We have previously discussed affiliate programs in passing. But in this article, we’re going to get an overview of this subfield of Internet marketing and how it could help bring about some stable and generous earnings for you.

It has been said that affiliate programs are easiest ways to online riches. There is a lot of truth in that statement, though it must be remembered that affiliate marketing is still a job, albeit one which you could do in comforts of your own home, hence, you cannot make most out of it without exerting some effort.

Even if you are not familiar with affiliate programs, I’m sure you have encountered some in your years on Internet. For certain, you have visited a site that was suggesting a book from www.amazon.com to supplement information its pages revealed. That site’s webmaster, my friend, is an affiliate. And if you decided to purchase book he recommended, he would have earned a commission from merchant site.

Amazon, indeed, is first business model for affiliate programs. There are more, of course, usually asking affiliate partner to sell web hosting, domain names, and tangible products. But it’s affiliate programs which offer information products that often give highest commissions.

But first, let’s discuss how affiliate programs work. There are three parties in affiliate programs:

* The affiliate merchant * The affiliate * The buyer

The affiliate merchant is one who has products to sell. He would establish an affiliate program to invite affiliates to pre-sell his products. Once affiliate finds a buyer, he would recommend same to affiliate merchant. The affiliate merchant would then sell his products to buyer. If buyer buys, affiliate merchant would give affiliate his corresponding commission.

I've been blogging occasionally over last two months about my ongoing experiment with writing articles. This is a super hot topic lately with changes going on at Google and Yahoo that are impacting many websites and basically freaking people out.

Now everybody knows that writing articles is a powerful technique. You knew that, right? And everybody is writing articles, right? No. Did I? Not until recently, though I wrote a lot in blogs and did post some articles I wrote on my sites. There's two parts to this for me. Writing, which I have been doing. Distributing. Which I hadn't been doing.

I finally came out of that fog and decided that I had to see what distribution might really do. Content, such as original articles is still basic currency of internet. People come onto web looking for information. Content provides that information.

But, if content is just sitting on a blog or posted in an article directory on one website, it has very limited exposure without links. Content may be flesh of web, but links are bones, underlying structure that allows things to found and accessed.

It's in our faces right here - two basics that you can combine to really power a successful website. Content and links. Write articles AND publish/distribute them. Simple, basic, old style site building.

One technique many are using to build sites is to get other people's articles and put them up on their sites to provide related content. I do it, you do it, nearly everyone seems to. Other people publish ezines, but can't possibly write all content they want to provide. This is demand that exists, right now, for your articles. There is a deep, apparently bottomless need for quality content on nearly anything imaginable. And it won't go away.

Original content on your site is a great traffic booster. Distributing your content all over internet gets you lots of incoming links - which over time could well continue to increase as your articles are picked up and redistributed. Plus you are generating a name for yourself and qualifying yourself as an expert. Experts write about what they know and discover. They share their knowledge. I'm not talking about anyone being a genius and discovering anti-gravity (and finally eliminating rocket science). I'm talking about what's already in your head and what you can learn, research and write about.