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Affiliate programs are available for a whole gamut of online activities. Some are hot as pay per click advertising and others are as old as pay per sale. While you can see all businesses, big and small, making money online with affiliate programs, the question you must ask yourself is - how do I also select solid affiliate programs in order to make assured money online?

Benefits of Affiliate Programs
Enrolling for affiliate programs affords you huge benefits. First, you can be your own boss working from the comfort of home with no hustle. Next, it is low cost or zero to start with. You don't need to have your own product to sell, while thousands of advertisers out there waiting to share their benefits with your in exchange for your effort to promote their businesses.

Third Party Affiliate Programs
There are virtually unlimited individual affiliate programs offered on the Internet, many being through third party affiliate networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, ShareSale etc. These companies connect a large number of advertisers together via their own network, enable you to access them all at one location with a single registration. Tracking performance is made easy, there is only one technical support to contact, things are easier to manage, and the best yet, payment is received as one convenient monthly lump sum.

Thus, it's recommended that you sign up for third party affiliate networks. This will save you lots of time; while you can collect your money altogether.

Watch Out for Cheats
Because you are utilizing a third party service, there are several pitfalls for which you must watch out. Some unethical affiliate networks may not treat affiliates honestly while tracking sales and leads (which means you can sometimes lose your hard-earned money). Payment thresholds can be fairly high - a minimum of $50 US is de rigueur for international publishers. A payment delay of two months or more from the date of a sale/lead generation is not uncommon. Finally, some affiliate programs claim are not responsible for missing checks or checks that are waylaid in the post.

However, its a different story with big, established affiliate programs like Google AdSense and Amazon. You can participate in their affiliate programs without fear of being cheated.

Know Thy Self
Don't select an affiliate program only based on their payment scheme, instead, see the kind of people who are most likely to visit your website - which means relevance. For example, if you are targeting home based business on your site, links to affiliate programs of text-books sale would most likely generate less revenue than banners that link to paid survey companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience and your own skills sets.

Last but not least, do not join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Internet marketing gurus suggest sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are those promote only few.

Lewis Low is the founding editor of OnlineBizPromo.com For more Practical Online Business Ideas and Work-From-Home Opportunities, visit his Work-At-Home directory at http://www.OnlineBizPromo.com