What is an affiliate program?
There are two basic types of affiliates. The first and probably more popular is pay-per-click. Pay-per-click is when you get paid from users clicking on your advertisement banners from sites like Google Adsense. The amount that clicks are worth varies. It could be $5 a click or $.05 a click. It just depends on how much advertisers are willing to pay. They use sites like Google adwords to show their ads. I will talk about that later.
The second affiliate type is commission. How it works. You join an affiliate program. That program offers vendors who are willing to pay you a commission if a person clicks through your site and purchases something from them.
If you have a
sports website you could join Sports Authority. You would put there
banner on your site and when someone links to there site from yours
you receive a commission from that vendor. Commissions vary from vendor
to vendor. It will depend what kind of site you have for what kind
vendors you would want to advertise for. If you have a sports site you
would want to choose vendors that offer sporting goods as it will be
more likely they would purchase something from that vendor.
You can
choose to use both commission and pay-per-click. See which one will
work best for your site. The best thing to do is experiment. It is free to join all the sites below, and each will have different advertisers. You can join one or all, it is up to you.