If you want to become instantly wealthy without ever having to work for someone else, then you and I share the same ambition. I too would like to sit around the house counting my money, eating potato chips, and watching the results of paternity tests being revealed live on the Maury Povich show. For the purposes of this discussion, we will outline a strategy for making a steady income on the internet without having to do too much work.

The easiest way to make money online is with a simple website that provides free information or a free service. If you are an expert in a particular field, or have acquired a great deal of knowledge about a certain topic, then you should set up a website that provides detailed information about your area of expertise. Hire a web designer to design your site.

Once your site is ready, submit it to search engines. Also, write articles and submit them to online article submission directories. As you put more and more articles into circulation, your number of inbound links will increase and your site will begin receiving traffic.

If the content or information you offer is important and instructive, then your site will be a valuable commodity - you will be able to make money with affiliate programs, dealer programs, pay-per-click (PPC) programs, or by selling advertising space on your website.

An affiliate program is a commission-based sales program whereby you, the affiliate, place a banner on your website that links to another website where a certain product or service is fold. You receive a commission on any sales resulting from any referrals you provide. Do a search on Google for affiliate programs and you will find thousands of different affiliate opportunities.

A dealer program is a little different from an affiliate program. With a dealer program, you actually add a webpage to your own site that is tailored to fit the look and feel of your own website, but you are actually selling the products or services of another company, who processes the orders and then pays you a commission.

You can also display pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on your webpage. You need to sign up with companies that deliver PPC ads. Nextag has a pay-per-click program, as do several ad delivery services such as Adrevolver. Google Adsense is probably the most popular pay-per-click advertisement service on the internet, and you should definitely sign up with them.

You can make some significant ad revenue from your site by actually charging companies a fee to advertise on your website. For this to happen, your website has to establish itself as receiving a lot of high quality traffic. If you have a website that gets thousands of hits per day, you need to have statistics that prove it so that you can justify someone paying a fee to advertise on your website. The more popular your site is, the more you can charge.

I hope this information will help you implement a strategy to make a living online. Sometimes, it is easier to make money with a website that provides nothing but free information than it is with an actual business. The great thing about a having a successful website is that you can just sit back and do nothing while the money pours in. No website becomes popular overnight, but, if you are patient, you will reap the rewards in the long run.