Where to start making money online?

Affiliate marketing

We'll start with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is basically an arrangement where a seller of a product or service pays commissions to affiliates in exchange for the affiliate referring sales or leads.

Pretty simple, right? That's not a trick question, it really is that simple.

Let me give you an example. If I was selling an ebook for $50, I might have an affiliate program in which I pay YOU (my affiliate) $25 commission for every sale you refer.

As an affiliate, you might place a link to the ebook on your website, or review the ebook in a newsletter, place a classified ad, or send traffic by a variety of different methods. Each time one of your referred visitors buys the ebook, I pay you a $25 commission. That's affiliate marketing.

There are also "affiliate program providers" which act as middlemen between the sellers and the affiliates. Some popular ones are ClickBank and Commission Junction, both of which we'll be talking about later.

affiliate program providers
Two of the MANY affiliate program providers that are compatible with my system.
Click bank Commision Junction

You can sign up with these companies as an affiliate marketer (also called a publisher), and take your pick of products to promote from a selection of thousands of products and services from thousands of sellers.

Being an affiliate marketer is an attractive opportunity because you can make a ton of money without keeping any inventory, dealing with customers, etc.

Remember, this is a hype-free page with no income claims, so I'm not going to tell you how much I make from affiliate marketing or force you to look at a bunch of screen shots of my earnings statements... so just trust me when I tell you that I make a lot of money from it, OK? Keep following the blog posts and soon youll see many links and information coming related to affiliate programs and products.

Pay-per-click advertising




Next let's take a brief look at pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it's a form of online advertising in which an advertiser pays for each click on a particular advertisement.

The most popular PPC providers include Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Whether you're aware of PPC advertising or not, I guarantee that you've seen the ads before...

If you do a search on Google, Yahoo, or most other search engines, the listings that appear on the right side (and often the top) of the page are the PPC ads. If you click on one of those ads, the advertiser is charged for that click.

The great thing about PPC is that it allows virtually anyone with a website to start getting targeted traffic almost immediately.

It also opened up a huge door for affiliate marketers such as myself to easily and instantly promote products and services.

If you've been told you shouldn't pay for web traffic, then you haven't been given the full story. Yes there are ways of getting free traffic (SEO, free ads, etc), but most serious marketers know that targeted traffic is one of the most important investments for your business.

It's simply a numbers game. Suppose you use PPC to send traffic to a particular offer that pays $20 commission per sale. Let's say you send 100 visitors for 10 cents per click. That's an expense of $10, right? Now suppose just one of those 100 visitors buys the product and you make $20 commission...

That's a net profit of $10, which means you doubled your money. If you had the power to turn a $10 bill into a $20 bill, how many times would you do it?

Of course you would do it as many times as you could. Some people call it "click flipping".

I can't promise any particular rate of return on investment, but I am certain that it works. I know it works because my PPC ads are increasing my income right now as you read this.
It's great because you don't have to do a lot of work or invest a large amount of money to start doing it. You just have to do a little work up front to set up each campaign, and then you can reap the benefits of it for weeks, months, and sometimes years...more to come..