Quick guide: 1. Create a niche website. 2. Join some affiliate programs in this niche. 3. Promote the website - try to get free traffic from search engines or use PPC advertising. 4. Improve your marketing - leave affiliate programs which doesn't convert well for you and try some new and also search for new methods how to drive targeted traffic to your website. 5. Enjoy the commissions
if you own a site, try to focus in getting traffic first instead of trying to make money from affiliate, you will see your site traffic converted to sale once you have valuable info to feed the crowd. For affiliate program suggestion, i propose clickbank.
So far my method (which I haven't made a dime off of, but I just started this week, so who knows what will happen) is to write several articles promoting an affiliate product and post them to high PR sites. Just checked today and three of my articles are on the second page of google, so submitting to places like Ezine Articles, Goarticles, Hubpages and Squidoo can REALLY help you if you want to try things out before hitting up PPC advertising. Good thing about article marketing is once your article is placed and you spend some time getting traffic, then you should theoretically be able to just let them sit and garner sales or at least adsense clicks (which is most of the reason I've been doing hubpages, actually). For step by step guides that are free, check out Travis Sago's Bum Marketing Method. Like I said, I personally haven't made any money with this yet, but it sounds plausible, so I'll give it a shot over the next few weeks.
MoneyTopList definitely has the idea. If you find clickbank a bit hard to navigate, you can also check out commission junction, I've liked them thus far. Can anyone lead me to a good post or article on clickbank? The information seems really scattered, commission junction was much more clear and easy to find my way around.
I recommend you to choose a good affiliate and read the website of the product the affiliate webpage. Because they have articles in it so you can use the article with your own affiliate link.