Once you have established your Web site, completed search engine optimization, and begun to manage your e-commerce site, implementing an affiliate program may be the right option to extend your online presence beyond your Web site. Nothing could be easier these days than setting up a Web site for your online or brick-and-mortar business.

Affiliate programs have been around for a long time due to the success that they have achieved for thriving online businesses. Another name for an affiliate program is an "associate program."

The concept is fairly simple. You have your Web site with your products for sale on it. You allow businesses to become "affiliates" of yours, and they can then promote your products on their Web sites. When a site visitor attempts to buy one of the products, they click on the link and are actually taken back to your Web site to complete the transaction. By using an affiliate program, this "click-through" is tracked, and the affiliate is given "credit" for the sale. Typically, affiliates earn 8 to 15 percent of the total sale?for doing nothing more than allowing the merchant's products to be sold on their Web site. One of the largest affiliate programs that is in place on the Internet is with Amazon.com, which has over 600,000 affiliate Web sites in place at this time. Since selling products as an affiliate of Amazon costs nothing and you can earn a monthly income, there are few reasons not to become an affiliate. Obviously, if you want to expand your online business, your goal is to have others become affiliates of your Web site.

In most cases, the arrangement between affiliate Web sites is based on the total number of Web visitors that they send to your site, the number and total dollar value of sales that you get from the people sent to your site, or the number of clicks you get back to your site. When you use affiliates to send Web visitors to your site, you're taking advantage of a marketing technique that is extremely effective, while at the same time very affordable for even the smallest business Web sites.

When an affiliate program agreement is put into place, there are three separate entities that are involved with each of the actions that take place: 1) the Web site of the affiliate, 2) your business Web site, and 3) the Web visitor, or customer, who you are trying to attract to your Web site. Oftentimes, there is a middle-tier layer, which is an affiliate tracking application or server that actually records the "click-through" transaction.

Whether you're an established corporation or an emerging startup, it's a well-known fact that your online presence can make or break your business.