Can anyone give a brief (or in depth if you have the time) review of these 4 affiliate programs. Pros and cons of each? Which ones tend to earn the highest and tend to be the least obtrusive? Do you have any personal experience with them?
eBay - No longer allows incentive sites. Amazon - No longer allows incentives. CJ - I use and have been paid several times. ClickBank - Haven't heard many good things recently. These are my opinions based on my site...others may disagree.
eBay's currently under CJ but is opening an inhouse program in coming weeks. Commission Junction has countless advertisers in all different niches. I'd recomend it as an excellent place to start out if you're new to affiliate marketing.
Commission Junction is a tremendously good place to start because you can join numerous affiliate programs from name-brand merchant that convert well (usually). Linkshare also have a great amount of quality merchants. These are 2 places to start and you should apply to a bunch of merchants, pull the links you want and put them up on your site/blog. Then you can start building out your topics about that merchant and/or the products they sell. The more you post and write product reviews the more traffic you can potentially get, over-time you will have thousands of pages all ranking if you stick to certain principles like adding fresh content regularly.