There are many different ways of making money online, ranging from affiliate marketing to direct sales of your own product. Affiliate marketing is a method of making money by selling products belonging to other people. You basically earn a commission every time you send a prospect to somebody's sales page that results in a sale. There are subtle differences between affiliate marketing and acting as a salesperson for someone else, but the end result is the same: if somebody buys then you earn money.

However, you can also earn affiliate money, not by finding prospects that purchase a product, but that sign up for service. There are many online membership companies that can make a lot of money from people who register for their service, and eBay is one of the biggest. eBay is an internet auction site that allows you to sell products and to purchase them. Many eBay sellers are ordinary people selling items that they no longer have a use for. You could sell an old CD, jewelery, books and anything you think you can get money for.

Others are professionals who use eBay as a store front, and eBay even provides them with an online shop from which they can advertise and sell their goods. While you can make money by purchasing items, and reselling them back at a higher price than you paid for them, there are other ways in which to make money from eBay. When you sell a product, eBay charges you a fee for the insertion of your item into their auction and also a final valuation fee, based on the eventual selling price.

The insertion fee varies according to the features you want included in your listing, such as pictures, bold text and so on. If you know how to go about it, you can earn between 50% and 75% of these fees through purchases made by buyers that you have sent to eBay to make the purchase. This is called being an eBay affiliate, and many people use this means of making money as their full time income.

There are actually two ways in which you can make money as an eBay affiliate: by referring buyers to specific auctions from which they make a purchase, and also by persuading people to register with eBay. You have to do nothing to earn that money except advertise eBay, and what could be easier than advertising the biggest online auction company in the world?

In fact it is not quite as easy as you might believe, since you are not the only person doing it. For best results you will need to have your own website, and not only that but a different website or web page for every product or keyword that you are promoting. More on that later. However, if you can achieve that, then consider the benefits.

Your web page could contain details of all current eBay auctions on your keyword, for example SatNav or GPS systems. These are selling from over $150 to around $1000 per item, and if you advertise these auctions on your web page, then you can get a good proportion of the eBay fees for each listing you are instrumental in selling. Not only that, but thousands are registering with eBay daily, and you get $25 to $35 for each person that registers from your website.

Many people interested in purchasing a new GPS navigation system at a fraction of the normal retail price will not be members of eBay, and will have to register first. You can make it easy for them to do so, and even customize the link so that they are taken to the appropriate registration page for their country.

So now you have two sources of income: purchases and registrations. How about more? You can add some Adsense blocks to your web pages as an additional income stream. Google will place adverts on your page that are relevant to the product you are promoting. Thus, Google will add a few GPS Google Adwords adverts (the adverts on the right hand side of a Google search results page) at places on the page selected by you. You get paid every time a visitor clicks on the ad. They don't have to buy, just click. How cool is that? You can also place some Amazon adverts relating to the topic on your page, and get commission every time a visitor purchases from Amazon.

However, all of this involves a degree of skill that most people entering the arena of internet marketing for the first time do not have. You might think that there should be some way in which this could be made easier. After all, there must be people making money from eBay in this way that are fairly new to online business.

In fact you would be right, and there are easier ways than you having to build a new website manually for every product. There are companies online offering software to do this for you. If you find such software, then the whole process, including placing the eBay adverts, the Adsense and the Amazon ads among others, can be carried out with the click of a button.

Being an eBay affiliate is one of the easiest ways to make money online: you don't need a product, and if you have the right software, you don't need knowledge. Even a child could do it. That's the way to make money online. Easy and simple!