online or starting a home based business using your computer and the Internet, an affiliate program might just be what youre looking for.

An affiliate program is a company who has a product or service to sell. You join and promote the product or service for a commission. Commissions vary with different affiliate programs. They are usually anywhere from 20% right up to 100 % commission from each sale.

Affiliate programs can be free to join, a one-time payment or a monthly subscription. An affiliate program that has a monthly subscription will produce a monthly residual income where a free or one-time payment program will usually pay a commission for each sale that you make.

The good thing about starting a home based business with a affiliate program is that your start up costs are very low while most businesses require quite a bit of money to start up with. One other great thing about promoting affiliate programs is that it takes very little skill. The company youre affiliated with will usually provide you with a replicated website with an id number or username on the end of the URL. That will track each sale that you make. Payments are made to the affiliate in various ways. Sometimes it can be by check or other times via a third party electronic payment account, which are free to join. One of the most popular is Pay Pal. Others are Alert Pay, 2 Check Out, e-gold, just to name a few. Some programs will pay out monthly while some with an electronic payment account will pay you Instantaneously. You will get a notification via email that a payment has been received.

You can find affiliate programs on almost any subject you can think of. There is a common saying in affiliate marketing that you will hear many times. It is that the money is in the list. There are many ways that you can go about building an Opt-in list. An opt-in list is another name for a mailing list.

Yes you can find many affiliate programs that will assist you in building up an opt-in list and you can also find a lot of these kinds of affiliate programs are free to join. The affiliate program will usually have some kind of feature to entice your customer to sign up That feature can sometimes be a free auto responder or a free tracking url so you will know how many people are visiting your site and where they are coming from. Most list building affiliate programs will let you send a mailing to your list once or twice a week. Sometimes there is no limitation to how many times you can contact your downline. Once you start to grow a list you might like to get yourself an auto responder so you can follow up with your leads. An auto responder will follow up automatically for you. You can set it up to respond every second day or whenever you choose.

Now you want to start to get some traffic to your affiliate program. A couple of simple ways are traffic exchanges and safe lists. You can join a traffic exchange affiliate program. With this program you view other members sites by clicking a button. In return you also get your affiliate program viewed. Safe lists are like an advertising club. You send out an advertisement on your affiliate program and in return you get emails from other members advertising their affiliate programs. A responsive safe list can be a very good affiliate program in itself as all affiliate marketers are looking for more ways to advertise their programs.

Niche marketing can be a very profitable way to make an online income. You pick a popular subject say for example Golf. Then look for an affiliate program on golf. If you have a bit of experience in building websites and are familiar with a certain topic, you can write a report on it. You then find some affiliate programs on the same topic. List your website on Google or other popular search engines. Get a free key word tool to see what key words people are putting into search engines. Use those key words in your report. Using affiliate programs can be a very fun way to make an online income. Money might not come straight away but remember practice makes perfect.