Sometimes, a merchant will run his/her own affiliate program. This means that they have to handle paying you themselves. However, most merchants use a third party affiliate network. This means sales and cheques are all handled by a third party. I've listed all the major ones in the resources section, but the two major networks are Clickbank and Commission Junction.
ClickBank is like an online bank that helps you market other peoples' information products (such as books, special reports and collections of articles), get a nice, fat commission from the sale of those products, and track your money.
ClickBank keeps a large number of these ebooks and such in an online marketplace, and when you sign on as an affiliate you act as the seller of these ebooks. Commissions can range from tiny to very large: 1% to 75%. The minimum dollar amount paid on commissions is $0.25 and the maximum is $100.00.
Important to know: ClickBank publishers can change their commission rate at any time, so when you pick products to promote, check back with ClickBank frequently to make sure the commission rate hasn't decreased.
To make things easy for you, ClickBank's Marketplace is divided into categories and laid out with ads for ebooks that list the commission right upfront. As you can see, each product lists its commission rate. If you are looking for a specific product to affiliate to, there are some good clickbank search engines that help you find a relevant product. Try www·clickbank-search·com.
To get started making money as a ClickBank affiliate, you'll need to go to ClickBank.com and sign up for a ClickBank account, which is free. When you sign up, you'll select your unique ClickBank nickname. This nickname is your unique ID that lets ClickBank track your commissions and credit you money. You use your nickname in all the affiliate links (hoplinks) that you create.
Clickbank offers a number of payment alternatives. Commissions are posted to your account within 2 minutes. They mail out checks twice a month and you can set a threshold value. If you haven't earned as much as the threshold value since your last check, you won't get a check. The default threshold is $100, but you can set it for anything from $10 to $10,000. Clickbank does have one bad feature, but it's really not their fault.
The United States has a law that requires ClickBank to have a Customer Distribution Requirement. What this means is that ClickBank is legally required to hold off paying you your account balance until it contains commissions on purchases by customers who live in four or more different countries, states, or provinces. Usually this isn't a problem on the Internet though.