If you want to make money online, then you should realize that you will need to spend money to make money. This philosophy holds true in the real world: successful businesses are successful because their owner has either spent significant money buying a solid business education or has learned through extensive "trial and error", or a combination of both.

If you want to earn money quickly, you might be better off finding a part time job; you will earn money without hard work and you can start making money right away. Part time jobs are easy to come by - just visit a local staffing agency and they will find you a job within a few days.

If you really want to profit online, you should know that you will not make money overnight. Successful marketers either invest a substantial amount of money into their online business or they invest countless hours into marketing their product or service (and when I mean countless, I mean it!)

Are you still reading this? If so, then maybe you are serious enough to give online marketing a worthwhile effort. There are a few basic ways to make money online:

Affiliate marketing - sell other people's products and earn a commission based on the amount of the total sale. This is the most basic of online marketing, and every marketer has engaged in affiliate marketing at one time or another. Tip: pick products that are in high public demand and that are being aggressively marketed by other marketers.

Advertising space - If you own a popular website or blog, you can sell advertising space on it. You can sell direct ads for a flat rate (or "cost per impression fee"), or you can sell ad space and get "paid per click". Both are profitable and if you can command enough traffic, you can earn a substantial amount of money every month.

Sell your own products - this is easily accomplished by writing an ebook and then adding your book to an affiliate network. Your ebook will be promoted by other marketers and you will split the sales proceeds with the marketers. This is a great way to sell an ebook and you will earn money on auto-pilot *if* you can write a good book on a popular topic.

While there are a lot of ways to make money online, I can honestly say that writing an ebook is extremely profitable, mainly because you don't need to be a professional marketer - you just need to be a strong writer and create a book on a popular topic.

I'll be honest with you: online marketing is extremely tough. It takes work, work, and more work, and in most cases a decent amount of money to get things rolling. But, as I mentioned above, there is a way to circumvent this process and conveniently avoid it altogether: write a book and let professional affiliates sell it!