Well its a tricky business dude.

If I'm understanding you right, you're talking about getting people to sign up for other programs under your code so you get the 5percent or whatever for all their signups - is that correct?

As a strategy for the little webmaster, thats almost useless.

But there are sigwhores that either try to be infamous, or to be helpful, or otherwise interesting - and they must make enough money to make it worthwhile, I suppose.