Using the Internet is not difficult, but it does require some familiarity with the technology and some understanding of how to put it to use. Basically, e-mail, newsgroups, and web-pages are the three essential Internet components you will want to understand.

E-mail: E-mail capability is available through a wide variety of online services. Once you are signed up, you can send and receive messages to millions of people all over the world almost instantly. What's more, you can do so at a tiny fraction of what you would pay for regular overnight mail. Putting your e-mail address on your business cards, letterheads and other printed materials, will provide your customers with a quick and easy way of getting in touch with you.

Newsgroups: The Internet abounds with electronic message boards in which people with a shared interest can offer or request information. There are literally thousands of these newsgroups, and they cover every subject under the sun. Once you have signed up with an Internet service provider, you can use the search engines to obtain the Internet address of newsgroups that suit your interests. You must learn to write your postings in such a way that they do not come across as a commercial sales pitch, which can be tastefully done. There is also the possibility of putting your business information in your signature that is attached to your posting. You can also contact newsgroup contributors individually by e-mail.

Web Pages: From a money making point of view, this is the most exciting aspect of the new information technologies. The World Wide Web is an area of the Internet consisting of electronic "home pages" on an unlimited number of topics. Huge multinational corporations have home pages. So do universities, artists, small businesses, and hundreds of thousands or rather millions of individuals. Home pages may be designed purely for information or entertainment, or they may be of a more commercial nature.

What we need to do now is rent some web space on the Internet using a hosting account, then we are ready to create our web-page. The cost of renting space on the Internet for a home page is fairly low. Depending on your intentions you will want a decent hosting company that allows you enough rented space for multiple web pages. If you are marketing single items or services you may just want to put up what is called a "sales page."

A very common way of earning an income on the Internet is to get involved with Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is simply where you are trying to sell a product that someone else has created or is offering to the Internet public. However these marketers must have an affiliate program in place. The most popular site to visit that offers thousands of affiliate programs is Clickbank.com. You can literally find any topic your interested in marketing at Clickbank.

Once you choose an affiliate program to promote you can go about it in a couple of methods. First, hopefully you chose an area you already have an interest in so that you can market the product using some of the knowledge you already have. This is where the web-page comes into play. You can construct a simple one page website or sales page that clearly explains the product that you are marketing. You will need to purchase a domain name for your sales page and this can be done for as little as $8 to $10. Ok, we are ready to build our sales page now that we have our web-space or hosting account and domain name.

Your sales page will sell the product or service to the customer. The bottom of your very persuasive sales page you have your "Buy Now" button which is linked to the website of the person who actually created the product. Clickbank recognizes your account through the hyperlink you create out of your "Buy Now" button, and pays you accordingly. Clickbank regulates all transactions and payments to affiliates-that is you-and they see that your account is credited for the sale.

As an affiliate you can sell this product in other ways as well. Going back to the e-mail and newsgroups, these are both areas where you can possibly market the product you are an affiliate for. If by chance you have an e-mail list that you can market to, you would simply send out an enticing e-mail. This e-mail would recommend the product to those on your list. In your e-mail you would include your affiliate link a few times hoping your potential customers "Click" on your link. With the newsgroups you, most likely can add your affiliate link to your signature that goes along with any postings that you make.

Now you can use your expertise in a particular subject and share that through article publishing. You would write an informative and helpful article that people would be interested in reading. There are hundreds of article directories and online magazines that are looking for quality articles to publish on their site. I am not saying that you can go on there and just blatantly write an article that is nothing more then a sales letter. You need to write an article that has substance, something that shares your knowledge on a particular topic. When you supply people with excellent information they will see you as an expert in that field, leading to a click on the link in your resourse box.

The resource box is your "give" from the publisher. You must write a good enough article that will help enough people with a particular problem. The other option is you offer them some excellent information on a topic they are interested in, then you have a good chance of getting your article published. The resource box is an area that comes at the end of your article. Here you may give a little information about yourself, and you may put in your affiliate link. This will send the reader to the sales page of a product that hopefully is directly related to the topic you just wrote about. It really makes no sense writing about something totally different then the product that you are trying to sell. You should only chose affiliate programs, selling a product that you have plenty of knowledge about.

There you have it, affiliate marketing in a nutshell. There is more that I could have gone into but I could literally write a few pages explaining every detail there is to know about affiliate marketing. If your interested in a great online opportunity, this was just a basic introduction to a business almost anyone could involve themselves in. Everyone has some special knowledge about something that they could share with others, and that is what affiliate marketing is all about.