Webmasters - earn money from your website by becoming an affiliate partner! Website promotion is an important part of running a successful online business, it doesn't take a genius to work that out, but it has also been recognised for a long time that the traditional means of luring in customers are failing. Banners have an awfully low click-through rate, pop-ups are annoying (and with many surfers using pop-ups killers anyway they are also often completely unseen) email campaigns are liable to antagonise potential customers tired of inboxes full of spam(whether they opted in or not!) and so on. The future then is seen in affiliate partnering, particularly through pay per lead and pay per sale advertising which many webmasters will tell you can prove to be very lucrative indeed!

What exactly is an affiliate partner and who can become one? Anyone with a website can apply and all you actually have to do to start earning is to place relevant banners, buttons, text links etc. on your pages, in your emails etc. Whenever a visitor to your site clicks through to a site through one of your links and performs the desired action then you will be paid for sending them there. Some companies will pay you a percentage of sales, some per click-through on a banner or link, others a flat fee for each new registration.

The affiliate programs and affiliate networks listed here will handle all the tracking for you and provide you with the html code needed to list each banner, button, partner link etc. on your site so it really is dead easy to get started. If you can cut and paste then you can become a website affiliate partner to some of the top names on the internet, provide additional useful content and enhancements to your website and best of all, earn a bundle by doing so! Oh and don't choose just one (you are unlikely to find all the sites best suited to your website in one place) but instead sign up and browse around a few of them to make sure you have the best opportunities to earn possible.

- The biggest affiliate network in Europe with many of the real prestige companies from around Britain and the world. Tradedoubler has excellent tracking with real-time stats and because it partners with prestige well known companies, the click through and conversion rate is high making them a must have for UK based website owners. Tradedoubler requires your account to reach £30 before you can be paid and they pay 2 months in arrears. One gripe about the site is that their merchants have the option to approve your site themselves before you can start placing their links on your site and start earning, great for the merchant, but as it can take weeks(sometimes) for certain merchants to approve your application it can become frustrating for the site owner.

OffersQuest - Small but beautifully formed springs to mind as from my experience so far they offer a number of programs not found elsewhere and offer rather competitive pay rates as well which are higher than their competitors in many cases. OffersQuest does insist quite plainly on their homepage that webmasters do not modify their partners' advertising in any way which hinders page design but otherwise they are worth looking into. Payment thresholds are low as well, starting from as low as $20 for US residents or $50 for the rest of the world.

AffiliateFuture - Another great source of UK based advertisers covering a wide range of different subject areas so there is sure to be something which suits the content of your site. There are quite a few advertisers here who aren't to be found on the other major affiliate networks either so this one is well worth a look.

Leadhound - Webmasters make money from your site here Launched in December 1999 this affiliate network has just kept growing in popularity. They keep 30% of all the profits made from partnerships giving the lion's share 70% to affiliate members like you and me so their payment levels are good. You can be paid here via the normal means or choose to use a PayPal account instead which is great for foreign residents tired of jumping through hoops to cash foreign currency cheques.

Affiliate Window - Has a large number of affiliate programs with payment made in pounds sterling, US dollars or euros to their partners. There are no minimum traffic restrictions here which is great for the smaller sites and very few restrictions on how you promote the partner links so you can tailor them to suit your page easily. Commissions are paid 1 month in arrears once your balance exceeds £25 and you can also earn a lifetime commission of 5% of the earnings of all the people you refer to them who subsequently sign up and start earning themselves.

UK Affiliates - A small-ish UK affiliate program but one which often has a number of merchants not found elsewhere. At the time of writing there are only 117 affiliate partners listed on the site and they credit your bank account every 3 months if you excede a balance of £25 or every six weeks if you regularly excede £100.

Commission Junction - Commission Junction is a massive international affiliate network with thousands of partners and more options for checking out your own stats and site performance than anywhere else I have seen. They are undoubtedly one of, if not the, market leader in affiliate marketing. Annoyingly CJ uses an awful lot of cookies to track its advertising with even text links coming with transparent gifs attached but with masses of affiliates all in one places you'd be a fool to ignore them!

Others - Of course, many sites also run and maintain their own affiliate programs preferring not to use affiliate networks like those above. Sometimes you are well advised to seek these out because you will often find you can earn more from these as they have cut out the middle man as it were. Wincasinoclicks.com for starters has one of the best casino affiliate programs I have seen and then of course there are the likes of internet shopping giants Amazon who prefer to run their own affiliate programs.