Kooday.com

I joined this site after seeing the ad on sweeva.com, and was unimpressed by it right off the bat graphically, as it looks to be about four years behind the times.

Dated graphics aside, the sites main spiel is that you can "own" keywords and get paid after you see results, something about residual income and profit-share credits, and your standard referral commission stuff. I decided to give it a shot, and see how much it would cost to "buy"  a keyword. I checked affiliate first, and saw that it could be mine for only 212.095 "kooday dollars". Unsure what exactly the exchange rate is on "kooday dollars", I checked the faq and found out that its 1:1, meaning one kooday dollar equals one, um, normal dollar. I could probably dig deeper into this already excruciating minutiae, but I'm not going to.

Aside from their dubious currency, dated look, and a few too many promises of things to come (Advertisers will be lining up to try kooday!), the last blurb on their about page says: "If you ever wanted to participate in something very unique, then kooday is a must to join!" I'd rather participate in something very profitable if I'm going to spend money, whether it's normal dollars or kooday dollars. Thumbs down.

Sweeva.com

I signed up for this site on a whim, and expected to be either mildly unimpressed or totally turned off to it within a few seconds, and to be honest, I still don' know whether I like it or can't stand it. One the one hand, your site gets to be viewed and commented on in real time, by real people. On the other hand, there is an astronomical amount of things you have to do before you reach the aforementioned point, including:

referring a certain number of people
tweeting a certain number of times about sites
tweeting once about sweeva.com
viewing the site of the day a certain number of times
something called toolbar loyalty (???)
about five more things I can't be bothered to go check right now

You can avoid having to do all of these things by paying money of course, but that's not how I do things. I realized as I was typing this that sweeva.com feels very much like world of warcraft in a few ways, namely the experience point system and largge amount of stuff to do at any given time, and that's a turn off for me, because I don't have the time to waste on mmo's. On the plus side, I do get to make snarky remarks about the often buzzword laden funnel pages that get shown almost constantly. It's a tradeoff I guess, I say check it out if you want, but if it starts sucking up all of your time, then run away and don't look back.

My face when the site told me I had leveled up

VisitorBoost.com/Shareasale.com

Visitorboost.com is one of the first affiliate sites I joined, and I'm still a member today. They have a very simple interface, packages starting at less than $2.00, and a very quick turnaround time for approving sites. I'd recommend this site whether you're just starting out or are a veteran.

A second site that is closely linked to visitorboost is shareasale.com, which in my opinion rivals some of the giant publisher/affiliate networks out there (adzoogle,commisionjunction, etc) in terms of polish and the amount of resources available for both affiliates and publishers. Like I said at the start of the post, these two sites have helped me immensely, and I give them a solid 8.5/10.

Trafficwhirl.com

I joined Trafficwhirl.com when someone forwarded me a link to it, and right off the bat it really got on my nerves. There are a lot of things I can let go when it comes to affiliate sites, after all, they're trying to make money too, and I can't knock that.

What I can knock, however, is annoying bait and switch tactics, constant bordeline spam emails and cumbersome site design. The clincher for me is that it seems to be more about niche marketing, article rewriting/spinning and wordpress, none of which interest me at all. Maybe it works for some of you guys out there, but it's not my cup of tea.
 
Thumbs down.

Freetrafficsystem.com

I signed up for freetrafficsystem.com, expecting it to be a blog list/traffic generating type of site, like blogclicker.com or worldhits.info, but it's a bit different in several ways. Firstly, there is a LOT of upselling on this site, so much that it's a little annoying. Also, the only blogs that you can list are wordpress blogs, which doesn't exactly do me or this blog any good. The good things are that there is a lot of content, including articles about different strategies and techniques, but those have a lot of upselling in them as well. All in all, I would probably give this site a try if they allowed blogs of this type, but since they don't, there's no reason for me to stay signed up. All in all, I give it a 3/10.

Worldhits.info

Worldhits.info is one of the first affiliate programs I joined, and it has helped my traffic immensely. In addition to having a fast sign up process (A big problem with many affiliate sites), the admins are very helpful and issues get resolved very quickly. There are both free basic accounts and paid pro accounts, and there isn't a constant pressure to upgrade, which is always a plus. The only gripe I had about it was that sometimes sites could take a while to get approved, but another admin has been brought on, so the speed at which your site gets approved and put into rotation is very good. Another thing that is good is that frame breaking sites are banned instantly, so you don't have to worry about one of them breaking your autosurfing session and ruining it. All in all, I give this program an 8.5 out of 10, and would highly recommend it.

The purpose of this blog

I had a list of all the affiliate programs I use on my pc, and it got pretty big, so I'm going to put the info up here. There are hundreds of affiliate programs out there, and they are NOT all created equal. Hopefully the info here will help someone to make a decision about which ones to use. I've tried about four separate times to make money on the internet, and the first three didn't go so well, partially because I signed up for almost everything, thinking that they were all good. This time I've been a lot more judicious in signing up, as well as being quick to un-sign up if something seems fishy, or if the system doesn't work. If anyone has any info on a particular affiliate program or site (good experience or bad one), feel free to email it to me or post it in a comment and I'll add it!