For those of you who just don't have any idea how people make money on the Internet, this is for you. One way to make money is called affiliate marketing. What that means is that you have a web site and on that web site you put advertisements for products. If someone clicks on one of the advertisements and buys a product, you get a small commission. There are other ways, of course, but we are sticking to the very basics.

I know many of you have seen the guy on television who is explaining in such a calm manner how he makes a fortune on the Internet and luckily he is willing to help all of us do the same; for a price of course. Truthfully I haven't purchased his book, but in my untiring effort to bring you the best information available, I jumped right in to the Internet money making world. And yes, I'm happy to report that I've made money. How much is for another article.

You may already have a web site with pictures of your Mom and Dad and a story about your pet on it. If you want to make money you have to start by putting something on your web site that the general public might want to see. As you begin, please do not spend a lot of money on web site design. There are free, and very low cost, services that will provide a decent site. Certainly if you find that this is your calling, then you will want to invest the substantial amount of money often needed to design your special web site.

So let's assume you have a web site and want to put some advertisers on your site. Well known companies such as Amazon offer an affiliate program, as do many others. An Internet search on affiliate marketing companies will allow you to connect with them. Their web sites will instruct you on how to place ads on your site.

My best advice on web site content is to find something you are particularly interested in and design your site around that. It could be a particular type of pet, or your knowledge of sailing, or sewing, or gardening. In short it can be anything, but you need to bring something a little different to the site.

Now you are all ready to make money, right? Wrong. Having a web site, even a very good one, doesn't mean that anyone will find your site amongst the millions of others. So, what to do? To find the answer to this question you can spend a fortune. There are many out there dying to tell you how to turn your web site into the proverbial money maker, for a fee.

What you absolutely have to know are the following three terms: SEO, article marketing and back links. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means that by using the best key words for your site, you have a better chance of actually showing up on the major search engines. For example; if I do an RV campground review my key words would include the name of the RV campground. There are thousands of articles on how to improve your SEO. Good luck.

Article marketing is one way to attract visitors to your web site, this struck me as being the perfect way for my Internet career to move forward. In the first place I have already written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines. So I have a ready supply if they are relevant to anything. I also have experience writing and that is a plus.

Article marketing works in this manner. You write an article, hopefully related to your web site, and submit it to one of the many, many, article directories. If accepted, your article will be placed on their web site with information about you and normally a link back to your web site. People who read the article can click to your site if they wish. Obviously if you can get people to click to your site there is a chance, albeit not a big chance, they will buy something.

Every time you place an article you should get what is known as a back link, or a link from their web site to yours. The more back links you get, the more seriously the search engines seem to take your site. This, again, is a way to improve your odds of being found on the Internet.

For one month I have been learning and working on affiliate marketing. To give you some idea; on one of the best article directories I have 23 articles published. My articles have been viewed about 1,700 times; 13 have been republished once or more; my profile has been reviewed 66 times and 40 times people have clicked through to my site. You will find my click through rate to be on the low side. I'm still working on that.

So far I have invested a great deal of time and very little money. It is my plan to give this process about six months to see whether enough income can be generated to make it worthwhile. My web site unfortunately combines several of my interests and this is likely a problem. If starting over I would make each web site more of a single theme.

One final piece of information you must understand; this is real work and will require real time and effort on your part.

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