If you have been online for any time at all then you will have heard about affiliate programs. Affiliate programs reward their members for driving traffic to the advertiser or for other transactions, like performing a particular action on their website, for instance adding their name and email address.

The advertiser pays the affiliate to place a link on their website, and the affiliate sends traffic to the advertiser in return. Simply put, it's about paying commissions to people who help you make sales. It's as simple as that!

Of course the difficult part comes from trying to promote affiliate products. If you do have your own website then you can simply plugin some affiliate products and start earning immediately. The scope of this article is to list the benefits of affiliate marketing as opposed to selling your own product.

Here are the following reasons on why web marketers are enthralled with affiliate marketing as an online money-making venture.

1. Little to No Cost

Many are scared to go on a home based business because of the capital required. In affiliate marketing, you don't have to spend much to start raking in cash. In fact the costs to get set up are very little. Compare the costs to setting up an offline business and the costs are practically zero.

2. No Inventories Required

Product management fuss can be extremely stressful. With affiliate products or services you do not need to keep an inventory. The merchant does is responsible for this.

3. Unlimited Income

There is no limit to the amount of income you can earn. Compare that to an offline job where you are given a set salary.

4. Go worldwide

With affiliate marketing, you are dealing with a global market place. All you have to do is choose a niche product and prepare all the necessary tools for your affiliates to lead traffic from just about anywhere to your website.

5. Low risk

The very main reason for Internet marketer's enthusiasm with affiliate marketing is its having a low risk factor. Especially for those with low budget set aside for advertising, affiliate marketing is just the way to do it.

6. No closing time

With affiliate marketing, your business works every single second of the day while targeting a worldwide market! What could be better than that?

There is an even easier way to target products to your site than signing up for individual affiliate programs. This is done through joining affiliate networks. Through these you can add multiple offers to your site through the same simple online control panel.

Affiliate programs are a fantastic, stress free way to get started making money online. They are not get rich schemes though and do actually take some work if you don't have an already established site. If you do have a site with traffc then that is a bonus.