Finding Affiliate Companies

Almost every large company online has an affiliate program. There are also companies online where all they do is offer other online business a way to have an affiliate program. I call these companies Affiliate Companies.

These Affiliate Companies manage affiliate programs for thousands of online companies and websites. This means that if you have an affiliate account with an Affiliate Company (don't worry, they are completely free), you can advertise for any of the thousands of websites that use the Affiliate Company to manage their affiliate sales. If you want to, you can search Google for affiliate programs just to see how big online marketing currently is.

When you are looking at these Affiliate Companies you will notice two things. They will offer services to both Affiliates and Merchants (also called vendors). Here's the difference between the two:

• Affiliate - Person who promotes a website to receive commission for each product they sell.
• Merchant - Person or company which owns the website being promoted by the affiliates.
Here are a few of the most popular Affiliate Companies

ClickBank - www.clickbank.com - Having an affiliate account with ClickBank will allow you to sell digital products (only available via download) for over 10,000 online businesses. Their commission rates on average run anywhere from 10%-75% per each sale the affiliate makes on that webpage. I highly recommend starting off with ClickBank.

PayDotCom – www.paydotcom.com – PayDotCom is a fairly new affiliate network that is similar to ClickBank. Unlike ClickBank, PayDotCom accepts affiliates from a much broader range of countries and also pays affiliate commissions directly into each affiliate's PayPal account.

Commission Junction - www.cj.com - Having an affiliate account with Commission Junction will allow you to sell mostly physical products (must be shipped to the buyer). A few of the big companies which use them are eBay, Dell, Best Buy and Yahoo, and many more.