What is an affiliate marketing program? An affiliate program is where you join a company and sell their products, for a commission. Getting started is easy, all you need to do is find a market you are interested in and join some related affiliate programs.

The easiest way to begin is to find your niche markets. Choose markets that you are interested in and specialize, in different aspects of the market. Research keywords in your market, and choose those with a large amount of searches and less websites supplying them. You can find out demand by going to overture search tool and seeing how many searches have been done. Putting the keyword into the search engine and looking at how many websites come up will give you supply. High demand and low supply will be your niche market.

You will build a website around the market and join related affiliate programs. Then you drive traffic to your website. Once you have one of these websites working and pulling in profits, you can go to another niche market and duplicate your success. Make these sites theme websites, so that you can promote more than one affiliate program from one place.

Try to choose some affiliate programs with residual income. This means that the customer will buy the product again and again, for instance a diet supplement or vitamins. Another form of residual income will be a product with a monthly subscription, like a membership site or autoresponder.

Get to know the product. The best affiliates actually use their sponsor’s products. Write good informative content to pre sell your visitors and establish yourself as an expert in your field. People will trust you more when they see your expertise and you will get more clicks through to your sponsor’s site

Affiliate marketing can be a profitable and fun way to build your business. However, it is very important to be sure that you are choosing the right programs. There are a lot of good programs, but there are an equal number of companies that are outright scams and will never even pay you for your hard efforts. Worse still the company can suddenly close and still owe you your commission.

How to avoid these scams: The best way to avoid these scams is to do your research well. Check out these points before joining:

1. Does the company have good support? Do they answer emails and have valid contact information?
2. Do they have a valid offline address?
3. What % of commission do they pay; 30%-50% is the best.
4. Tracking system - this should be in real time and accurate.
5. Products, should be well targeted for your market and of good quality

Where to research:

1. Forums, related to your industry. There are many savvy people who use the forums and you may be sure they will tell it like it is. There are few programs out there that at least somebody has heard of and can give educated advice on.
2. Discussion lists
3. Look into the program carefully yourself.
4. Put the company name, plus the word scam, into the search engines and see what comes up. Use your own judgment, as sometimes these reviews may not be 100% unbiased.

The golden rule to avoid being scammed is to look before you join, and do not be afraid to ask other people’s opinions. If it looks too good to be true it very likely is, so do not get involved with a company that needs to hype up its opportunity or program. When you are alert and use caution before rushing into something you will be able to choose good reliable programs that will help you in reaping profit for many years to come.