You will at some point, be inundated with offers of programs to join,buy or be a joint venture partner with.(A joint venture partner is a sort of affiliate program under another name but you generally get a higher percentage - in return for doing most of the sales work.

The very best offers are for products that you will own and get 100% of the ongoing sales. These are rarer but can be of outdated or older software.

Other offers you'll get are variants on Adsense Programs (buy Joel Comm's Adsense Code book instead - it's cheaper and if you contact Joel Comm

you get thousands of $$ worth of videos and software free), Programs to make money on eBay and Adwords.

The first thing you should do is to do a Google Search for the program name. This should put up a number of reviews if the program is any good - but please note that some affiliates use reviews as a marketing tool and some program vendors do reviews of their own products under a different name !

Make notes of positive AND negative comments. Then do the same search again using the program name and the word scam or con. This will show up any outright rotten programs or unhappy customers. Read their comments carefully and remember that these may have been written by the program vendors rivals !

Every vendor spends thousands of $$ copywriting their sales pages to convince you that their product is indispensible. Bear this in mind too !

Before you sign that credit card slip though, go onto eBay and type the program name there - chances are you could buy a copy of the program for far less from an independent vendor. Many eBayers buy resale rights and then resell the program for a lower price.

Sometimes that can be 10% of the original price.

EBay itself is a great marketplace and you can buy and sell pretty much everything there. There are masses of books teaching you how to buy or sell on eBay and most of these are available from Amazon.com Click Here for a selection of them