The traditional model of making money from affiliate products was simple. Create an interesting website geared to a specific theme, slap up some banners for affiliate products that were related to your theme, and sit back, hoping that some of audience your website drew would click on those banners, giving you some sales. If you really wanted to get creative you might have done some email campaigns for specific products on side.

But email campaigns are mostly ineffective (and God-forbid you should spam anyone). And banner advertisements don’t generally work. And websites take a long time to build, and promote. And even longer to get good ranking in search engines.

So it was a slow steady process. There were no ‘quick routes’ to affiliate gold.

Until now.

Hang on to your hats, ladies & gentlemen, because pay-per-click advertising is here!

Pay-per-click search engines like Google AdWords and Overture offer an exciting way to quickly bring highly-targeted, highly-motivated people who want to buy straight to your affiliate products and services. You don’t even have to have a website.

The pay-per-click method is simple and straightforward. Place an ad to show on Google or some other pay-per-click search engine. Customers click on it. It brings them to a page where they can make purchase.

It’s a wham! Bam! atmosphere that’s sharp and direct, but sometimes those of us who use pay-per-click market get into same mindset and overlook perfectly profitable products simply because they don’t pay out as much right away.

I’m talking about power of residual income, and any time you find an affiliate program that pays ‘residually’ or mentions words ‘lifetime customer’, you should take notice.

Here’s an example. Suppose you find two web-hosting providers, each of which has an affiliate program. Web host #1 offers an immediate payout of $90 per sale to you for anyone who buys their service. Sounds pretty good; it’s a high payout and you think you can get a good conversion rate on any ads you run for their services.