It can be difficult to keep up with all the different ways people make money from the Internet. Perhaps the easiest and most popular is affiliate marketing. If you are new to the exciting world of affiliate marketing, you may ask which is the top affiliate program network.

You don’t have to be a computer expert or a big time website designer to profit from affiliate marketing. You need only to know the most basic HTML codes and have some marketing sense. The rest are easy to manage. Let’s take a look at a few of the best known affiliate program network currently available on the net.

Clickbank.com

Clickbank.com is an excellent affiliate marketing website that allows users to earn up to a 75% commission from every sale done. However, Clickbank.com focuses on digital products only. Here is how it works.

You start by creating a free account with ClickBank.com and then visiting the ClickBank Marketplace to search for items you want to promote. You choose products that you are interested to promote or the ones that are relevant to your website. Once you have chosen a product, you begin advertising that product on your website. Every time someone buys a product through your recommendation, you make a commission.

The better you are at promoting your affiliate products, the more money you can make. If you continue to promote more products, you can easily turn your ClickBank.com account into a full time job. Clickbank.com is best for promoting digital products.

CJ.com

Choosing the best online affiliate program is not easy and Commission Junction could be one of them. CJ.com tends to focus on physical products and professional services. Accounts here free too, but you’ll need approval from merchants in order to promote their products or services. This is because CJ’s merchants are usually high end companies like Expedia and Dell Computers.

If you are new to affiliate marketing, it’s best you start out with ClickBank.com first before venturing into CJ.com. Stepping up to CJ.com is like stepping up into the big leagues, you need to have a professional looking website before any merchant is willing to accept you as their affiliate. CJ.com is best for promoting physical products and professional services.

LinkShare.com

LinkShare have over 10 million partnerships in their network, including some Fortune 500 companies. Delta Airlines, Hallmark, J.C. Penny and American Express are some of their clients. However, they don’t handle payment for all their merchants because their clients can choose to process their own payments. This mean that, as an affiliate, you are taking a higher risk as your commission payments are controlled by the merchants.

With LinkShare, you have to choose you affiliate merchants very carefully, always choose ones that have credible payment history and avoid the ones that don’t. LinkShare.com is best if you want to work directly with the merchants.

As you can see, all these companies have their own specific focus in the world of affiliate marketing. If you want to know which is the top affiliate program network? I would say that depends on what you are looking for. All of them are the top affiliate program network in their own ways.

ShareASale

There are currently over 2,000 Merchants plugged in to the ShareASale Network. Each of these merchants has a different type of product that they are selling – and each is ready to commission you on that sale if you bring a customer to them.

The idea – and the implementation – are simple. You decide which merchants to promote and how to promote them, and when commissions are generated, you can see your stats in real-time. All payments are consolidated from the programs you participate in, and are paid with one check or direct deposit by ShareASale.

ShareASale has a strict “No Software” policy which means you will not have to deal with affiliates utilizing Adware, Toolbars, or other desktop software.

Google Affiliate Program Network

So is the Google Affiliate Program worth signing up for? Yep! Is it the best thing since sliced bread? Some may love it like that but I think it is worth signing up because it gives you options! Clearly Google is a great trusted source and when it comes to affiliates… that trust issue is a big deal. I have mainly used CJ.com in the past as they have such a huge selection of advertisers and product… well, clearly with the name Google, you can imagine they are supporting a lot of affiliate advertisers as well.

Google offers some of the biggest brand names there are and many smaller unique companies as well! They have a nice mix!

You can find advertisers by searching for specific products. Let’s say as a blogger, I’m going to write about Dishwashers. Simply type in dishwasher or by brand name or the specific kind of dishwasher you are writing about and boom, instant products that you can list right on your site and earn commissions! You will have to be approved for a “dishwasher” company and they need to offer products as well, but you can find just about anything with the Google affiliate network.