You can use affiliate marketing techniques to help you spot opportunities on the Internet. Affiliate marketing basically means that you will be promoting someone else products. You only make money when a sale is made. If you can't convert the traffic into paying customers, you don't earn a single cent.

There is very little risk involved in affiliate marketing. You start off by driving traffic to the sales page. After about a hundred or a couple of hundred visitors or so, you get a good feel of whether the offer is converting well enough or not.

This is ideal for market research. There is no need to spend money to develop a product, only to realize that nobody wants to buy it. When you find an offer that converts well, simply develop your own products - but do it better.

You see, it all starts from affiliate marketing. If you like, you may even test different markets at one go. Very soon, you will be able to see for yourself, some concrete results - which market is lucrative with rapid buyers, and which market appears to be just luke warm.

Once that is over, just keep your eye on the profitable opportunities. If you want to make more money, just rinse and repeat what you have done.

Here is a business model that has been proven to work - build a list of prospects or customers, and sell them products over and over again. It sound simplistic, but list building works.

Here is a quick illustration. Assume you only sell one product, and you sell it for $10. When a sale is made, you earn $10. In order to make more money, you have to convert more prospects into paying customers. That cost money.

Assume that you don't acquire any more new customers (which is unlikely). Is there a way to grow your business? You can continue to develop more backend products. You are trying to sell to your existing customer base. Each customer is worth more to you now.

The lifetime value of a customer is the amount of money that he spends with you. For instance, an individual who spends $10,000 with you over the next 10 years has a lifetime value of $10,000.

Things get exciting from hereon. Every customer equals a lifetime value of at least $2000 to you. You can spend $1000 to acquire the customer and still make a profit.

This is what many affiliate marketers are not doing enough of. They make an upfront sale of $47, and then they forget all about the customer. Think of ways to serve the same customer several times over. It's a downhill ride when you sell to people who already know who you are, and trust that you deliver.

Use a simple web form to capture emails so that you can get in touch with your prospects again. You will be making 3-4 times more than what you are earning now.