If you’re signing up under an individual or small company, you may need to sign up directly. Individuals and companies often prefer to pay their affiliates via Pay Pal, as this saves paper and is just plain easier. Some individuals use programs like E-Junkie to manage their affiliate network, while some have their own software to do so.

Most programs will let you start up as an affiliate no matter how green you are, but some individuals or companies will only take experienced affiliates who can drive a certain amount of traffic per day to the sales web site.

Pay attention to terms of service. Most affiliate managers will drop you from their program if they catch you sending out affiliate links in spam. But spam isn’t the only thing that will get you banned from most sites. Using foul or derogatory language on any web page, advertisement, or in any email is enough to get you banned from most affiliate programs. Read each affiliate program’s terms of service to make sure of what kinds of claims you can and can’t make, what types of advertising might be verboten, and everything else you need to know about the affiliate program’s guidelines.

How do they know that you helped them make the sale? A special tracking code is used. You will get your code and/or sales page link(s) when you sign up for the program.

There is typically a payout period with each affiliate program–every two weeks or every month is pretty standard.

However, the best affiliate programs allow you to track your sales in “real-time”, that is, you don’t have to wait until the end of the pay period to see how many sales you made, or when you made them.

Knowing when you made your sales is important to know if you’ve just changed your website, so that you can see if your sales have gone up or down. It’s extremely important if you’re using pay per click advertising to drive people to your web site, so that you’ll know if your market is biting harder at one time than it is another. Knowing this can really save you some money.

Eventually, you’ll want your own tracking software–don’t worry, as you can get some good stuff for free–so that you can tell when you’re making the most sales, where most of your converting customers are coming from, where you might be wasting time and/or advertising dollars, etc.

Even if you have your own software, it’s still important that your affiliate program show you your results in real-time, because it’s the sign of a professional and competent affiliate network/program.