For many people who would like to get involved with e commerce, the thought of finding a product, creating a website, organizing payment systems and marketing that website is just too much of a challenge to start with. The good news is that there is an alternative choice, which takes care of at least three out of these four challenges for you, and that alternative is to join an affiliate program.

So, just what is an affiliate program? It’s a program offered by an established website owner/operator, whereby he distributes copies of his site to affiliates, enabling them to sell his product line for a commission. In most cases, the affiliate’s only responsibility is to market the site, everything else is handled by the website owner. The beauty of an affiliate program, is that it allows anyone who owns or has access to a computer, the opportunity to have their own online business, fully operational, literally in a matter of minutes and in many cases, completely free of charge.

The temptation for many people when they realize the wealth of free affiliates programs on the internet is to jump in with both feet, and join programs left right and centre, lured by the promises of wealth made by program operators. Whilst this won’t do any harm, a far better plan of action is to choose one or two quality programs, and concentrate on building an income from these before adding more programs to your portfolio.

So, just how do you choose a good affiliate program, what criteria do you look for? Here are a few suggestions to get you started, which I will expand on later in this article.

1/ First and foremost, a good quality in demand product.

2/ A good quality, visually stimulating easy to navigate site.

3/ A fair compensation plan.

4/ A responsive company contact / support system

5/ Good affiliate marketing info and advice

6/ Testimonials from other affiliates.

7/ Cost

1/ There are a huge array of products and services looking for affiliates, so you have plenty of choice. If you have a passion shared by others you may like to choose products within that category, or you may have a particular area of expertise. There are a number of excellent tools available on the internet to access info on product popularity and viability. Affiliates Alert, is an excellent system which enables you to view product rankings in the Clickbank marketplace [ whets hot and what's not based on sales made through the Clickbank marketplace] A Alert also allows you to do a keyword search for a particular product or product group. At time of writing you can pick up a free version of this program at http://affiliatesalert.com . Another excellent keyword search tool based on the number of searches for a product or product type on the net over the preceding month is available at www.overture.com . It’s called the keyword selector tool. Using either or both of these tools should give you a good picture of current demand for affiliate products which appeal to you.

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