Advantages

Affiliate Programs are ideal way to get money quickly and easily online:

You don’t need to launch a new product; You don’t need to handle any products; You don’t need physical inventory; You don’t need a huge investment. You can start with $10 and 2 hours a week; You don’t need a website because you can use Pay per Click ads.

Disadvantages

The very important disadvantage is a low click-through to conversion rate. Only a few percent of your visitors will click on a banner or link; of that percentage, a few percent will actually buy something. It can be disheartening to see that there have been thousands of visits to your site, and only small percent of them have bought something you promote. Recommendation: If you focus on affiliate programs to theme of your site and interests of your audience then better results you will achieve. Also text links, "odd" ads (i.e. advertising that doesn't immediately look like advertising) will generally give rise to much better results than banners or buttons.

You should be reliant on a merchant's ability to sell to visitors products that you're promoting. Of course you can improve chance of a sale by effectively pre-selling product or service, but it's still up to merchant to close a sale. And if they don't sell anything to your visitors, you get nothing. Recommendation: Before promoting any product you should learn it and decide for yourself: “Would I buy it?” If answer is “Yes” that's greate, but if “No” you should look for better productsto promote.

You can find books to read first and AdWords helping tools at http://www.RichTrack.com.

Written by Helen Peshkova, RichTrack.com.