Throughout the coming weeks, I am going to thoroughly cover the intricacies of making money online through affiliate programs. Consider this as an online course that is aimed for your benefit. A good affiliate program, after all, with the generous commission scheme and the liberty it provides, is one of the best, if not the best, home business opportunities in the World Wide Web.

An affiliate program as a home business opportunity is an arrangement between an affiliate merchant and an affiliate, you. Once you have enrolled in an affiliate program, you will be tasked to pre-sell the products of an affiliate merchant. You will be able to do this by marketing the said products and finding potential customers.

Consider the benefits that an affiliate program can do for you and see for yourself why this is a profitably viable home business opportunity:

* The commission you will receive per successful sale is very high. We're talking in the range of 10 to 95%. This opportunity would definitely pay better than most sales jobs in real life.

* You don't have to sell the affiliate merchant's products. You don't have to worry about writing sales copies and processing payments. You don't have to concern yourself about deliveries and possible refunds. All you have to do is to pre-sell the affiliate merchant's products and hope that the person you have reached would eventually buy from your affiliate link.

Pre-selling doesn't require that much work, as more often than not, everything is provided for you by the product or service owner. You just have to make sure that the prospective client would get to know about the affiliate merchant's offer by referring him through your affiliate link, and that's it, basically speaking. Of course, there's more you could do to assure maximum success in this area, but we will discuss those in succeeding lessons.

* Affiliate marketing is, generally, a passive income stream, meaning, it's a home business opportunity that could make you earn even while you're offline. This is made possible because the affiliate program is mostly automated. Once a system is set into motion, you could sit back, relax, and wait for your commissions to come to you.

* There are so many strategies you could use for this type of home business. If one wouldn't give you the results you have expected, you could try a thousand more approached differently that could pave the way to your success. Of course you could try a lot of techniques simultaneously for enhanced results.

* You could join as many affiliate programs as you'd like to increase the number of your income streams. This would ensure that you could expect earnings from numerous sources. If one underperforms, there would always be others to count on. This can be a venture with a lot of heads that could generate so much profit!

Clearly, there are many fantastic advantages in capitalizing on affiliate programs! Most affiliate programs require no fees to join, so it would be wise to take advantage of this.

In the next six weeks, we're going to immerse ourselves in every nook and cranny of affiliate marketing. By the end of the course, you will know everything there is to know about the wonderful affiliate opportunities!