Affiliates for making money online

Online earnings are available in many forms, and one of the most popular forms is the use of affiliate links on a website or blog. In short, you may receive commission on sales made as a result of a link from a website.
Commissions vary according to the commission rate and the transaction total, but it is not difficult to find affiliates that could potentially pay hundreds of dollars for a single high-value sale. However, getting your visitors to complete a sale may be a bit more tricky...
Some of the most popular schemes are selling software of all types, they generally offer good rates dependent on the price of the software, often offering 50% of the retail price as commission. This can be particularly good if the software on offer is directly linked to your niche.
In my experience, good niche sites are the best way to get affiliate sales, the beauty of the scheme is that the clients usually provides good resources in terms of buttons and widgets to click on and often will provide pages of information that you can copy or adapt to your site including video presentations, YouTube demo's and the like.
There are a couple of ways to get linked into affiliate schemes (you will usually need to be approved for this type of activity), you can either contact the vendor direct and sign up to an affiliate scheme for a specific product/service or you can sign up to a service that has a host of affiliate schemes on offer. The service I have had the most success with is ShareASale I have had genuine sales from their scheme so am in a position to guarantee that they are legitimate.
My recommendations are that you browse through the affiliates on offer to see if they have something that your visitors might be interested in. Then sign up, sometimes you may have to sign up for a particular affiliate as well as signing up to the umbrella scheme - this is a quality control measure so that the vendor has a chance to turn down sites that they feel are not suitable.
You can then decide whether to run ads alongside your normal content, or create a page or content specifically to promote the affiliate. Be warned though, most affiliates don't like you taking out PPC ads with the specific product name - this is to prevent your cornering the market on sales by bidding against other affiliates for the same brand-name keywords.
It may take a while to get established and a lot of trial and error will be required, but with the potentially high commissions on offer, there is a lot of money to be made with affiliates.