If you're a business owner with a fabulous product or service, creating a top affiliate program may be something to consider in order to help your business grow.

A top affiliate program is undoubtedly a proven way to increase your business' sales and profits through your web site. The reasons for the success behind a top affiliate program are quite simple.

1. A top affiliate program is an automated advertising campaign.

While you'll need to purchase affiliate tracking software or write your own software for an affiliate program, a top affiliate program is an automated ad campaign that will promote your product or service continuously - 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Affiliate registrations and sales reports are processed automatically, as are visitors and sales. Your only job is to recruit affiliates, train them, and pay them at the end of the month for all sales generated.

2. There is no expense to pay with a top affiliate program.

After installing affiliate tracking software, there is actually no expense involved in maintaining a top affiliate program. You don't pay your affiliates until they make money for you. This is obviously the best benefit of having a top affiliate program. Your affiliate tracking software can be used to get hundreds, or even thousands, of affiliates to promote your product or service for free and dramatically increase your business' sales.

3. A top affiliate program offers fringe benefits for future purchases.

Even if visitors on your web site from affiliate links don't generate a purchase, you can still reap the rewards of a top affiliate program in other ways. For example, by offering a free enewsletter or ezine subscription, you'll generate names to work with for future purchases, and chances are good that those people will also bookmark your web site for future reference. Since you're only paying your affiliates for actual purchases, these leads are generated to you at no charge.

4. With a top affiliate program in place, you will never buy advertising space that may not work.

When you have a top affiliate program, you let your affiliates test the waters for you. You write text ads and provide banners for them to place in various locations on the internet, including their own web sites, and you use your software to measure the results. If your ads don't work, you're not out any money, which would be the case if you were purchasing advertising space. With this in mind, you can test the waters, so to speak, with your different ad types in order to determine what works best, and you can do this without fear of losing ad dollars.

5. A top affiliate program is a viral marketing strategy.

Viral marketing is a powerful tool in generating sales. Implement a two-tiered program, where you offer to pay affiliates for other affiliates that sign up under them. This encourages your "automatic sales reps" to recruit more affiliates to work for your business, bringing your business unlimited growth potential.

6. Enjoy better search engine placement with a top affiliate program.

Another one of the rewards of a top affiliate program is obtaining better search engine placement with the major search engines. Link popularity plays an absolutely huge role in the ranking of your site on most every search engine. The more sites that point to your domain, the higher your position with the search engines. By having hundreds of sites linking to yours through a top affiliate program, you'll be bringing more and more traffic to your site, thus increasing your search engine ranking.

What may be the most difficult part of creating a top affiliate program is recruiting affiliates to represent your business. To make the recruiting process easier, consider a two-tiered program, as mentioned, which will allow affiliates to earn a commission when they refer another affiliate. This encourages webmasters to find other people to join your top affiliate program so your affiliate base quickly multiplies and continues to grow.

To summarize, the beauty behind a top affiliate program is that it allows you to build a tremendously large sales team. The members of your top affiliate program sales team all have their own web sites, visitors, and opt-in lists. This team of sales reps, or affiliates, use their visitors and opt-in lists to advertise your product. You don't pay them a penny until they bring in a sale or a lead, according to your affiliate agreement. Other than your time, the only cost involved in a top affiliate program is to purchase tracking software, which can be very low in cost. Basically, you can't lose by choosing to develop a top affiliate program.