To put it in simple words an affiliate program is nothing but a revenue sharing arrangement between two different parties. The party which offers the affiliate program is known as the affiliate merchant and the party that accepts the offer is generally known as the publishers, affiliates or sales persons.

How does an affiliate program work?
Affiliate program is strictly a performance based marketing program which involves the affiliate merchant paying out commissions to his affiliates for any sales leads generated by their referred visitors. There are may commission schemes like pay per click scheme, pay per sale scheme, pay per referral, life time commissions, two tier commissions etc that the business can decide to pay to its affiliates on a fixed time bases.

Why do businesses start an affiliate program?
The main reason why a company offers an affiliate program is to promote goods and services. There could be many related reasons like beating competition, following trends, experimenting with new techniques, decreasing marketing costs, increasing website traffic, developing product/service awareness etc. But the primary motive of any affiliate program is to promote products/services and generate sales.

Why join an affiliate program
Affiliate programs are a win-win marketing strategy with both parties taking benefits. A webmaster joins an affiliate program primarily to make money, to leverage his website potential, to provide value added to his visitors and to increase the value of his website.

Affiliate programs give benefits both to the affiliate merchant as his goods and services are promoted and his affiliates as he can earn good money increasing their popularity in the present context.

Tips on publishing affiliate programs
Publishing and affiliate program is the only way to attract and recruit affiliates. And as affiliates play the most important part in an affiliate campaign, publishing affiliate programs becomes an unavoidable process. There are many ways in which a business can publish its affiliate program. Let us look at some of them.

How to publish affiliate programs?

Using third party affiliate network service
Using a third party affiliate network service will directly quality the affiliate merchant to all the promotional strategies that the network utilizes. It's not advisable to depend entirely on the affiliate network provider for all promotional activities.

Making use of advertisements
Affiliate merchants can go in for advertising in their websites about their affiliate program, giving adverts in newsletters and even in related print media. For instance an automotive affiliate program can give adverts in auto magazines. Giving adverts in other related websites won't be such a bad idea either.

Publishing in online directories
Online affiliate directories are a powerful means of advertising as they are viewed most by affiliate seekers and generally hold good positions on search engines. Most affiliate directories are free and many allow you to publish good amount of information regarding your affiliate program rather than just providing a link.

Forums and discussion boards
Another good place to publish your affiliate program is in related online forums and discussion boards. These affiliate forums are frequented by thousands of members' everyday and also have good search engine rankings. Apart from participating you can also think of advertising in forum pages.

Using softwares
There are some good affiliate softwares that allow you to publish your affiliate program in forums, directories etc. You can go in for buying software, using a third party software service or going for an application service provider.

Publishing affiliate programs plays a major role in the success of your affiliate campaign and hence should be done on a dedicated basis.