Four Top Reasons To Do Affiliate Marketing

If you're looking to start a home business, the following reasons to do affiliate marketing may well persuade you to serious consider becoming an affiliate for merchants online and selling their products in return for a commission on every sale.

1. Affiliates don't need to create products.

Unless you've tried to create a product, you won't know what a huge amount of time and effort it takes. Even digital products take a lot of effort. If you create software, you'll need to work with programmers and coders. They'll want a product specification and even with the best team of coders available, you'll need to keep a close eye on their progress and will more than likely change the specification as the project develops. Even when it's finished, you'll have to test the final version, or coordinate other people testing it for you. Another popular digital product, ebooks, take time to research, write and format. So even digital products have creation costs. The time and effort required to make, store and ship physical products is even higher. Being an affiliate who can just concentrate on product promotion instead of product creation saves time, effort and money.

2. Affiliates don't need to do customer service

Creating and selling products requires a merchant to also support those product. With ebooks, the customer support isn't very high although, people often forget, lose or never recieve their download details which necessitates them contacting the merchant after their purchase. The biggest customer requirement for customer service comes from selling software. The number of different combinations of software already running on people's computers means that it's impossible to test for every possible combination before selling any new software. As sure as the sun rises each morning, there will be customers for whom the software won't install, or work properly. Furthermore, as operating systems, firewalls and other pieces of user-installed software changes, the merchant's product will need updating and patching. An affiliate doesn't have to concern themselves with any of this!

3: Affiliates can work from their own home

Working from home gives you a wonderful sense of freedom. You don't have a boss to answer to. You don't have to be in a certain place at a certain time. You don't have to fight your way through rush hour traffic twice each day. You don't have to put up with over-crowded trains, tubes, flights or roads. Commuting to your home office each day takes about thirty seconds, which releases more productive hours for you each day. The one drawback to working from home is that working while you're at home without a supervisor looking over your shoulder takes discipline.

4: Affiliates need very little start-up costs.

Unlike developing, testing, selling and supporting products, which is what a merchant has to do, an affiliate doesn't have to worry about the costs involved in each of those activities. Instead, all an affiliate has to do is put up a blog or website, add some content and focus on driving traffic to their web properties. Of course, when the affiliate realizes that a particular promotion is profitable, they can start buying traffic to ramp up their sales and commissions. However, when they're first starting out, it's possible to simply test different promotions using free search engine traffic.

Those are the four top reasons to become an affiliate, sell other people's products online and earn commissions on those sales. Affiliate marketing is now a multi-billion dollar industry. If you're looking to start an online business from your own home, it could be perfect for you.