The main reason behind this is that you do not have to create the product, putting in the required research, the development, the testing. The affiliate's only requirement is to market the program - and in this regard, you are even usually provided with the sales material.

This is a great recipe for getting the ball rolling quickly - you can have your business up and running in no time, and money coming in fairly quickly. That said, is the the ideal, a long term strategy?

The answer is a definate no. The affiliate will have marketed the product and hopefully got the client to the sales page and made the sale. However once the sale has been made, that would be it for the contact between the affiliate and the client. A once-off sale with a once off client.

So the affiliate is left to repeat the process with another new client. This can be a costly excercise that is based soley on the conversion ratio of the product and it' sales page.

So what should the objective be then? Well as with any successful business what you should be looking for is repeat business and the way to do this with affiliate marketing is to own the client so that you can remarket to them a different product down the line.

This means you must aim to capture their details and add them to your list. You need to develop this list and grow it so that you have a waiting audience to market additional products to down the line - and get recurring business. Some marketeers refer to their list as an ATM. Any time they want some moeny they market a product to their list!

The easiset way to do this is to use an autoresponder and load up a few messages outlining the benefits of the product you are promoting

However you need to a build a substantial list and you need to offer something of value to get people to trade their details for. Not to mention the fact that you need to look after these clients so you keep for a long time.

However if you mange this, you could create a monthly recurring income stream - with multiple sales from the same client.