You’ve built that great website and it’s got rave reviews. Now it’s time to money with it.

There are several ways to monetize a website – earning advertising revenue, making sales commission or charging a subscription fee for services are some of them. There’s another one, and it’s gaining more popularity by the day – and that is to sign up for affiliate programs.

An affiliate program is simply an arrangement by which websites promote products sold on other sites, by placing affiliate links within their content. These could be in the form of banners or text links. When a visitor clicks on them and makes a purchase, the website gains a commission from the affiliate program.

Expert affiliate marketers will tell you that content is everything in this game! Since these links appear within a specific context in an article, it must pre-sell the product for any click through to occur. If the content doesn’t "sell" there’s no the way the affiliate program will succeed.

Therefore, for a website that is looking to earn serious revenue from affiliate programs, it is essential that the content is of a very high quality and is able to deliver value to readers. This means the content should be:

• Well written
• Comprehensive
• Relevant and up-to-date
• Easy to understand
• Easy to find
• Targeted to the users

Once the content is taken care of, website owners must generate traffic into it. After all, if there are no visitors, there will certainly be no click-throughs. The website must be optimized so that is shows up within the top 20 listings of most search engines. That would require careful attention to be paid to:

• Description of title pages
• Keyword density on pages
• Construction of meta-tags
• Links to other pages

Choosing the right affiliate programs to tie up with is a relatively simple process. Successful affiliate marketers would advise you to partner with a few, but credible affiliate program networks, such as Clickbank, Linkshare or Commission Junction which aggregate the affiliate programs of individual merchants.

This has several advantages including

• Convenience of having to register only once to gain access to several merchant programs
• The assurance that the affiliate network and underlying programs adhere to high standards
• Aggregation of sales commission into one account, making tracking so much simpler

Besides this, websites can also register on individual affiliate programs, run by websites that are not part of a network. Some of these are well worth considering, for example, the Amazon affiliate program.

Since there are many affiliate programs for the same category, making a choice might seem difficult at first, especially if the products are very close in terms of quality and reputation. However, some of these guidelines could help:

• Compare the commission structure offered by the affiliate programs
• Go for programs that offer a life-time or long term commission
• Some programs offer commissions on Tier 2 sales – this means that if an affiliate website refers another, the first website also earns a commission on the sales that the second website may have generated
• Compare frequency and regularity of payment of commission and minimum payout levels

While fortunes are not built overnight through affiliate programs, a website can certainly make a tidy sum over time. The good news is that once the initial hard work is done, the website will continue to earn a regular income, with very little effort.