Life-time cookies – A life-time cookie means that you will get paid for referring a customer who makes a purchase through your affiliate link even if they buy at any point in the future. A really good affiliate program will offer life-time cookies. Unfortunately, some shopping cart systems don't allow the vendors this feature, which isn't so great for you – the affiliate.

When looking for a good program, try to lookout for those which offer life-time cookies or at least a minimum of a year. Remember sometimes it takes customers months before actually making a purchase.

Limit before Payment – Pay attention to minimum sales required by merchants, and watch out for some programs that ask you to sell a certain amount before being paid. For example if the commissions on a $20 eBook are 10% (that's $2 per sale) and they ask you to accumulate a minimum of $200 dollars in commissions before they send you payment, that's a whole lot of books you need to sell before getting paid – 100 books to be exact.

Training – A good affiliate program will provide training tools and resources for their affiliates. Some of them will send material to your mailbox, and others will provide member's area where you can log in and grab promotional materials, your links and check your stats and commissions. Please notice that not all affiliate program provides training to their affiliate, so this is one factor that you need to consider.

Customer Service - A good affiliate program will respond to your questions in a timely manner. What will it be like if you ever have an issue with payments or other important question and you get no response from them for 2 weeks or later? Try to find out affiliate program or merchants that have good response to their affiliate.

One point to remember, as a good affiliate, you need to make sure you read all the provided materials provided on the website before contacting the program.

Interesting Sales Pages – Before starting to advertise a specific product, have a look at their sales page. Does it look like it will convert into sales? If a sales page is sloppy, has grammar and spelling mistakes, or just looks unprofessional, you may not make too many sales – no matter how good the product is.

Now that you know some of the things you should look for in a good program, here are a few things you should be careful of!

Be Sure You Understand Affiliate Program and Merchants Terms and Conditions - Some of these programs operate on the basis that affiliates will usually not make that many sales and they'll never need to pay out. It's unfortunate but this does happen, so always check payment terms before promoting a program.

Sales's page Advertisements – If you're promoting an ebook and sending customers to a sales page, be weary of sales pages with Google ads or other types of advertisement on the sales page. If you're working hard to send traffic to that page, it's not fair that your traffic will be used to make someone else money through ads (without you getting paid anything in return).