You affiliate program should be something that grows in participants and revenue every year, and makes gains on a monthly basis by attaining a higher level of affiliate participation. Operating across several affiliate networks can be a good strategy to give affiliates more choice and opens your offer up to more potential affiliates. Operating an inhouse affiliate program can be a very effective strategy, which allows you to work even more closely with affiliates and pay them more money directly. You can grow an inhouse affiliate program by recruiting affiliates from the web (by contacting websites and posting on forums) and advertising in Google, Yahoo, and MSN under “affiliate marketing” keywords, driving the traffic directly to your affiliate signup page. Once you are signing up affiliates directly you can measure the ROI they generate against what it costs to acquire the affiliate via PPC. From my experience, it does work well. You only need 1 good affiliates sometimes to pay for the entire monthly advertising.