By creating your own affiliate marketing network you can increase your internet presence, resulting in increased sales while paying for performance based advertising. Traditional advertising is not cheap and you pay for the ads regardless of the outcome. If you receive no sales or sales leads from your advertising, the money is wasted.

Affiliate marketing allows you to have your ads potentially placed on thousands of other sites and you do not have to pay anything for them unless they return results. Best of all, you have the option to choose which sites display your ads and the types of ads that are used. Tracking information is built into the links so you can tell how many impressions your ads are getting, how often the ads are being clicked on and how much sales are being generated by the ads.

Whether you run your own affiliate program or sign up with an affiliate market corporation to run it for you, the choice of which websites to use as affiliates is still up to you. You may want to review sites that request to affiliate with you to determine if it is the type of site with which you want your name affiliated. You can also determine the pay structure. If affiliates believe your commission structure is too low they do not have to sign up with you. Of course, if it not worth their time and effort to add your links to their page, you will have no affiliates working with you.

Another hidden advantage to using affiliate marketing is the increase in the number of links that point to your website. Many search engines use that information as part of the logarithm in determining your position in their rankings. The more quality links that point to your site, the more that score is worth. Of course, not all links back to you will be viable and if a search engine believes you are getting links just for the sake of having links, it can also hurt your position in the rankings.

Primarily you can choose to pay for visits to your site, or for visits that result in a referral or a straight commission percentage on any and all sales. You also can determine at what earning level the commission will be paid to keep from having to send out commission checks for miniscule amounts. Typically, earnings must hit at least a certain threshold of $25 for instance, before being paid.

Running your own affiliate marketing network keeps the rest of the profits at home, but having another company operate it can free your staff's time to concentrate on customer service as well as following up on referrals you may receive through the affiliate marketing program.