Do you precisely understand what affiliate programs are? Do you understand how you earn residual income from them? Your chances of profiting from and, even enjoying them, are greater if you do.

Are you like me and constantly emailed and spammed with sure thing business opportunities that are about to close membership? Do they say you better sign up immediately after reading their article content so you do not miss the opportunity of a life time? They tell me that too.

Do they say you will make large amounts of income and it is easy to do? Do they say they will hand hold you every step of the way?

You can make good income but it takes lots of work to get started and keep going. Most of it is not easy. Almost all of them are lying when they say they will hand hold you through it.

Marketing ads that make the claims above make it difficult for the honest marketers to make it big in their affiliate programs. It is human nature for us to stop believing all content niche claims when they say their programs offers unlimited income.

Only a handful of human beings have an unlimited income that gives them time and money to spend as they please with no debt worry. Their timing, heredity, natural skills, health, outright luck, hard driving work habits, organizational skills, help and support from their families all work together for them.

Unlimited income for any business is a nonsense claim. Affiliate programs are available in thousands of fields. Like multi level marketing years ago, large companies are now getting into them.

You need to learn the whole story about income model residual businesses before letting yourself get poisoned about them and get discouraged about becoming an entrepreneur.

Yes it does take constant, daily work. Yes it is hard to do but, thousands of people are doing it.

Affiliate programs have two working functions. Selling products for commissions is first. They are set up to save money and time for promotion and marketing. To have someone else do the advertising.

This gives free marketing to the product makers and cash flow profits to inter net marketers. Companies are usually responsible for setting up a high powered web site where customers are sent to analyze and buy products.

The company is responsible for setting up individual html code for the affiliates. The purpose of this is to carefully give commissions to workers who earn them. This is a must to keep your working affiliates.

The job of you, the affiliate, is to market and advertise the site to the world. This is a proven team effort set up that many are succeeding at during this very moment. We, the advertising workers in this, market the web sites.

The second function business development purpose or job of the business owners is to recruit new affiliates. So the affiliate link taking your leads to the web sites gives satisfied buying members the possibility of becoming cash flow partners themselves if they like the product.

Now the cycle starts all over again. The exception here is that if the program is more than one level deep the marketers will get residual income from new member marketers also.

This gives you growth as affiliates sign up more members. This is a big plus as marketers sign up more marketers. Everyone now wins. The company is getting lots of free advertising. What they had to do was set up and monitor the systems. Workers do the rest. As with MLM, many major companies are implementing affiliate programs for their own products.

The most dishonest part of these opportunities is where they say in their advertising that you can easily make lots of money.

It is true that if you sell lots of products and build a team of affiliates under you who sell and recruit lots of products that you can make a large amount of money.

It is not that simple. First of all, setting up a stable and strong team is hard. While you will sign up many members, who want quick and easy money, high percentages of them drop out when they realize there is work and some investment in advertising involved.

When this happens with most of your recruits then you cannot make a lot from them. Commissions on product sales are low and someone usually needs quality team members to be making good commissions.

It is possible to make good income, but it takes time to do it. Many people would rather remain independent affiliates and promote their own web site links. This is my preference. Eventually you will get some affiliates to join, who like your products, if you do it long enough.

Some entrepreneurs are negative about affiliate programs because they closely resemble MLM or pyramid schemes. Most successful marketers at this are completely independent and have a few members in their selling group from satisfied customers sales.

Pyramid schemes involve recruiting people to sign up under you then you make all your money off of them. In this system you make money off of the products, not the people.

The additional member recruiting is kind of like icing on the cake for you to raise some additional income from your program membership.

These programs have useful products to sell and there is the difference. Pyramid schemes do not have useful products to sell. They offer you a genuine opportunity to be earning residual income in an honest business.

This is a real way to build residual income. You can be successful with affiliate programs if you work hard and especially smart at them. They are not a scam and are a true way to earn online residual income.