By using an existing affiliate network they provide a lot of the resources that you would typically need to provide yourself.

For merchants they provide services such as tracking technology, reporting tools and handle the payment processing for you.

For an affiliate marketer, they can provide services that might include one-click purchasing, reporting tools and payment aggregation (so you get paid for multiple products all at once, by one company).

That is basically what they do and it doesn’t matter if you are a merchant or an affiliate marketer, this is one of the easiest ways to start making money online immediately.

Commissions can be paid in a variety of ways through affiliate networks.  They could be paid on a pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, pay-per-action (or cost-per-action – CPA as it is sometimes known) and also pay-per-click (which is what you are using with Google Adsense).

You may have heard of ClickBank (www.clickbank.com) before, right?  They are actually the biggest network for information products.  You basically end up with access to a whole network of thousands of affiliates.

If you browse through the site you can sort the products into any category and they will automatically tell which products are performing best on a number of categories as well as what percentage of the affiliate sale you would make if you promote the product.

Successful affiliate marketing relies on dealing with the top products in their category.  You also have another statistic called “Gravity” which will tell you the number of affiliate sales that there are for any product.  You want to deal with the products that come from people who are making a lot of affiliate sales because that means that people are already making money selling these products.

In addition to the useful tools that ClickBank provides they are also exceptionally reliable in paying your for your affiliate network sales.  You don’t have to rely on each individual merchant to make a payment to you each month.

In addition to ClickBank you could also consider looking at Pay.com which has been created by Mike Filsaime.  This works in a slightly different way to ClickBank because the individual merchants are still responsible for paying you however it does offer some additional functionality that ClickBank doesn’t.

Alternatively, just do a search on Google for “Affiliate Networks” and you will find a few pages of results for different options. 

Find the one that suits you best to deliver the success you can achieve from successful affiliate marketing.