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An excellent and rather simple way to start a business or add income flow to your existing business is to start an affiliate business. An affiliate business offers an individual the opportunity to become an affiliate, or business sales partner. An affiliate is paid a certain amount of money for either a click through from the partnering web site; a fixed amount for a lead generated by an ad on the affiliate's web site; or a percentage of a purchase made by a visitor as a result of a click through created by the affiliate.

There are two ways to successfully create your own affiliate business.

1. Creating an Affiliate Business Promoting Other Businesses

If you have a web site with a decent amount of traffic, and you have time on your hands to search out some great affiliate programs and continue to increase your web site traffic, then you might consider starting an affiliate business promoting other merchants. While this is not a get-rich-quick scheme by any means, it can, over time, generate a fair amount of income.

Promoting your chosen affiliate business partners can be a tedious process, and can become a bit tricky at times. While banner ads are often the preferred method of promotion by an affiliate business, choose an affiliate business that also works with you to provide text links and other forms of communications, such as enewsletters and email, to promote click throughs. Other promotion options that have proven successful for many affiliates include pop ups, which can work well, but are often blocked or closed even before they've loaded, as well as pop unders, which tend to show more success simply because when an internet user discovers them, they've already loaded and can be seen in detail before they're closed. This allows the viewer a short amount of time to consider clicking on the link to get more information.

While it is certainly possible to search for each affiliate business individually, and sign up for each one individually, a streamlined way that can become very successful is to work with a company such as OffersQuest.com, an affiliate business that works with many different affiliate partners. Companies such as this offer dozens of programs covering everything from shoes to ecommerce solutions, and can offer a variety of affiliate business advertising options, including both banners and text links.

Before signing on as an affiliate business partner, however, be sure to only consider links for products and services that promote and complement your current business and web site. For example, a site dedicated to home schooling information will not do well as a casino affiliate. On the other hand, a site dedicated to marketing and advertising may actually see improved web traffic and visitor stats from an affiliate business link related to an ecommerce merchant.

Another thing to keep in mind is that many search engines, including Yahoo!, may not allow your site into their listings if your site consists mostly of affiliate links. Too many affiliate links will litter your site, making it difficult to focus on your site's content and the true nature of your site as well, so choose only a small amount of select affiliate business partners in which to work. Focus on the success of those select affiliate businesses rather than many different affiliate business links.

2. Creating an Affiliate Business Promoting Your Own Business

If you're a web merchant and have a great product or service to promote, it's safe to consider implementing your own affiliate business by promoting affiliates to join on as your sales team. The steps involved in becoming an affiliate business will take time and even money, especially with choosing and installing affiliate tracking software, but can, in the long run, become a very profitable and viable business expansion. However, the most time consuming step in owning an affiliate business where you're promoting your own products or services is recruiting affiliates into your program.

A good way to promote your affiliate business program is through increasing your own web traffic. Consider reciprocal linking strategies with sites that complement your business or the nature of your business. Links to your site from a popular site not only increases the rate of visitors from that site, but is also a factor used by many of the world's most popular search engines when calculating rankings. There are software packages that can choose links for you, but because they're expensive, if you have the time to look yourself, choose that route instead.

Once you have an affiliate business team in place, be supportive of your team so that they can generate the sales that you need and desire. Offer a variety of web banners to choose for posting on their web sites, as well as text links and other advertising options that are easily accessible for your affiliates. Respond to their communications quickly. Pay them on time. Offer suggestions to help them increase their web site traffic, their click throughs, and ultimately, their commissions. By working closely with your affiliate business sales people, you'll bring them success in working with you - and in turn, will bring in increased sales for your business.

A wise merchant knows that good sales affiliates are rare, and treats them with respect, assisting them with resources and providing prompt commission payments. A wise affiliate knows that an affiliate business merchant wants quality promotion and sales performance for a minimal cost. With these two statements in mind, the only successful merchant and affiliate partnerships are struck when both parties understand these points and work hard at working together, resulting in profits for both parties.

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