When starting to build your business online, promoting through affiliate marketing or referral programs requires you to work with others. In order for you to build a successful business through affiliate marketing, you have to build credibility. The best way to do that is with a solid, well respected product. Your recommendation is what your business will be based on, make it count.

If you already have a website set up, you can add an affiliate program to it, or you can simply build a site to promote a particular product or service. As long as it makes more cash than it takes to build and run it, you'll be fine.

The key is to find the right product, one that you feel completely comfortable promoting and would buy yourself. Even though it may seem tempting to promote programs with the highest commissions, those programs won't pay you anything if your visitors don't buy them and it might make it hard for your visitors to trust you again, even with a good product.

Use these 6 tips below to help you select an affiliate program that's right for you:

1. Driving traffic is hard work so you have to make sure your profit outweighs your expense, so try not to accept any commission payout that's less than 25%. You can find thousands of programs with great payment structures and high percentages of pay in just about any niche. In Clickbank alone you won't find anything under 50% and some pay

90 %. Not to mention many other programs out there that payout 100%.

2. If you're going to spend time and money driving traffic why not make money from that one sale over and over again. Look for affiliate programs that payout a recurring monthly payment. More cash for the same amount of work makes sense!

3. Look for affiliate programs that give you affiliate statistics that list the number of click throughs, sales, and earnings so you'll be able to see how you are doing. It's also nice if you can find one that allows you to create tracking links so you can see what promotions work best.

4. Always look for programs that offer a wide variety of tools to put on your web site. Some promotional tools include banners, text links, Google ads, keywords, ezine ads, solo ads, classified ads and one I like the best is follow up emails. A bonus would be a quick guide showing places to advertise, this is where most people have the hardest time.

5. Make sure the payment schedule is something that works for you. I like to be paid every two weeks; I can even deal with a monthly payout. But some programs pay quarterly and I'm not a bid fan of that, these programs are more appealing when the payout is big and you're already making money. But to start, I'd stay away from these.

6. Make sure that top level support is included and has a good track record, you don't want to make the merchants process issues yours. If it's a software product, make sure updates are free. Also, make sure that they have a good refund policy, if someone doesn't like what they bought, they won't think bad of you as long as they get a no hassle refund. Paypal and Clickbank both protect the buyer so these are two things to look for.

Once you find and are comfortable with the affiliate programs you promote, you can make a lot of money. If you are just starting out, you should always use common sense and not rush into anything. As you become more familiar with how things work, you'll be able to pick a winner at a glance - and enjoy making money from it.