The Internet has totally changed the options an average person has when it comes to making a living. Where I live more people work and home than actually get up and go to work. Many of them home office which is done at the convenience of their employer. For the right person this is great. You don’t have to waste wear and tear on your car and who needs to pay $3.00 a gallon for gas when you can walk into your office and go to work.

Another trend is the number of home businesses that are being started thanks to the Internet. I think more and more people would like to work online and make money, but they don’t know how to get started. As they Google search they type in phrases like make money online, or work at home, or home business. All kinds of ideas are going to come up. When I did this I immediately was intimidated by the thought of having to build my own website.

Then I stumbled into a concept that has forever changed the way I think about how to make money and work online. The way to do that without your own website is called affiliate marketing. In short being an affiliate for a company is just getting paid by them to sell their stuff.

What I have found is that you can do that but the problem in affiliate marketing is that the company gives the same website to everyone else. The other thing is the websites they give you are basically sales pages and when a person goes online to search for information they are not interested at first in a sales pitch.

So this brings up 2 important points.

1. Having your own website allows you to pre-sell your visitor before sending them to the affiliate sales page

2. Capturing the name and email address of your visitor by offering something of value for free allows you to follow-up in the future.

If you think about any purchase you have made online recently you probably did not do it right away. It has been said the average person needs anywhere from 5 all the way up to 12 exposures to something before they buy it. If all you are doing is promoting the affiliate website the company gives to you then you are missing out on valuable sales because of a lack of follow-up. You can offer more free stuff and weave in the benefits of the product which will help lead them back to your affiliate sales page.

So to summarize this article a great way to work online and make money is to sell other people’s stuff. This is called affiliate marketing. To do affiliate marketing correctly you need your own website which you want to use to pre-sell the products you represent. You also want to offer something of value for free to your visitor in exchange for their name and email address which you can then follow-up with more information containing benefits.