There are many different ways of making money online ranging from affiliate programs to multi-level marketing where you make money by selling products and recruiting others to the program. Some people seem to do better with one type of program and others with another. It would be very risky for you to give up the day job for an environment in which 99% of people fail through not fully understanding what is required to make money online.

Many people find selling affiliate products a trouble-free method of making money. An affiliate product is one owned by a third party who gives you permission to promote the product in return for a share of the profits of any sales that ensue from your promotion. You do not actually sell the product yourself, so you are selling on commission, but are promoting it and sending prospects to the merchant's sales page.

It is the owner of the product that does the actual selling and who accepts payment. The merchant also deals with any complaints and any refunds requested. All you do is direct your prospects to the merchant's website and wait for the money to come in. Countless people have found this an easy way to make money, and have turned affiliate marketing into a full time business, and that is the generally accepted method of affiliate marketing that most people use.

The people who find themselves able to give up their regular employment in favor of affiliate marketing from home are generally those that have developed their own websites to carry out their affiliate promotions. In doing so, they open up a much wider range of possibilities, and are able to promote not just one but many different products for a number of different merchants. Thus, if one product on a specific webpage does not suit a particular prospect, perhaps another on the same page will. In this way, better use is made of the visitors that they have succeeded in attracting to their website.

Not only that, but various pages in a site can be used to promote different types of product, and it is this multiplicity of income streams that allows most people to turn a lucrative hobby into a full time income. Whereas one web page might earn $20 weekly, 100 such web pages would earn $2000 weekly.

Given that having a website is the key to success, then, there are opportunities available online whereby websites can be designed by people to enable them to act as affiliates for specific types of product. One of these is eBay marketing. EBay is the world's largest online auction site where real live auctions are carried out 24/7 all year round. Anything that can be bought and sold is bought and sold on eBay from old coins to new cars. Ebay offer online entrepreneurs two ways of making money by promoting eBay itself: affiliate income and referral income.

If you refer somebody to eBay, and they decide to join the site, you can earn between $10 and $20 for each person that joins. In addition to this, if you promote eBay auctions, and somebody visits an auction from your website and goes on to make a purchase, you can earn a proportion of the listing costs of the seller for each item purchased.

If you build an affiliate website designed specifically to promote eBay and specific eBay auctions, then you have the capability of earning large amounts of money. As hinted at earlier, the key here is to refer visitors to lots of different auctions by using lots of different web pages, or even different websites. Each website or page should be optimized to promote the auction of a specific product type. Multiple income sources from multiples types of product will eventually enable you to fire the boss and kick the day job.

The emphasis is on the 'multiple' and the key to online success is to generate multiple websites. This can be very time consuming, which is why software has been developed to do it for you. This type of software can generate site after site, each dedicated to a specific eBay product type. Through its use you can build up an empire of websites to generate income from hundreds of different auctions.

The benefits of affiliate websites certainly include the possibility of you working from home, but also of making money from a number of different sources, and that is the secret of internet success: multiplicity. Those that fail do not recognize this and try to make a living from just one website. While it can be done with the right product, very few people will find that one product, and multiple websites are the way to go if you want to make a living online.