Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Can I Join?

Yes, of course, you can join an affiliate program. A company would be crazy to say that you can’t join. After all, it’s possible that you might send some business its way, and it doesn’t cost the company anything to sign you up. Actually, about the only way not to get approved for an affiliate program is to run a Web site that the company finds objectionable — like a XXX adult site or one that tells how to rob banks with a homemade nuclear weapon.

Finding partners

So who’s running affiliate programs? Where do you go to sign up? The short answer is that just about everyone’s doing some kind of affiliate program these days. If you just use your Web browser’s page-search function, you can hunt for the word affiliate on the sites that you visit in the normal course of your surfing, and you’re guaranteed to trip over tons of programs. Many of the outfits that I list in other chapters of this book offer them, too.

You can also go to particular Web sites to find out the lowdown on affiliate programs. Table 15-3 lists some of the best sites for finding up-to-date news on the latest and greatest of these programs. (Figure 15-1 shows one of them.)

Figure 15-1. Which-Affiliate.com provides information on many affiliate programs.

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Table 15-3. Top Affiliate Information Sites

Company	Web Address
AffiliateMatch.com	www.affiliatematch.com
AssociatePrograms.com	www.associateprograms.com ...