I have been with Tradedoubler (Alexa) for several years now and they have some very good name merchants such as Boots -
Dell.co.uk - Halfords Jessops and many more.  If you hang around for a while you can watch their rotating banner below of 
some of their merchants.  One month I sent them about 250,000 impressions.  You can have more than one rotating banner 
on a page which is a feature that I like.  (See E-Commerce@theEuroMall). You can also recruit affiliates, but not merchants.
 I also like their data feeds where you can mix different merchants products (max 100) onto one page.  You can also track 
banner type effectiveness.

USA
I have worked with LinkShare Referral Prg (Alexa) for a number of years and they have a great list of well known 
merchants. My main earners with them have been Playboy.com and Omaha Steaks.com so if you join Linkshare
I would definitely pick Playboy as our average click thru rate is 25%.  They also have a rotating banner, but you can 
only have one on a page which you can see it below.

Another US affiliate program that I first worked with was Reporting.net (Alexa) and I have had regular checks form their 
merchants - Overture.com - LendingTree.com - barnesandnoble.com - Proflowers - British Airways and Interflora.

I have just joined shareasale.com Affiliate Program (Alexa) and ChatDollars Affiliate Program (Alexa) this one in view of 
the fact that Playboy seems to sell and this one is also aimed at the adult/personals  market.  Also I have just joined 
Harken Home (Alexa) where the commission is $100 per sale. 

I discovered this affiliate program recently and quite like it - myaffiliateprogram.com

Regular payers seem to be some individual affiliate programs - One and Only.com - Match.com -  MdHealthcare.com. 
Some other affiliate programs that you may wish to take a look at are Wordtracker.com . WebsiteManagementTools.com
I really like a one of the features of the Allposters.com (Alexa) program and below left you can see and example of the feature
Posters will be rotated to your visitors - here I have used 20, but if you sign up you can choose as many as you want.

Another way of earning money is by using the Alexa.com webmaster tools and becoming an Amazon.com affiliate.
On the left I have placed a our ranking box.  There are over 3 billion sites indexed by Alexa and below I am going to 
list the top 10 websites (17 June 2004)
1. Yahoo!
2. Microsoft Network
3. Google
4. Microsoft Corporation
5. Passport.net
6. EBay Inc.
7. Amazon.com
8. Offeroptimizer.com
9. Go
10. DoubleClick Inc.
Our company has made an investment in CMGI Inc so let us see their ranking and whether this former owner of Altavista 
share price goes up.  About 4 years about the shares went over $100.  I have given Alexa links above to see how important 
each affiliate program company is.  As there are many out there it could be a good idea to check their Alexa ranking 
before joining - My dream?  to have a ranking equal to Friendsreunited.co.uk

If you want more traffic try this one INCREASE YOUR WEBSITE TRAFFIC BY  65%  INSTANTLY FREE, 
Guaranteed!  (The only three-tier point referral system on the Internet.  Another link exchange program to seriously consider is the Axandra affiliate program

Conclusion - You are not going to get rich but you will probably cover your costs.  Choose merchants that are related 
to the your content of your site.  Forget a shopping mall as there as so many out there.  I will place the best affiliate 
program banners in the left hand navigation panel and keep this page update.  The Internet is getting so complex with
affiliates being encouraged to pay for clicks, obtaining high rankings etc.  A lot of sites out there are based on selling 
their services to encourage your ranking.  www.itccommunications.net has been here since 10 October 1997.  We have 
placed a few of tools below that you may find helpful in building your web page. We hope that you will find them helpful 
and welcome any feedback.

Useful Resources
An essential tool for any webmaster is web.ceo which offer a free edition to try.  Paid versions range from $19.00 to  $495.00
For reference, 59% of paid users stop at the Professional edition, 23% choose the SmallBiz edition, and the rest (approx. 18%) 
only need Web traffic analysis for their site so they decide on the Startup edition. Finally 100% of paid users download the
Free edition before choosing any of the above editions :)  Also take a look at WebsiteManagementTools.com which also 
offer free downloads.

Page Ranking seems to be all the rage now and links to your site can assist to achieve this - Google Search Example:

Shows indexing of all pages listed in website site:  www.websitedomainname.com

Shows indexing of a specific web page in website info:  www.websitedomainname.com/pagename.html

If the page is listed in the search engine results, this means the page has been indexed by the search engine robots. This means the web page is valid for indexing and that your link will be picked up as well.

It will assist search engines if the HTML and XHTML document is in conformance to W3C - Check
and that there are no broken links on your page - Check

Two other sites that webmasters might find useful are Web-Source.net and Web-Inspect.com