Because you're here, you are very likely an affiliate marketer.

I know that when I started this internet business, I had a difficult time deciding whether I should sell my own products or sell other people's products. Let me tell you – marketing for others is far easier and just as lucrative – if not more so – than creating your own products.

There are many advantages of affiliate marketing – here are some of the benefits.

• There is no need to create a product. You simply make mention of an existing product, place an affiliate link, and move to the next promotion. Remember your high school term papers? How much you procrastinated? How you abhorred them? It's the same with creating a product. Plus, people look to you as an expert, so you'd better deliver expert-quality content. No more "mailing it in."
• Speaking of mailing, there is nothing to ship. Every part of the sales transaction is handled by the product creator. You write your product review, a user clicks your link and he buys the product at the vendor's site. Everything from then on is taken care of by the vendor.
• You don't have to deal with customer support issues. The product creator handles all of this.
• There is no "inventory." Many products sold on the internet are digital in format, but even the physical products like books and CDs are shipped out of the vendor's inventory. There is no need for you to store anything at all.
• You don't have to assemble a sales force – YOU are the sales force. In order to be successful, an internet marketer who's created a product needs to develop a sales team of eager affiliates (people like you). It's not easy. For one thing, there are tons of products to sell – why should an affiliate pick yours? In order to lure potential affiliate marketers, product vendors often have to offer very high commissions (50, 75, or even 100 percent!). You reap these rewards by simply pre-selling the product for the vendor, who then takes in 50, 25, or 0 percent of the sales price.
• You don't have to create any sales pages, set up elaborate sales funnels, or configure shopping carts or other sophisticated (and complicated) sales systems.

As you can see, there are many benefits of being an affiliate marketer. Of course, you need to get eager buyers to your site to click your affiliate link. Traffic building will be the subject of a future post.