An affiliate program is something every online business must have. Setting up your own affiliate programs creates a win-win situation for everyone. It does not matter what you are selling, a software program, physical product, an e-book or online training, by choosing to setup your own affiliate program you can add significant value to your business and the affiliates working with you. 

Imagine how many more sales you could generate if you had an online sales force eagerly recommending your products and services their website visitors. By building your own network of affiliate marketers, your business will have other people on the internet carrying out an extensive advertising campaign on your behalf. The best thing about this is that you do not spend any money on all this advertising until one of your affiliate marketers makes a sale of your product or service. All you have to do is provide them with the affiliate management software, marketing materials, a good product and a bit of encouragement. Creating your own affiliate marketing program means that instead of spending money on buying advertising, you can spend all your money on the results of sales.

Still not convinced. Here's 10 more reasons why every online business needs its own affiliate program.

1. Buying of banners, website impressions and emailing is really expensive. It's also a risky proposition as you don't know whether your efforts will generate enough sales to break even or even make a profit. With an affiliate program you can recruit affiliates, get exposure and pay commission only when your affiliates make sales. No up front costs, no break even, just clean profit and performance-based payment.
2. Your affiliates will display have links or banner ads on their websites that when clicked will take visitors to your products and services. So, what this means is that your affiliates will use their web traffic for increasing their own revenues as well as for increasing your sales and giving you brand exposure.
3. Good affiliates will work at publicizing your website, increasing your page views and building a name for your website and the goods and services that you offer.
4. You cannot do it all alone. With affiliates you have others helping to promote and advertise your products and services. They do all their own promotions and marketing tasks, which means that you have more time to focus on other aspects of your business.
5. Affiliate programs are cashflow positive. You only pay your affiliates when you have made sales through their efforts. Imagine, you are getting: advertising, promotion and branding and only paying commission on visits or on actual sales.
6. With the Internet, you can make affiliates from all over the world. In this way, you rapidly expand your reach and can publicize your products and services in almost any part of the world where you could not easily have reached being had you tried to do it all alone.
7. When people, other than yourself, believe in and are willing to endorse your product by promoting it for you, it speaks volumes. Customer confidence is greatly increased when people see that people other than the source merchant are confident enough to promote a product.
8. The collective experience and professionalism of your affiliates will bring value in breadth of perspective to your business. Their knowledge and innovation will help you to implement business strategies that can be helpful in promoting your company and which you may never have thought of if you had done it alone.
9. Your marketing campaign can be community developed. Many affiliate programs create  their own advertising materials like banners, emails and text ads. But why not also allow your affiliates to create these for you. It makes sense. They are on the front line and can try ideas, dropping those that don't work and keeping those that do – there will be higher chances that affiliates will make sales for you.
10. Starting your own affiliate program, gives you an immediate possability of increasing your market share through the efforts of your affiliates.

Bottom line results are what count. Making money online is not as easy as 1, 2, 3. If it were, everyone would be doing it. But working with others who are willing to work on commission and learning together is a sure way to generate revenues for all. So do you still think you don't need an affiliate program?