Finding the best way to make money online is no different so let's take a closer look at the three of the top proven methods to understand what is involved.

1. Advertising - This refers to getting paid by either selling space on your high traffic blog or website to paying advertisers, or using a service like Google Adsense that automatically places adverts on your site that relate to the content and getting paid for each click the adsense ad generates. This is probably one of the most straightforward and low cost ways of starting out making money online. You can either use a free blog from wordpress or else buy your own domain name and hosting site to post on for as little as $10 per month. It does not require a high level of technical ability either. Your main tasks are to arrange the advertising either yourself or via google adsense, and then to get traffic to your site or blog. There are numerous ways to generate traffic to your site that we will cover in another article. Some are paid methods such as direct mail marketing or Pay per click and some require some leg work to generate free traffic.

Conclusion: Low cost (but beware potential costs of pay per click campaigns), Low technical knowledge, Low ongoing maintenance, High set up time. Hardest challenge = getting your adverts seen. Yield per unit sale: Low

2. Affiliate Marketing - This is where you basically get paid for promoting somebody else's product. It can be a book, service or goods, and you get part of the sale proceeds and part goes to the original retailer/writer. Clickbank and Amazon provide easier set up methods. You sign up for an account for free. You then select a product or service to promote. You then advertise it and receive commission for each sale made via you affiliate link. Promotion can be offline or online. Online is our focus here so that could be done via pay per click advertising, ezines or email lists.

Conclusion: Low cost (but beware potential costs of pay per click campaigns), Low technical knowledge, Very Low ongoing maintenance (ignoring Pay per click), High set up time. Biggest challenge = getting traffic to see your offers. Yield per unit sale: Generally Low - Medium depending on product

3. Ecommerce - This is where you trade goods or services via an online store. You can either use your own website or blog, or that of providers like ebay who provide a platform and a marketplace of buyers for you.

Conclusion if trading unwanted gifts or homemade items or service via ebay: Very Low cost Very Low technical knowledge, Very Low ongoing maintenance, Low set up time. Hardest challenge = getting your adverts seen. Yield per unit sale: Low Conclusion if producing your own products, ie information products are very popular: Low cost (but beware potential costs of pay per click campaigns), Low technical knowledge if use sites such as clickbank or payloadz to trade via, Very Low ongoing maintenance (ignoring Pay per click), High set up time, often including researching, writing and developing a product. Biggest challenges = Finding niche market with a need. Getting appropriate products together can be time intensive. Plus getting traffic to see your products. Yield per unit sale: Generally Medium depending on product they can be low or indeed quite high.

Of course you can hire professionals/freelancers to undertake almost any task you do not have the time, skills or inclination to do yourself, so do not be put off any of the three strategies above in your quest to find the best way to make money online for you. As with the offline world the biggest issue is finding reliable and trustworthy people at the right price.