There are literally thousands of affiliate companies and directories out there all proclaiming to be the best. Each one would love you to sign up with them and help them make more money, but which affiliate companies should you choose to work with?

There's also the question of what to choose from the millions of products available. My own approach has been to find products that fit in very well with my niches or in other words, what I like to write about. I'd find it hard to promote a product well that I had no interest in.

I'm fairly new to affiliate marketing - I've been doing it less than a year, so I'm certainly not going to proclaim myself as an expert just yet. My aim in this article is to pass on some info about a few affiliate companies you might want to try and that you might not have come across before.

I should say at this point that becoming an affiliate for any of these sites is completely free - you should never have to pay to become an affiliate. The way these companies make money is by charging the people that want to sell through their sites and taking a percentage of their sales revenue.

Linkshare is by far my favourite affiliate company and I would even go as far to say that it is the best I have found at this point in my affiliate career. I came across them because I wanted to be an affiliate for Homestead Technologies.

I'd been using their website builder and hosting service for nearly a year and was very happy with it. (I still am very happy with it!) So it was quite by chance that I found out that Homestead use linkshare to manage their affiliate sales.

The first time I went into linkshare's website I was totally amazed at the quality of companies who work with linkshare. This was not like clickbank to be sure!

Of the 500 companies to choose from, there are many major retailers and brands are just waiting for you to promote their products including:

• McAfee
• Fat Face
• Jigsaw
• Clinique
• Crocs
• Smoking Everywhere (e-cigs)
• Napster
• PC World Business
• Ben Sherman
• Liberty
• Links of London
• BoxFresh
• Match.com
• Toshiba
• iTunes

Of course each company offers their own percentage on sales you make and some are better than others. I've seen from 1% - 75% commissions offered. I had no problems signing up with my HubPages account. I made sure that I filled in the description of what I do on HubPages well. I think I wrote something about writing quality and evergreen articles. Not every company I have applied to has said yes, but the majority have.

Have a look at LinkShare.com and see what you think.

I also really like this affiliate company. I've just started with MyHelpHub, selling one of their products on my website and so far I'm very pleased with them. They have a good range of downloadable products for you to choose from including:

• Self development products
• Products for writers
• Software
• Utilities
• Internet Business Tools
• UK Driving Products
• Health & Lifestyle

There's no wiating to be accepted as an affiliate with this company. Just sign up, pick a product or two and you're done.

See what you think of My Help Hub.

No article on affiliate companies and directories would be complete without giving Clickbank a mention. They are probably the most widely used and most well known affiliate company out there. There are thousands of downloadable products to choose from to match your niches. Just click on the "marketplace" tab and have a browse through. Again there are a broad range of commissions available, some companies offer commission on future sales too.

Setting up your hoplinks (affiliate link code) is simple and they're easy to paste into a Hub or Webpage.

Click here to check out Clickbank.

I thought I would throw these into the mix. They look like they could be an interesting option, although I must admit have not used them yet (I've added the links to my favourites to follow up at a later date). I imagine you would need your own website to market Microsoft products or use their adsense type advertising program.

Microsoft USA

Microsoft UK

There are also other options if you are based in a different country than the US or UK.

If you decide to try out any of these affiliate companies I'd be really interested to hear about your experiences, your thoughts and how well you do with them.

Also, if there are affiliate companies that you already use that you think are the bees knees, please tell me and my other readers about them!

Any questions? Leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

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