Affiliate programs are marketing tools used by vendor sites such as Amazon. You simply sign up for the program and they give you an affiliate ID number. You will then get instructions on how to create links to their website from yours (or articles), in many cases you can create links to specific products. When someone clicks on the link you made, the vendor takes note of your ID. If the person buys you are given a commission. Simply, you are promoting someone elses site and products. You set it up and wait for the money to come in. There is no limit to the number of sites you can promote, and done correctly, with enough focus, there is potentially a large income to be made. As an affiliate you can also get discounts and bonuses based on the quantity of traffic you send to a site.



Autoresponders are the answering machines of the internet. Say you have a number of products for sale. These products are technologically challenging, so you need to provide detailed information on them, how to operate and maintain and so on. If you try to do this on your website you will require large amounts of space, possibly creating design problems for your site as well as making it messy and off-putting. By using an autoresponder you can place a link for all the detailed stuff, and a pre-composed email will be sent to the person requesting it. You can place a form on your site where the customer can enter their name and email adress and place the link below it.

Autoresponders can be used in several ways. Apart from answering queries for detailed information requests, they can also be used as correspondence trackers. Different providers offer autoresponders with different functions, and some offer autoresponder services for free. Although I would always opt for a paid service. They are not expensive and offer a more reliable service in general.

If you have an existing website you can correspond with another website to have your banner placed on their site, in exchange for accomodating their banner on yours. The same is true for links. You can place a link to another site, whilst the webmaster of that site can place a link to yours. If you don't have a banner there are many free and paid for banner utilities you can find with a quick search on the web.

Internet classified ads are another option for promoting your website. There are many such sites, and some of these classified ad sites will give their services for free.

If you want to become a big vendor site, the best way to go about it is through e-commerce. This means setting up shopping carts for your customers so they can go through the order process quickly and easily. You will also need to analyse your payment system, and accept various methods of payment especially major credit cards. Again, there are many providers of this kind of facility, including PayPal, and WorldPay to name just a couple.

Electronic magazines, more commonly called E-zines, are newsletters that get sent out regularly to a list of people. These recipients have subscribed to the E-zine so spamming is not an issue. You need to have an article (or several) about your product or service, with several links embedded in it in case your subsciber decides he wants your widget.

Mailing lists entail sending out quantities of emails to a targetted audience. This is where you can fall foul of the spamming laws. So be careful and always use an opt-in list, where the customer decides if they want to be on your mailing list (another use for your autoresponder).

There are many money making ideas and utilities that have not been covered here. There are, frankly, too many to mention. Why not browse around and look for yourself. Research can be a tedious process, but the knowledge that you gain from it might be just what you need to set up, or improve upon, your own internet business.