The success of http://Amazon.com is unprecedented in its time thanks to the company's innovative way of bringing customers to its online store. They were the first to introduce the affiliate program in 1996 in which they pay a portion of their profit to website owners or advertisers who bring buyers to their site. You can pattern the success of http://Amazon.com by starting your own affiliate program.

You can employ the diligence of other website owners or bloggers by giving them incentive to introduce your website to their readers and visitors. You can even form joint ventures with other online sellers whose products or service is complementary to what you're offering. You can tap their customer base by giving them incentive to endorse your product or service on their website or through their advertising campaign also. You can either pay a flat rate per sale they make or per incoming traffic from their site; although the latter is not a very good option in terms of capping your advertising cost.

If you have a good product or service, you can level the playing field with your more successful competitors by crafting a clever affiliate program strategy. Ride the success of other webmasters or bloggers and tap their visitors to introduce your online business. The best part is setting up your affiliate program.

A secondary but not negligible advantage of a affiliate program is search engine optimization. Search engines love to rank website with lots of links pointing to it. You not only get direct traffic and customers from your affiliate program, you also jack up your search engine ranking through it.

Setting up your own affiliate program takes time and a small investment, though. If you know how, you can create your own banners or graphics which your advertisers can choose from to place on their webpage. However, you may need to use the service of a affiliate program setter for other things you need like a system to track your affiliates and give them support especially if you give tiered commissions.

With some effort, you could have thousands of affiliates promoting your product or service for you.

A good example of a website that specializes on setting up affiliate programs is http://affiliateshop.com. They charge a set up fee of $395 and a flat monthly fee of $45 as of the date this article was written for unlimited monthly service like affiliate activity tracking and support service and HTML and banner affiliate link creation. They offer a good value for your money.

If you want to choose from a variety of affiliate set up packages to increase your online business, you might want to check out http://affiliatezone.com. However, they ask for a one-time set up fee of $149 and a $34 monthly fee as of the date this article was written.

There is no question as of the effectiveness of a cleverly crafted affiliate program to promote your online business. The investment you need to make in order to get your affiliate program off the ground is surely worth it.