Online affiliate marketing is a business in which the marketer gets paid a commisison to sell other people's products on the Internet. As an affiliate marketer seeks to drive traffic to a merchant's website and make sales for them. There are many advantages to setting up an affiliate marketing business as opposed to a traditional off-line enterprise. Here are six of them!

1. Overheads and running costs are much lower for a start. You can run a successful affiliate marketing business from your own home with just a cheap computer and Internet access. When you compare that with the expenses involved in running a traditional business from a shop or an office, it is obvious that setting up an affiliate marketing business from home is extremely inexpensive to do. You do not have to hire employees, rent office space, pay insurance, and so on.

2. Many traditional retail businesses have to keep substantial stocks of the products that they sell. That often means they have to rent storage space, then pay an employee to unload the boxes and stock the shelves and cover other logistical costs. With an affiliate marketing business you are not required to stock any inventory because the merchant ships everything to your customers for you. That alone represents a tremendous cost savings for your business.

3. As an affiliate marketer you can easily set up multiple businesses in various different niches. Once one website is up and running and pulling in a regular income it will not require too much maintenance and you will be able to start another one. This is hard to do with the traditional business because you are generally locked into one theme for your business and the logistics required to diversify are much more complicated, making it much harder to expand.

4. Most traditional businesses are local to their marketplace. Some manage to grow to a point where they are marketing on a worldwide scale, but for the most part that is the exception rather than the rule. But as a successful affiliate marketer your customers will come from all over the world. Wherever people can plug into the Internet they will be able to purchase the products that you are offering.

5. You can make an incredible amount of money as an affiliate marketer. Today there are people who have succeeded in earning over a million dollars a year in just a short time selling products online as affiliate marketers. That kind of performance curve is very difficult to achieve with the traditional off-line business.

6. One final thing that is important to mention is that your Internet business is open 24 hours a day to make you money. Most traditional off-line businesses run from nine to five and only operate five or six days a week. As an affiliate marketer your business never closes; it is open seven days a week, all year round.

The six advantages of affiliate marketing that I have outlined here show you exactly why affiliate marketing is better than a traditional off-line business. If you are not currently affiliate marketer and want to start a new business on a shoestring, perhaps it would be worth looking into this business model.?