Affiliate programs are the first choice of most newcomers to net earnings because they have many advantages:
1. All you have to do is to join a merchant program as an affiliate and send visitors to the merchant site
2. All other work such as making a sale, delivering the product or service, receiving payment, attending to the complaints or making a refund, is handled by the merchant site.
3. The merchant site also sees to it that you are paid commission when a sale is made through your efforts.
4. You are also rewarded when a sale is made through the efforts of an affiliate referred by you to the merchant site.
All easy and simple. But most affiliates soon find that in spite of their best efforts they are not making any money.
This is because the affiliate earnings depend not on how many visitors they send to the merchant site, but how many of them buy the product or service of the merchant.
So just sending visitors to the merchant site is not enough.
You can do this easily by joining traffic exchange or autosurf programs. Your merchant site will be seen hundreds of times but it will not make a sale. This is because these visitors are not interested in your site. They are looking at it to earn credits so they can show their site to others.
This is not to say that traffic programs have no use at all.
I have used them successfully to build my downline in free-to-join programs, but have never made a sale through them. Most members of such programs are promoting their own programs. They could get interested in joining other opportunities, but would rarely go for a product themselves.