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After speaking about blogging, I thought I would write a brief introduction to internet marketing. You have probably come across the term internet marketing before, but may not necessarily know much about it. Word is slowly spreading about the potential to make money online, but too many people still seem put off by the idea. Many believe that internet marketing and affiliate marketing are for the computer geeks and the tech heads, but I want to make it clear that anyone can get into this game if they are willing to take the time to learn a few basics.

Imagine I was to offer you your own shop for a few dollars a month in rent. This shop was in a special location that could be visited by anyone in the world. Imagine I then offered you unlimited stock, and said this stock would be free, however much you need, just sell as much as you can. You would probably either bite my arm off, or dismiss me as a nutter. But this is the kind of business on offer with affiliate marketing.

If you are not familiar with the term affiliate marketing, it simply means selling other peoples stuff. As an affiliate you find a product that has an affiliate program, and more and more companies are starting to use these. Clickbank.com is one of the biggest affiliate networks with thousands of digital products to promote. The great thing about promoting digital products is that there is no real cost involved with the sale, so the commission you receive can be very high. 50% seems to be quite common, however there are programs that even offer 70-80% commission.

You do not have to sell digital products, Amazon Affiliates is growing rapidly and allows you to promote their products too. The commission may not be so high, but there is still good money to be made if you are promoting the right products in the right places.

The best place to do this is through your own website. Now please don’t be put off by this, creating a website is easier than ever and programmers are continuously coming up with new ideas to make creating a website even easier. I’m not going to go into how to do this right now, but I do want to make one thing very clear:

YOU DO NOT NEED MAJOR TECH SKILLS AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO LEARN HTML TO CREATE A WEBSITE

I hope that’s clear enough. There are lots of guides around on internet marketing and a lot of them are a little dated from a time when you would have needed to learn the HTML basics to get a website set up, but I am writing this in 2010 on my website and guess what, I know hardly anything about HTML.

I do know how to copy and paste, and if there is the odd bit of HTML I need to incorporate into my site, I simply look it up, copy/paste it into my site and follow any instructions to make sure any changes I need to make are done correctly. There is heaps of information on HTML online but personally I’m too lazy to learn it all, I prefer to just copy the bits that I need.

It isn’t essential to get your own website if you want to get into internet marketing, you can promote using certain forms of social media, and there are certain forums that allow you to promote affiliate links, but your options would be limited and I would highly recommend getting your own site.

This is a very basic introduction to internet marketing, there are whole courses and ebooks that tell you a lot more about how to make money online, but the main point I want to get across in this post is that internet marketing is something that anyone can get into. There are bored housewives and weird nomadic twenty somethings like myself with little or no computer experience all over the world making money online, so it is not just for the techies and the gurus.