Earn Money from Other People's Hard Work

If you're making money on the Internet does it really matter what you're selling?

That depends.

It might if you're selling something you'd be ashamed to tell your parents about. But if that's the case my advice is simple: Maybe what the parents don't know won't hurt them!

But seriously, if you're looking for ways to make money on the Internet, check out the world of affiliate marketing. That's a system in which online merchants pay other web site owners (their affiliates) for driving traffic from affiliate sites to the merchant's site.

Affiliate marketing can provide you with an excellent source of income while saving you the hard work of researching an idea, investing in development, and testing marketing reactions.  All you do is find effective products or services and promote them to an audience who wants to buy them.  Sounds pretty simple and it is.

How good's the pay?

That depends on different variables, but plenty of affiliate marketers generate enough commission to work the affiliate marketing model full time. 

Who pays me?

Merchants pay affiliates and easily track their affiliates' efforts using unique URLs tied to each affiliate.

How do I get paid?

As would happen if you were a commissioned sales rep, you might get paid a certain amount every time a visitor sent from your affiliate site to the merchant's site makes a purchase. But it's better because affiliate marketers don't make sales pitches or hammer prospects unmercifully until they succumb to the pressure. That's called Pay per Sale (PPS) affiliate marketing.

Another way to get paid is by generating "clicks" to the merchant's web site. Commission rates for Pay per Click (PPC) programs vary widely so it's definitely worth it to know the products or services you're promoting and amount of commission each pays before getting too deeply involved in a PPC program.

Some affiliate programs will even pay you for generating leads. With Pay per Lead (PPL) programs all you've got to do is get the people visiting your site to register over at the merchant site and guess what? Cha-ching!

With affiliate marketing, all you do is put advertisements on your site and wait for the people visiting your site to take some action that benefits the merchant you're affiliated with.

It's a win-win situation for sure. The merchant gets free advertising all over the Internet and either makes sales or grows his prospect list. And you the affiliate marketer get paid - electronically - which means your commission checks don't bounce!