What is an Affiliate Program? An affiliate program is way of allowing others to sell or promote your products and services for commission.

Benefits

1. Because your banners and links are placed on other sites this makes you more visible with not much effort. 2. You have other people marketing your product and services, it's not all down to you. 3. Your sales will increase dramatically. 4. You will certainly appear "bigger" than what you are and your credibility will be higher.

Gone are days when only "big" sites could set up and run affiliate programs. Today its easy and there are a couple of ways of doing this. You could get someone to install required scripts on your own server and run it yourself. This is way I like to do it as you have full control but in order to do this you need to be able to accept credit cards on-line via your own merchant account.

It's not that expensive or complicated, sometimes it's a matter of who you know. My hosting company actually provided and installed script on my latest site absolutely free and offer an excellent service. Take a look at http://www.rambit.com to find out more about this option. You need to decide what your objectives of your affiliate program are before you decide which route to go down. You can either have your whole site replicated or you can have a script installed that will simply track your affiliate sales. You will need to look at various options depending on what you hope to achieve.

Ask yourself following questions before you begin.

The easiest and cheapest way to build your sales force is to give customers a chance to promote your products and services. Satisfied customers not only know all about what you sell, but because they have tried your product themselves, they have more credibility with prospects. A prospect believes when a past customers says "Yes, I used it and it works great." No ad or commercial can speak as powerfully.

Create A Simple Referral Program Many customers will be delighted to tell friends about your product or service. You only have to ask. Say "I'm glad you got great results from our service. Please spread word. I would really appreciate it if you told a few people you know who could also benefit from our service."

You can offer a discount to new customers referred by existing customers. One store has a sign in waiting area "Tell a friend and you both save 10% on your next purchase. Ask for details."

Start Your Own Affiliate Program Back when Amazon.com was first staring out, founder Jeff Bezos was at a party. A woman who had just gone through a divorce told Bezos she wished she could sell Amazon's books about divorce from her web site.

The wheels started turning inside Bezos' head. Back at office he worked with his programming staff to create software to track sales that came from other people's web sites.