Google competes with Commission Junction with its own affiliate network.

Apart from Google AdWords, affiliate agreements are probably the main sources of income for many “non-professional” web site owner.

The recipe is easy: Find products that are relevant to the topic of your site. Sign up for an affiliate agreement and get percentages of the sales generated from links on your site. In other words: You (normally) get paid per sale, not per click.

Amazon’s affiliate program is probably the most well known of these (an one of the least profitable from a webmaster standpoint).

There are also several affiliate companies that gather a large number of affiliate programs under one roof. This makes it much easier to handle a large number of agreements, as there is only one user account. Moreover, services like Commission Junction will send you one monthly check for all your income that month.

Now Google is entering the same market, launching the Google Affiliate Network .

The new network is based on the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate network, recently purchased by Google.

Among the present advertisers we find Barnes & Noble, Citi and Verizon.

Note that the Google Affiliate Network is separated from Google AdWords, meaning that you cannot generate data from them both using one web site entry.