There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own homebased Internet business. Let’s look at 15 of the best reasons to join affiliate programs.

No Production Costs: The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren't an issue. The product has been developed and proven - all on the merchant's nickel.

Low Cost Set-up: Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need to start making easy money from affiliate programs.

No Fees or Licenses: I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate's ability to promote his website.

Sell Almost Anything: What isn't sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

No Sales Experience Required: When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

No Employees: Employee salaries are the biggest business expense. Although you may need or want someone to work for you on occasion, you'll never have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees while working as an affiliate marketer.

When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee related benefits and deductions.

No Merchant Accounts: Setting up a merchant account is time-consuming and costly. However, affiliate marketers don’t need merchant account. Merchants bear all the costs for payment processing. As an affiliate, you’ll never lose sleep over chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account.

No Inventory: As an affiliate marketer, you can sell large items without storage concerns, even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment.

No Order-Processing: Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!

No Shipping: The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.

No Customer Service: Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don't worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.

Make Money While You Sleep: What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?

Worldwide Marketplace: The Internet is the world's largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than a small-town merchant will see in his or her brick and mortar business in a year.

Minimal Risk: The product you chose isn't making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It's that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don't sell.

High Income Potential: If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there's not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.

No other business is so inexpensive to start yet offers such high profit potential without investing years of labor.

Affiliate programs enable you to work from Almost Anywhere in the World!

Best Wishes.