If you are at this webpage, you are probably asking yourself, why should I become an affiliate? Well there are some good reasons to become an affiliate. But instead of citing statistics, begin by visualizing yourself getting up in the morning and going to work at your current job. Your alarm clock goes off, and it is too early, so you roll over and hit the snooze. You get up the second time it goes off, you realize that you are already running late. You rush through a breakfast and grab a quick shower, only to run out the door, get in your car, and sit in traffic for twenty minutes. Finally you get to work, get to your desk, drop off your jacket just in time to spend the rest of day in meetings. After sitting in traffic again to come home, you realize that you have to do the same thing all over again tomorrow.

Now imagine you have a neighbor, Mark. Mark worked as an accountant for a large tax preparation firm. Although he made good money there, it was a boring job without too much room for advancement. Additionally, all of his good ideas went to improve the company, not to benefit himself. Two years ago Mark joined an affiliate program, started a website, and has been working hard on it ever since. At first his site struggled, and he wasn't making much if any of a profit. However after several months of work, he got out of the Google Sandbox, had a fair amount of traffic on his webpage, and was finally making some money. After a year and a half of work, he was making as much money from his website as his regular job. Finally, last week, after two years of work he decided to quit his job and focus solely on his online business. He still has to work, but now he can do it on his own terms. If he needs to take a day off, he can do it whenever he wants. He is spending his time working for himself, and building his own business. If he ever decides to quit affiliating and go back to work, he can sell his webpage for a tidy profit.

Mark is a great example of why people become affiliates. Although there are some people who get rich quick, and become instant successes overnight, and there are others who never do well at affiliating at all, there are many many people who make a lot of money from affiliate programs. Online advertising is one of the fastest growing advertising markets out there. Last year, online advertising grew at a faster rate than television, newspaper, and magazine advertising. Combined. Why wouldn't you want to get a piece of the action?

Being an affiliate and running a webpage is a great intellectual challenge as well. Some people may think that corporate strategy and marketing is reserved for the heads of multi-national companies. But as any webmaster can tell you, once you start a webpage you get deeply involved in how you are doing against your competitors. You take pride in increasing your visitors month over month, and in moving up in the search engine rankings. Friends and family are amazed that you are making money from your very own webpage, and that you are making a lot more money at it this year than last year or the year before.

Additionally, becoming an affiliate isn't hard to do. Case in point is my own grandparents. Several years ago my Aunts and Uncles got them a computer for Christmas and hooked them up to the internet. Now my Grandparents aren't slow by any means, but like many old people they don't have very much exposure to technology. Two years ago when I was over at their house for Thanksgiving dinner, I logged onto the computer to show my relatives a Poker Website which I was currently running, and making a tidy profit off of. My Grandpa was taken aback that one person could handle a website. He thought that was a job for webmasters with teams of IT professionals. I told them that it was actually quite simple, and that anyone could do it, and would he like me to show him? After a week of tutoring from myself he had enough of an understanding of how to work the necessary software to begin. Now he wasn't interested in making himself an extremely fancy, web 2.0 cutting edge website. All he was interested in was making himself a hobby page where he could display his woodworking, and post about woodworking techniques.

That was two years ago, and his site is still up and doing well. On my advice he threw on some Adsense advertising onto the webpage and he says it is now making him almost a thousand dollars a month, all from a few weekly articles and some posts in his forum. Something that he would be doing for free anyway! He also told me that his friends at the VFW laughed at him when he said he was going to create a webpage, but after he got it running they were some of his most frequent visitors.

The Bottom line, why should you become an affiliate? You can make a lot of money, you can spend your time building your own business, if you become successful you can give up the hassles of everyday work. Additionally, being an affiliate is a great competition. Become successful, and your peers will know who you are and try to emulate you. How much can you make? Can you crush the competition? The only way to find out is to become an affiliate and see for yourself.