For those new to online business a topic that has more than likely has come up is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is the process of making money online by advertising another websites products or services. If you are new to being a webmaster or blogger affiliate marketing should be a consideration if you plan to make money online. First though you will need to build a web presence which is receiving a decent amount of traffic. If you would like to learn how to build a website then I would recommend visiting w3schools.com. These guys have a huge amount of free tutorials teaching people html, css, javascript, and any other web language that is needed to build a website. Now if you would prefer to take an easier route when attempting to make money online then perhaps you should consider blogging. You can create your free blog at blogger.com, wordpress.com and typepad.com just to name a few. Once you have decided which web presence you would like to introduce to the web your next task should be building traffic.

Building traffic is truly one of the most difficult tasks of being a webmaster or blogger. It is much more difficult than creating new content or choosing which layout you would like to use. Website marketing will more than likely take up 80% of your time especially if you are attempting to gain a coveted first page on Google’s SERPs (search engine ranking pages) for a competitive keyword. Now to get to the top of any major search engine there are a couple of things you will want to do. First and most important is having a website or blog that is useful and having the content updated daily. The next thing that you should work on is building backlinks. A backlink is your URL on someone else’s website. There are many ways to build backlinks such as submitting to free directories, social bookmarking sites, blog commenting, article writing, and guest posting. If you would like to know how many backlinks would be necessary to gain a first page for a particular keyword then type it into Google and go down the list checking the number of backlinks on each by going to yahoo and typing link:www.theirurl.com. Now once you have reached the top of SERPs and begin receiving a decent amount of organic traffic it is time to decide which affiliate program will be most helpful in capitalizing on your traffic.

One of the biggest questions throughout forums and other media which webmasters communicate is “I am getting XXXX amount of traffic how do I make money off it?” To answer this should be on a case by case basis. Personally I think a mistake most webmasters make is rather than finding something that would actually help their visitor they prefer to take the easy way out and sign up with a Google Adsense account. Google Adsense is a program that Google offers which places ads on your website of related websites then pays you for each visitor that clicks off your website or blog. I think the only time to use Google Adsense is when there is no other helpful affiliate program. For example I run a website that teaches people how to make money online without a web presence I chose to advertise for websites that paid people to work for them. In turn I get paid for everything that the visitor does for the website that I referred them to. I also run a blog about fishing and rather than use adsense I chose to use click bank which is a massive marketplace where you can pick and chose which product you would like to offer on your website or blog then are paid a commission for each sale usually much higher than a click on an ad. So before opting for a PPC (pay per click) system it may be in your best interest to look through some of the other options such as amazon.com, clickbank.com, and other affiliate programs. Truly though once you get the traffic deciding how to make money should not be that hard just take the time to look through your options before deciding.

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