There are literally hundreds of ways to make money working online from home, from completing online surveys, selling goods on e-bay or even playing online bingo or poker! So how do you know which method is the real deal and which is just a lottery, or worse, a waste of your time?

There are 5 tried and tested strategies that work time after time and underpin nearly every internet success story out there. Here I shall share an outline of each one.

The Five Internet Income Streams

There are essentially five ways that you can make an income on the internet:

1. Advertising - This refers to one of two main methods; either the practice of selling space on your high traffic blog or website to paying advertisers, or of signing up to a service like Google Adsense that automatically places adverts on your site that relate to the content. Depending on the scheme, you either get paid when a visitor clicks through to the advertised site via your advert, or when they click through AND make a purchase.

2. Affiliate Marketing - This is where you basically get paid for promoting somebody else's product. There are many ways of doing this but two popular methods are to go to a site like clickbank.com and typically select an e-book to sell. You then sell it by using Google adwords to advertise it. A second method is to recommend products sold on sites like amazon.com. For each sale you get a predetermined share of the sum the book or product sold for and the original author/product creator gets a pre-determined share too.

3. Ecommerce - This is where you trade via an online store. You can either use your own website or blog, or that of providers like ebay. You can sell anything, from products you have created to your old, unwanted belongings. Information products are a very successful way to generate regular online income. Typically you write an ebook or create a podcast or videos providing valuable content on a subject you know well, and sell it online. The secret is to test and make sure there is a market before investing time and effort in producing any of your own products.

4. Subscription - These days you can set up an online membership site; it's like paying for a good old-fashioned magazine on your favourite topic. In order to succeed it must meet a niche market and provide valuable content and/or a link to a like-minded community. It should also offer products and services that would interest that community and can generate an additional commission via affiliate sales. Once set up and a vibrant community has evolved, it can be a great way to make money online with minimal effort.

5. Participation - This is the hardest market to crack as it requires a high level of trust and commitment from your purchaser. Typically a relationship will have been built on and/or offline prior to any online participation sales. However once this relationship is built this is considered by many to be the best way to make money online due to the high transaction fees and loyal following that commands repeat sales through up-selling and cross-selling. You will typically be talking about services like mentoring, coaching, conferences, online training webinars etc which can command substantial fees. At the outset, when you are setting up your online business you should explore all the possible money making opportunities and ensure that the website you build at the outset has the capability to meet your needs as you add new ways of making money.