Once joined, you will have to start promoting the products in order to sell them and you will receive a nice commission.
Now, when you are first starting out exploring all the different ways you can make money online, you will probably come across a lot of different affiliate programs, just pick one you are really interested in and specialize a website around your own interest. Research the keywords in your market, which you can do by going to overture and use their search tool to see how much your competition will be.
Then you start building your website around the keywords you have found and add the products of the affiliate programs you have joined. Writing articles to make your website interesting for your visitors, and make sure it is interesting for the search engines as well. Make sure there is plenty of information, many pages, many articles so it will become easier to rank well and attract more and more organic traffic, making it easier to promote you products to a larger audience.
Try also to pick out affiliate programs that will also offer residual income, meaning that when people go back to order with that same company, you will receive another affiliate commission, or promote monthly subscriptions which will give you a small piece of the cake for as long as your visitors remains with that service.
Something that is really important is that you really get to know the product. Do not just slap some links on your website just because they offer a high commission. Your visitors will pick up on that. People are not stupid and treating them as such will only make you form part of the huge amount of aspiring affiliate marketers who will never reach financial independency.
The best way to really be able to promote a product, is actually using it yourself first, so you can give your personal opinion about the quality. You can then offer informative and sincere content, sharing your passion for the product you are promoting, and letting others know it really helps for whatever it was designed for.
If you are just promoting a product because of the commission they offer, but you just know the product is crap, your opinion will shine through whatever you write about it. Plus, you will probably have to deal with the fact that many people just return the product when they find out it is indeed crap, leaving you with nothing.
