Indeed, this is a business that has no match in terms of what it can deliver for you and what it demands from you, because you can go off to a very solid start with less than $200 and a time dedication well below what a regular business or day job will require.

Now, what do you need in order to really make money by internet marketing?

The internet marketing business model require the confluence of three basic ingredients:

1.- A product or service that a great number of people might need or want.

2.- A place to display or promote that product, which involves any form of landing page (a blog, a squidoo lens, a website, or even a simple forwarded domain).

3.- A source of targeted traffic or visitors (that is, people you know are or might be looking for the product or service you are promoting).

The first thing you might ask is, how do I find that very product everybody wants?

Simple, if you go to any CPA or affiliate network, you will usually find information such as gravity (this is a measure of a product popularity used by a network called Clickbank) or EPC (Earnings per 100 clicks, this is used by other networks such as Commission Junction).

If you find a product or service with a high gravity or with a high EPC, you can safely assume that if that product or service is there it is because a lot of people want it or need it.

Once you know this you have a good level of certainty that if you connect targeted visitors to this product or service you will likely get them to buy it and you will make a profit out of it.

However, in order to do this you must have some form of landing page of your own, which can be the website of the merchant whose product you are promoting, or a pre-sell landing page of your own where you may bring some insight on the product or service to help the prospect make an informed decision.

This stage of the process is crucial, because assuming that the prospects are targeted (meaning that they have arrived to your landing page looking precisely for what you have on display) you still need to help them make a decision, and for that you do not need to be a salesman, in fact, I would think it is better if you are not at all.

Indeed, most of us surf the web in search of products or services, and when we do what we are really looking for is for information to let us know that we are making a good decision. If you provide this information it is likely that a good number of people, already with their sight set on the kind of product or service you are promoting, will feel they have no further research to do and go for it thus making you a commission.

Sometimes the landing page provided by the merchant will do the job, in which case you might do well using a simple redirect, but if that is not the case, you must create additional value by setting up a place (blog, lens, website etc.) where your visitor can access the information they need to make sure they are on the right path.

So as you can see, it is not about tricking your visitors into spending money, it is about creating a win-win situation where in order for you to be the winner, your visitors must first become the winners themselves. They probably will not know if they are making you a winner, and in fact it does not matter to them, just as long as you are making them winners through the information and value you have provided.

Selling e-books is big business though. It doesn’t really matter whether the books you buy actually give you stuff that is useful … because by the time you work this out you’ll have paid your money out anyway. Many e-books on web marketing for example, will simply regurgitate the basics over and over again and very few of them will give you anything more useful than that.

The fact is that e-books can make their ‘owners’ a lot of cash. Unfortunately a successful e-book isn’t always measured by how really useful it is to the person who downloads it … success is often measured by how many copies it sells. So, although the e-book itself may not be as great as you or I would like, you can bet that the sales stuff that sells it will be good!

The problem here is experience, or lack of. You don’t really need any to write a best-selling e-book. And it doesn’t matter if your book is on making money online, DIY brain surgery or how to raise chickens. The person who writes and markets the books may have the skills to sell the e-books but they won’t necessarily have any experience in the subject matter … of making money online, operating on people’s brains or…..you guessed it….. keeping chickens!

Acquiring the necessary information to include in an e-book is reasonably straightforward … there is tons of free information on the net, and you can outsource the entire writing job. Also you can actually buy hundreds of ready-to-sell e-books and brand them under your name!

This makes it really, really hard for the prospective purchaser to choose the right e-books to download. Sure, you want more than just basic information that you probably already know … but how can you get it? Every single e-book seems to tell you that it has this secret never-before-revealed information … but only a few actually will. So, unfortunately you’ll sometimes waste your cash learning nothing new and you’ll be no closer to making any money from your online efforts.

But, don’t think that all the help that you can get on affiliate marketing and other programs is useless. There is a lot of really good stuff out there … but you simply have to work out where it is and why it’s good, BEFORE you spend your money. Look for affiliate marketing e-books that show stats on the results that have actually been achieved … and that don’t try to blind you with Internet ‘guru’ hype.