There are a great variety of options available for placing advertising on your website. It can be a very confusing process to pick the one that is right for you. There is no one solution that will work best for everyone. Therefore, it is wise to consider what type of programs will work best for the visitors to your site. This is a difficult question to answer. So, below are brief descriptions of various types of programs available as well as examples of websites they would work well with.

The first type we will look at is the PPS or Pay Per Sale program. This type of program is the closest you will find to the traditional salesman earning a commission by selling your product. Bestbuy.com, Buy.com, Amazon.com and many others offer a pay per sale program which gives their affiliates anywhere from 2-15% commissions on any sales that they make. The pay per sale program works well with informational sites as long as the product you are selling is linked closely to the demographic of your particular site.

One example of this would be a site dedicated to scuba diving. This scuba diving site would feature information about the best places for scuba diving and perhaps offer review of the newest scuba diving equipment. After you review a new product, you could place a specific affiliate link to that product on an online retailer's store. You would get a good conversion and click-through rate by going this route.

Another example would be an affiliate based site which sells electronics. A lot of pay per sale affiliates offer data feeds for all of their products which are available through their online retail outlet. With these feeds, you can build an affiliate based online store of your own selling their products. There are a lot of software packages available to assist in automating the building of affiliate sites around data feeds.

Many times online retail establishments run their own affiliate programs. However, there are other places to find these types of programs. Two of the best affiliate networks for this are Commission Junction and LinkShare.

The next type of program we will consider is the PPL or Pay Per Lead program. These programs pay you for sending lead information to an online company. These leads can vary greatly in the amount of information given. They may include only one or two fields such as an email address or zip code. They can also be as in-depth as extensive financial data need for loan or credit card applications. The programs with the highest conversion rates are the ones that require the least amount of personal information. If your site's audience is not prepared to purchase something online, then these programs may work well for you. They tend to convert well on freebie sites such as getBANK.net as well as informational sites. Here are some examples of affiliate networks to get pay per lead programs: PrimaryAds, AzoogleAds, AffiliateFuel, BulletAds.

The third program to be discussed is the CPM or Pay Per Impression program. These programs are best for sites with high traffic levels. It is not recommended that you use these sites alone, because PPS and PPL programs tend to be more profitable. However, CPM programs do offer an incredible chance to increase your site's cash flow when used along with PPS and PPL programs. They are also a great way to diversify your site's income stream. One of the best CPM affiliate networks is FastClick.

The final program is contextual advertising. Almost any site can benefit from contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is a great way to complement your current advertising and to provide an additional source of income. They are also a wonderful way of diversifying your site's income stream. Google AdSense is an excellent contextual advertising network to check out. Usually a site will achieve best results by employing a combination of these various types of affiliate advertising. You must experiment not only with these various programs, but also with individual offers to figure out the best combination for your site.