There are many online billing and marketing services that have been created for the development of affiliate programmes. They provide tracking services to enable merchants to pay a designated amount of money to the person who referred the business to the merchant, which serves as a commission payment. They know who the affiliate is because the affiliate uses a special link provided by the affiliate network that uniquely identifies them, and then they track the visitor's progress through the merchant's site to the sale of the product.

Google AdWords is one of many pay-per-click services with which you can place advertising at low rates. You write an advertisement for Google AdWords that will appear on the "sponsored links" section of their search results, and you tell Google that you would like your ad shown when somebody searches for specific keywords. You get charged a small fee each time somebody clicks on your advertisement, and thereby visits your designated website.

Link the two together, and what have you got? An easy way of making money quickly! Well, it would be easy if nobody else knew about the technique. The trouble is that hundreds of thousands of people are well aware of this technique to make money, and as a result, lots of ads exist for most worthwhile keywords. If an advertisement is already listed for the keyword that you want to list for, then you must be prepared to pay more per click than that advertiser to get your advertisement listed, and then the costs of advertising ramp up.

If you can get in first with an advertisement campaign, you have an advantage. Google AdWords rewards advertisers who write copy that attracts clicks by lowering the cost per click that these advertisers have to pay to get their ads listed near the top of the list. This way, ads can build up history. One way of getting into this market is by striking while the iron is hot. If you can find a vendor that has just started an affiliate programme, you may be able to get in with a good ad before anyone else does.

ClickBank is a famous payment processor and affiliate network tracker that have over 10,000 downloadable goods available. There are plenty of products available through ClickBank that can be marketed in this way, and new vendors are coming along all the time. Commission Junction are another famous network that provide a similar tracking and commission-payment service with new products quickly coming in, and there are plenty of others. Some organisations like Amazon operate their own affiliate tracking network; indeed, Amazon made the model popular. Those affiliate marketers who are successful sometimes achieve that success by finding these new products, and marketing them before anybody else does. In this way, they maximise their chances of generating autopilot income.