What is Affiliate program?

An affiliate program is internet terminology for a referral management system for tracking those persons or websites that refer traffic to another website. They provide the technology that allows websites to refer and funnel traffic to other websites. For instance, carsdirect has an affiliate program that pays out great to those who can refer traffic that generates a car sale. Some of these websites may only refer one person a year. That would be too costly for carsdirect to manage itself. Can you imagine putting one person in charge of signing up a contract with a website to refer traffic. Then you need to implement the technoloy to track the referral. Then you need to track the referral fee. All of that, and then the website only kicks out one referral. No way. Those small deals are handed off to the affiliate program. The affiate technology provider cuts one deal with carsdirect and all of the affiliates cut the deal with the network. The network takes a piece of the pie for being the aggregator, providing technology and tracking and collecting funds.

The first issue is figuring which end of an affiiate program are you. Are you the person that will be referred traffic and cutting checks or are you the person who will refer the traffic and receive the checks.

Next, I would go to a top website and find out who provides their affiate program to find a top provider. You can search the web for providers, but I still believe going to website you respect and finding out who they use will save you lots of time.

Best of luck.