Increase Sales
The primary reason for most of the companies to adopt an affiliate program is the possibility of boosting sales. In fact, proper implementation of a quality affiliate program is capable of increasing sales dramatically.

Free promotion
A successful affiliate program can easily become the largest traffic generator for the company website. Many websites receive major portion of their visitors from their affiliate links. To find suitable websites with required content in order to run a banner or link campaign is time consuming and require large resources; affiliate programs in comparison can resolve this issue often with a far smaller investment.

Increase search engine ranking
Search engines, Google in particular, calculate link popularity as one of the main factors in their ranking algorithm. Backward links from affiliate sites certainly help improving this.

Branding
Thanks to its affiliate program Amazon.com banner links can be seen on numerous websites. Popularity of Amazon.com among the newcomers to Internet proves that Amazon.com was successful in creating its online brand name. No doubt, omnipresent visibility of their logo on the affiliate sites definitely had a huge impact on the brand recognition of the Amazon. Offline companies had to spend billions of dollars of advertisement money to get similar results!

How about the affiliates? What are the benefits they get from an affiliate relationship?

No product or service to carry
Online business with your own product or service might be rewarding, but it requires substantial investment from your part. With carefully chosen affiliate programs you can have your online business without the requirement of having your own products.

The investment is low as all you need is a website.

No need to have a merchant account
Since you don’t carry your own products or services you do not have to go through the hassle of having a merchant account to cater your clients. Your affiliate program owner will do everything. All you have to do is supply clients through your designated link.

Possibility of residual income
Many programs pay you a commission from the sales made to the customers generated from affiliates, who have signed up as an affiliate following your link. This kind of affiliate system is called 2-tier system.

Visitor tracking system allows affiliate programs to pay you a commission when same visitor from your website makes repeat purchase.

Some affiliate programs that promote monthly or yearly subscription services pay a commission each month as long as customer referred by you stays subscribed.

Complement you website with added products and services If your site is dedicated to certain products or services, there must be other stuffs that go well together with your own products. It’s a good idea to seek out viable affiliate products of these items and promote through your site. Your visitors will love this and this will help building loyalty among your visitors.

Have new contents for your site
Many affiliate programs supply you with valuable marketing materials. Some of these materials can be nice addition to your site content bringing further value to your website.