Everywhere you look you see affiliate program offers for every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over world. In case you don't know, "hard" products are those that you can touch...unlike an ebook or downloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of bigger companies have over one million affiliates.

What are advantages of joining an affiliate program?

They provide a ready-made business. This is a very big plus for those people who want to earn some kind of living off Internet but lack knowledge or inclination to set up a business by themselves.

Commissions and rewards are generally good, and more established programs offer a real chance of advancement to higher and better-paid levels.

Other affiliates are usually on hand to offer practical support.

What are limitations?

You are restricted in your promotional activities due to fact that you do not actually own affiliate site they give you. You won't be able to put such things as banners, images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your page. The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long or contains such awkward things as question marks, which many Search Engines will not index.

Any promotional ads or articles have probably already been used by thousands of other people and consequently may have lost its impact, making it more difficult to achieve sales or referrals.

If program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run risk of low quality products or sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made.