Authored by Ted Goodman in Internet Marketing 
Published on 11-17-2008

You are contemplating whether or not you should take a chance on affiliate marketing for the advertising aspect of your business expansion. You have heard of the idea before, but yet, seemingly, your current advertising efforts are working for you already. So the question on your mind now is, should you employ and outsource your advertising efforts for your business?

Here are some reasons why you might find it more amenable to saying yes to that question:

Affiliate marketing requires less money on your part. This is so when you contrast the possible expenses compared to expanding your marketing and advertising team, or even outsource your advertising to professional marketing groups. Affiliate marketing pays when revenues have already been collected, so in the sense you are sharing revenues. If you employ somebody else, then you have to pay the employee or the outsourced persons on a time basis, meaning, whether they deliver maximum results or not, you would have to pay them for their efforts. Business-wise, that is unhealthy. So it would be best that you adopt the affiliate marketing model in order to expand the advertising of your business.

Affiliate marketing allows you to save time and effort. What happens is that someone continuously innovates and works on your behalf. Of course this must proceed with your supervision, or else you might find yourself at a losing end. But once you have established trust on your partners, and you could confidently say that they will not put your business reputation in a bad light, then you could comfortably sit down and watch as money flows into your business. You could even use the time and effort saved to improve your products and/or services and make your business much better.

Affiliate marketing allows you to gain control. Most start-up businesses make the heads of their organizations micro manage. This is because these heads have to make sure that every activity within the organization is in line with the flow and direction that have been executively set. However, not all organizations grow in this manner, precisely because it exhausts the possibilities for shared growth and contribution of ideas in the organization. A key to organizational expansion is trust – of the head to its members, most importantly. Affiliate marketing allows you to have this control of your organization, while setting the precedence that you could trust those people who could produce desirable contributions to the company. Even if you do not necessarily place the advertisers within your company’s organizational structure, you could make the most of the opportunity that teams within the company could have their own styles with working and meeting the goals that you have set.

Affiliate marketing is a far step forward from the traditional marketing methods and their implications to the company’s financial and human resources. It is just another calculated risk that you must make, and by calculated, it means a rational, well-grounded option based on the capabilities of your company. If you are able to make the most out of the situation, you would find that you have made the right choice.