You’ll also want to check these people out. They’re at: http://www.cj.com/. Their full name is Commission Junction, and they are a ValueClick company. If you don’t want to have to cobble your own affiliate marketing program together piece by piece, CJ offers turnkey affiliate marketing products.

If you’re really lazy, or just super-busy, you can turn over the management of your program to them, or use one of their customized search marketing solutions. You can also combine these.

They’re a bit like Google AdSense, too, in that you can get paid for putting other people’s ads in the categories of your choice on your site.

Advantages of CJ:

• They’re the current market leader in affiliate marketing solutions.
• They have more merchants than any other affiliate marketing company I have seen.
• Their system is very robust and has lots of good features.
• One feature puts a big SCORE at the top of your screen so you can see at a glance how much money you’ve made.
• You can set things up so that people who work for you setting up affiliate stuff can have different security privileges.

Disadvantages of CJ:

• A whole bunch of cookies are involved. It’s to the point that text links have a built-in 1x1 transparent GIF with a cookie. If you hate cookies you will have to double-isolate all the links!
• In 2002 CJ jacked up their prices so a whole lot of merchants dropped out. However, as of May, 2005, this seems to have turned around and new merchants are streaming in.
• Commission percentages are extremely low in comparison to other major affiliate sites.
• Affiliate links are provided by cj.com. Meaning that as an affiliate you do not have total control over the appearance of links.