make money through affiliate program

Certain affiliate programs have a very high profit potential. Others have about a snowball's chance in... well, don't have much chance of making an income at all.

So how do you choose? It depends upon the content of your site. It doesn't work to promote dog medicine to people if your site is about trips to Jamaica. While you might be able to relate the two, your site visitor probably will not relate their trip to Jamaica with getting cheap medicine for their dog. And when it comes to affiliate marketing, it's not about you. It's about your visitor. Affiliate income is about you, but you only earn the income by doing the marketing.

There are affiliate programs on just about anything, but only some programs are highly profitable. If you are working with a very profitable affiliate program, then you can actually build your entire site around the affiliate program itself.

So, which affiliate programs make the most money?
If you have a high traffic site (100,000 visitors per month), then you can make money with any affiliate program as long as it is related to the content of your site. However if you have a low traffic site, you need to be more selective to make money. Look for the following characteristics of a good affiliate program:

1. Lifetime commissions. Certain affiliate programs give you commissions on every product that is sold to the customer, forever. A great example of this is SpeedyPin. One of the designers of this site earns residual commissions from people purchasing calling cards, and these people signed up months ago through SpeedyPin.

2. Affiliate programs that have high profit for each sale will help you grow more quickly. However, simple logic will tell you that $2 is better than $0. It's better to make a profit of $30 per sale than $2 per sale, but if you stick and stay, you can get your pay. What this means is that patience and persistence are huge when it comes to affiliate marketing.

3. The product needs to be of great quality - something that you can actually vouch for. Why sell something that is poor in quality?

4. Information products can be the best type of affiliate products because they do have high profits. Many people will give you 50% commissions or more for selling their information product. Why? It costs virtually nothing to reproduce an information product. Stamping a CD costs 25 cents, or emailng the information costs less. If it's a good product, it can be resold for $9.95 (or more), and because the product designer doesn't have to market it, they will pay generously for your efforts.

To get a real idea of what are the best affiliate programs, you need to have a look at what affiliates are earning. Find out more information about what top affiliates are earning.

You can also have a look at the affiliate networks which put together a whole lot of affiliates with merchants.

The main affiliate networks are listed many places throughout the internet, and on affiliateadvice's affiliate program directories page. Check these directories out for a high quality selection of products in a wide variety of areas.

If you REALLY want to know what the highest commission products are, here are a few examples. But please remember that these areas are highly competitive, and it is hard to get search engine traffic for them

Information products - online newsletters and ebooks.
Credit Cards.
Online Gambling, sportsbooks etc.
Mortgages/loan companies
Software products
Web Hosting (very competitive area)
Office Supplies (such as inkjet cartridges)

This is not a definitive list. There are plenty of other products as well. These, however, are all very high profit areas.