Affiliate programs...

Are pretty cool toys and in most cases, most effective systems to make money online.
Some of the Affiliate programs ask for investment and some are completely free. It is therefore normal that those which ask to be paid bring you in most cases a lot bigger income.
Also some of them will pay you only one time and some will pay you continually, mostly on monthly basis (those are usually the neccerarry to be paid kind :)
In these programs you earn money with reselling the products, aka selling somebody else´s products and for that you get a certain percentage which can sometimes be pretty attractive, up to more than 50% of the sale you made.
There are some really great programs like AMAZON.COM, GDI International, and many others which you can read more about in my posts.

But as always the question is: Why they want to give me that money?

So this is the way it works...
Some site or organisation decides to make an online shop.I will use AMAZON.COM as an example. To make their income they need to have product and a marketplace. Usually they have products, but even if it is the best product they can not sell it if no body knows about it. So this is where you and me as affiliates come in the game.

Because advertising is "pretty expencive sport", AMAZON.COM "can not" rely it self´s income just on the base of ads in Google-ads or other advertising agencies. It is effective though, but it is allways the risk of how many people who see the ads will actually come to their site and buy the product.
In contrary, every sale which came from an affiliate is paid by "one on one" method, which means that they paid an affiliator only when he did a succesfull sale, and only one time for each sale.
Which i would call a good job, or advertising with 100% effectiveness and therefore cheaper advertising.

2. Affiliates are predictable
The important thing, as mentioned above is that by investing in ads AMAZON.COM never knows how many effective ads they will buy. It means that income which comes out from that source is always just an unknown variable, and they can not predict it, though it can be evaluated in some relative and average numbers.
In contrary when they pay the affiliator it is always for effective sale and therefore they know that each paid affiliator will every single time bring them income. I would call that predictable.

3.  Affiliates are stable
This chapter is I think most appreciated for the people in AMAZON.COM´s accounting department. :)
The ad-companies usualy always ask to be paid in advance, so the company acctually invests and "looses" the money for a while just with hope that it will bring them income and with the question if that will be enough to cover all the costs. By the way it is neccesarry to say when the talk is about accounting, that money is now gone and not available for further use and it is possible that the money never comes back.
In contrary the affiliators are always paid only for effective sale and always after sale so the money they used to pay the affiliates is actually already made income, so that would be a non-Risk investing or in otherwords and therefore stabile investing.

Remember!
Only those who decide to step out of average can become successfull...