What is an affiliate program?

An affiliate program is a way to make money by indirectly selling someone else's products. You don't sell the product yourself, you just lead people to the website that actually sells the product. The seller then rewards you for any purchases those people make. Usually this is done by embedding a code within the HTML link to the website, which lets the seller track which affiliate is responsible for the sale. For example, if any of you clicked on this link:

http://egiguere.marketplace.hop.clickbank.net

and then proceeded to buy an ebook or a software package from ClickBank, Eric Giguere gets credited for the sale because his ClickBank affilate ID "egiguere" is in the link. Similarly, if you signed up for a mailing list at AWeber.com using this link:

http://www.aweber.com/?208659

Then an affiliate is credited because the affiliate ID (208659 in this case) is in the link.

A lot of reputable sites run affiliate programs. Amazon does, for example, so you can make a bit of money by referring people to specific books and CDs on Amazon's site.