There are many different options available to people who want to earn money from affiliate programs. The route you take will depend on your current situation and your plans and goals for the future. In this article, I outline a few different avenues you can take to start making money from affiliate programs. Some will be free, while others will cost a small fee.

The first thing you’ll want to do is sign up with affiliate networks like Clickbank, PayDotCom, and Commission Junction. Registration is free and you will have access to thousands of different digital products within almost any niche that you can sell and earn commission.

Regardless of how you make money from affiliate programs, you’ll want to sign up with these sites. These are the best to start with and are well established. I am a member of all of them myself, and I can tell you that the payout percentage and payout time are very good.

Now that you have a large number of products to promote, you’ll want to determine how you’re going to promote them. The easiest and cost-free method is with BUM marketing. This is simply article marketing, where you write articles and link to the product in the resource box. The article acts as a pre-sales, providing relevant and useful information, and the link to the product helps the reader learn more about it.

Classified sites and forums where you can post ads are another option you can take to earn money from affiliate programs. The classified ad must attract attention with a catchy title, and the body of the ad must arouse curiosity so that the person clicks on the link in the ad to go to the product page. With forums, be sure to follow the forum rules when posting an announcement. Usually there are designated areas for this.

Another route you can take, and this is my favorite, is to start a WordPress blog. You can get a cheap domain and hosting today and set up a site in a matter of minutes. The blog should be geared towards a specific niche and then promote various affiliate programs related to your blog. There is a lot more to learn if you plan to go this route, but this would be my recommended method for making money with affiliate programs.

Another method that works well is pay per click. I personally don’t use this method, but I know many people who do and have moderate to great success with it. The idea here is to sign up for Google and Yahoo’s paid advertising program. You set up campaigns for each product you want to promote. Once the campaigns are done, when someone is searching for a particular keyword that you’ve chosen and sees your ad, if they click, you pay only for the click. Click costs vary based on the popularity of the keyword and what you are bidding on.

This should give you some ideas on how you can start making money from affiliate programs. No matter which direction you decide to go, it’s always best to research them and know what you’re getting yourself into. There are a lot of details I didn’t mention, so there’s a lot to learn about each method. Making money with affiliate programs is one of the easiest ways to make money online and is a viable option for many.