Finding an Affiliate Program can be a difficult task for both merchants and aspiring publishers alike. With the explosion of internet marketing in the current decade, selecting the right system that works for you is a crucial first step towards establishing a career in internet marketing. To help narrow down the selection process, here are some descriptions of the best types of affiliate programs today.

Commission Per Click and Commission Per Ad affiliates - these are the two most common types of affiliate programs, though their use has diminished over the years due to several different issues. In the first type of marketing, revenues were paid to affiliate web sites whenever people visited their site and clicked on a link that redirected them to the client merchant's web site. In the second type, the pay was based on having ad space on the affiliate's page, and revenue was paid on a weekly or monthly basis just like renting a billboard's ad space.

Commision Per Sale basis - this type of affiliate program required that people who were redirected to the merchant from the affiliate web site actually purchase an item from the merchant before a commission was paid. In general, the commission was often larger than the per-click or per-ad type of program. Some affiliate programs use a mix and match approach that actually incorporates the three systems together, changing percentages of commissions earned in all three categories to take into account the fact that revenue was generated in 3 separate ays.

Full Etailing - in this type of affiliate program, the affiliate web site actually goes an extra step and becomes an actual Etailer (which is just jargon for Electronic Retailer) for the merchant's product. In this case, payments were often on a purely per sale commission basis, with minimal attention to redirecting people to the merchant's web site. The commissions per sale as a result of this were proportionately larger. This is one form of affiliate marketing that, in some circles, is actually treated as it's own type of emarketing separate from affiliate programs.

Review Sites - these affiliates often take the form of forums and electronic magazines that do reviews for the merchant. Naturally, the reviews are designed to speak favorably of the merchant and it's products, and the usual pay method for these affiliates is on a per click redirected and per article basis. Some merchants even take this a step further down the micro scale and offer similar commissions to interested individuals who run their own blog sites.

Loyalty and Rebate Sites - these sites are made to offer loyalty programs and coupons to people who take advantage of the merchant's products. The affiliate essentially takes the marketing approach of offering visitors to the site additional incentives to purchase the merchant's stuff. The usual payment system here involves revenue for every batch of incentive items that visitors get, as well further revenue when customers actually use those items like rebate coupons to purchase items from the merchant.

Two Way Affiliate Marketing - this system has been gaining in popularity among linked web sites who offer their own products. It involves two or more merchants who choose to act as their own affiliate partners. The revenue generating details are different for each such partnership, but by and large the advantage of this is the fact that the affiliates all have their own products as opposed to being simply an extended marketing arm. This makes such groups far more versatile, especially if their products complement each other without being in direct competition.

Multi Level Affiliate Marketing - this is an affiliate marketing program built exactly like a multi level marketing platform. In this case, the biggest difference is that each "slot" in the multi level marketing heirarchy is filled by an affiliate web site. Naturally, each individual web site will offer links to it's direct up line and direct down lines. The commission is similar to the referral fee involved in multi level marketing, and it has the same advantage for a merchant in that it creates a self-supporting and constantly growing marketing arm requiring minimal actual input and intervention from the merchant. Like etailing, however, die hard affiliate marketers sometimes treat this as a separate form of markating called EMLM, or electronic multi level marketing.