Affiliate programs have been used by some of the most well known and profitable internet businesses to make their millions. Amazon.com and ebay.com are just two examples of websites that have used affiliate programs in a BIG WAY to make money online.

Affiliate programs are programs where you pay other people to grow your business. The idea is that you pay them a fraction of the profits you make from the sales they give you so that you are always in profit.

For example, some affiliate programs offer to pay affiliates $5 for every time they sell a copy of their $10 eBook through their special affiliate tracking link. As long as the product and the management cost less than $5 per eBook to maintain then you are still in profit and are gaining customers you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

With affiliate programs the advantage is that you will always make a profit from your investment in them if you do it right. If you pay your affiliates a commission per sale then you are only ever paying someone to benefit your business and at a profit. You will never be paying anyone to benefit your business and not get your investment back with a profit.

Other affiliate programs pay affiliates per hit to their website, and the fee is obviously smaller but the boss (that’s you!) still gets the biggest profit. The only risk with this method is that, while you may be getting traffic, you have to be sure that you can convert that into sales in order to make a profit.

You would be surprised just how many people there are out there that are very good at selling products or guiding traffic but cannot create their own. They need to sell YOUR unique and original products.

Many affiliates will be webmasters with websites with original content who simply enjoy maintaining them but would like to make enough money from them so that they maintain themselves.

Many affiliates will have read every handbook on marketing and making money from programs and will be working night and day to sell your product.

The only drawback is that you have no idea of what methods they may use or where your website may end up being promoted. However, this is a fairly calculated risk you take and in my opinion little harm can come of it.

I hope you have taken something from this article. It can definitely be used to grow any sort of web business and has been used in this way for a long time now.

You may also be surprised at how well this can increase your revenue as it has done for many giant e-businesses in the past.

Setting one up is as easy as a trip to clickbank.com where you can set all of the cash reward settings and just leave it. Automatically people will begin promoting your website for you and soon it will begin to grow far quicker than it could on its own.