There are thousands of affiliate programs on the web, which claim to provide large profits. A lot of them provide banners to put on your website and get paid for it. In this case it needs for you to have a website with a lot of traffic.
Many affiliate programs offer you a variety of banners for your website but only few of them are effective. The main issue with the banners is their size. If you place a large banner, it will take a lot of time to get implemented. The best size for a banner should not be more than 15kb.
For graphical advertising you should keep the theme of your website in your mind. At one place graphical ads help out a lot in catching a visitor's eye, it should not be in such a way that other things on the page go unseen.
Some affiliate companies provide pop up or pop under ads. But pop ups are not so good because chances are that they are being closed by the user before they even load. Its better to go with pop unders that only get displayed once per visit.
For marketing the best thing to use are the text link ads. They use less space and low bandwidth and can be easily implemented in most page layouts. They also give a small briefing about why a visitor should check the offer.
Direct Marketing
Email marketing has been one of the ways for direct promotion of your products and services through your mail. However it also has boosted a lot of spam on the other side. If you want to advertise directly through mails then you should be available for any queries to answer.
If you have the ability for generating sales for company's you must contact them for an arrangement. If you do not get any answer immediately then you must wait for a while as companies receive a lot of offers from affiliates every day.
Generally the affiliates are not able to deliver what they promise and companies are very much aware about this.