As an affiliate marketer your job is to drive targeted traffic to a merchant's website and make sales for them, which results in commission for you. Getting paid to sell other people's products is known as affiliate marketing. There are many advantages to running an online affiliate marketing business compared to a traditional off-line business.

There are numerous advantages of running an online affiliate marketing business compared to a traditional off-line business, so to help you decide if the business is for you, let's have a look at 6 advantages

1. Overheads and running costs are very much lower. To start and run a successful online affiliate marketing business from your own home you will only need a computer and Internet access. You just need to compare that with the expenses involved in running a traditional business from a shop or an office and it is very clear that setting up an affiliate marketing business from home is extremely inexpensive to do. The other great advantage is you will not have expenses such as renting office space, paying insurance, hiring employees, etc.

2. Traditional retail businesses are usually required to keep substantial stocks of the products that they sell. This means that they have to rent storage space then pay an employee to unload the boxes and stock the shelves and cover other logistical costs. You are not required to stock any inventory at all, which represents a huge cost saving for an online affiliate marketing business as the merchant ships everything to your customers for you.

3. You can easily set up multiple businesses in various different niches as an affiliate marketer. You will be able to start another one once one website is up and running and bringing in a consistant income as it will not require too much maintenance. Having a a traditional business makes it much more difficult to expand because you are generally locked into one theme for your business and the logistics required to diversify are much more complicated.

4. A few traditional businesses manage to grow to a point where they are marketing on a worldwide scale, however most traditional businesses are local to their marketplace. As a successful online affiliate marketer you will attract customers from all over the world. Wherever people can plug into the Internet they will be able to purchase the products that you are offering, thus making online affiliate marketing a truly global business.

5. As an affiliate marketer you can make an incredible amount of money. Many internet millionaires have been made in a short period of time by affiliate marketers simply selling other people's products online. That kind of performance curve is very difficult to achieve with a traditional off-line business.

6. The fact that your online business is open 24 hours a day to make you money is a very important factor. Most traditional off-line businesses only operate five or six days a week and run from nine to five. As an affiliate marketer your business is open seven days a week, all year round, it never closes.

These six advantages of running an online affiliate marketing business that have been discussed here show you why affiliate marketing is better than a traditional off-line business. If you are not currently an online affiliate marketer and want to start a new business on a shoestring budget, then perhaps this business model would be worth looking into.