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 an example. Let's say you start off with just one product, and you sell it for $47. When you make a sale, you earn 47 bucks. If you make 10 sales, you make $470. To make more money, you have to acquire more customers. If you don't, you can't grow your business.

Assume that you don't acquire any more new customers (which is unlikely). Can you still grow your affiliate business? You can still grow your business by working on backend products. You are trying to sell to your existing customer base. The lifetime value for each customer increases.

There is a lifetime value for each customer - and that is the total amount of money that he is willing to spend on your products and services. For example, if he spends $1,000 with you over the course of the relationship, the lifetime value is $1,000.

Things get exciting from hereon. Now if you know that for every customer you acquire, you will earn an average of $2,000 during a customer's lifetime, how much would you spend to acquire that customer?

To make money, affiliate marketers must repeat the sales process. They make an upfront sale of $47, and then they forget all about the customer. Build a list, and focus on serving the same customers over and over again. The cost of selling to an existing customer is much lower than selling to a new customer.

Use a simple web form to capture emails so that you can get in touch with your prospects again. You may earn 5 to 10 times whatever you are earning now.