The third main route to internet cash is intimately tied in with the last. Affiliate marketing flips the idea of product selling on its head.

Rather than creating your own product and making it available through Clickbank with all the perceived difficulty of making your own material, you could take the products already created by someone else and sell them for a cut of the profit.

Now, Clickbank is not the only game in town here. Amazon is a company that most are familiar with and they run an affiliate program of their own. Interestingly, they will credit you with a share of any sale made whenever you send someone in their direction. So, for example, your link may target a very specific product on Amazon but if the customer then browses the shop and buys other items, you share in the commission for those products as well.

At this point you can also get involved with other affiliate programs that “drop-ship” real, physical items to customers. The main marketplace for finding this kind of program is Commission Junction, where you will find campaigns run by end vendors for hundreds of different kinds of product. Commisssion Junction have a rating system, so be careful to stick  with those with a good reputation here. In fact, the products here are so varied, that you may find exactly what you need to become a full-time online vendor of one particular kind of goods – effectively creating a standard e-commerce website. If that is your passion, CJ may be just what you need.

The biggest complaint about affiliate marketing is not that you can’t make any money, many affiliates prove that wrong every day. No, it is the idea that you do all the hard work of generating traffic and then you give your potential customers names and email addresses straight to the final vendor. For some people this is acceptable, but for others, the idea of building a list of real buyers is the main reason for generating traffic. In this case, going back to having your own products is really the way forwards.

The second main way of making money online is to start to sell your own product. Well, that’s all very well, but what if you don’t have a product to sell?

If you are new to the online world, there is a real temptation here to assume that you need some kind of world-beating physical product. That you need, in some way, to become the next big inventor that makes money from solving a problem that has troubled mankind since the dawn of time.

That is certainly one way to go, but if you are going to get started with this fairly quickly, you probably need to give up that idea and start looking at the world of digital products. The beauty of going digital is the speed of creation and the ease of delivery for your new product and there are several ways that you can get to market with this approach.

By far the most common is the ebook. If you have started looking at internet marketing then you have been exposed by now to countless ebooks on many different areas of this business but it is completely possible to take this approach in other walks of life.

Obviously this is a subject in its own right and I will go into more detail about how you get your ideas into your creation in another post (or maybe even an ebook )

Once you have started thinking about digital products, you could branch out into audio or even video and in some ways these are more highly regarded than even ebooks in their potential. Everyone has different ways of learning, but a good video walkthrough can often help to clarify subjects for anyone watching them. I posted a quick youtube video in an earlier post to show you just how easy it is to get started.

The beauty of all this, is that you don’t even need to have your own subject matter in some cases. Check out the world of PLR (or, Private Label Rights) to see how you could use someone else’s material, possibly in ebook form, and legally add your own name or rework it into audio or video to form your own product.

Once you have your product, you can obviously sell it direct from your own site (maybe controlling this through one of the integrated shopping basket services that exist) or you could opt to make it available through a service such as Clickbank, which, for a fee, will handle all the aspects of payment collection for you. It will also look after your affiliate programs where others will sell your product for you, for a share of the profits.

As always, if you want more details or if you have any comments on this subject, let me know below and use the buttons to bookmark this page. If you have found this page from somewhere else, follow the link for the rest of the articles on the subject of making money online.

Internet marketing is a huge subject. The more people I speak to people in all walks of life, the more I have come to realise that many of the things that I take for granted are completely strange for others. It is clear that many of the assumptions we make about people when we start to talk about this area of making money online are starting from a different place to where the “man in the street” actually is.

So, for the next few posts, I will try to reset the terminology on the site so that anyone who is really just starting out should be able to get up to speed with the terminology that we all throw around so much.

I hope that this will help you if your business just happens to be in an area completely outside Internet Marketing and you are just looking to take your business online as an extra channel to market in these interesting economic times. Of course, if you want further help with this approach, particularly for projects in London, feel free to drop me a line through the contact page.

So, the first term we need to clarify is just the phrase “Internet Marketing”.  Well, let’s step back a bit and make sure that we all see marketing as the same thing. In essence, marketing is just the way that the value in a product or service is made visible to potential users of those things. It can be as broad in focus as marketing of a “brand” – making the value of an entire organisation clear to the public, or it can be as narrow as concentrating on an individual product, effectively making the sales of that product an obvious choice.

Internet Marketing (IM), then, is just the use of the internet as the main delivery mechanism for this “value message”. The appeal of this approach is obviously the huge reach of the internet. Taking your products to just a small fraction of the internet-using population holds enormous potential for most companies.

In a strange twist of terms, it is also possible that you will see the term “Internet Marketing” used in the context of this huge global marketplace where IM experts create products to help others just getting into the IM world themselves. While this may feel strangely incestuous at times, it is undeniable that people still need this kind of help.

If you are just starting out, let me know if going back this far is useful for you.