It must be one of the most overused words in the online home business industry. Wherever you look, there is a free this and a free that. Money-making sites often claim that you can join for free and make money without paying anything. Is this really possible? Can you really make money with free business opportunities online?

Well, believe it or not, it is possible. The affiliate marketing business model means that you actually can promote something for free and make an income.

Most affiliate marketing programs allow you to join for free, although many will expect you to upgrade to a fee-paying membership at a later date. Most of the time the choice of when you do this is up to you, and some people only do this once they have started earning. With other programs you may only get a limited period of free membership, so you will have to pay if you decide to stay with them.

The point is, within a few moments you can be set up with an affiliate identification which is coded into an affiliate website that you can start promoting straight away.

You earn a commission whenever you make a sale. The cost of doing this is nothing; there are many very effective ways of marketing for free on the internet. The only cost is your time.

However, before you resign from your job and start signing up with all the free affiliate programs you can find, you need to know a few things.

1. I have said that making money from a free business opportunity is possible. However, it is also hard work and there is much to learn first. You do need to master internet marketing methods such as article writing, blogging, forum marketing, traffic exchanges, directory submission and more.

2. The affiliate web page provided by your merchant is going to look the same as every other affiliate's web page in this program. This makes it very difficult for you to stand out and get above the competition.

3. People often like to think things over before buying, so they will often look at a website and then leave. You will have no way of following them up, and if they've already left your site, how do you ever get them back again?

But don't be disheartened. You can get round these problems and be successful. However, this is where spending a little bit of money comes in.

In order to have a unique presence on the internet you really need to create your own website and send visitors to that. You can promote all of your affiliate programs on this and make it completely unique so that it stands out from the competition. Of course, you have to pay for the hosting, but this is not really expensive at all.

In order to follow up your visitors, you capture names and email addresses through a newsletter sign-up option on your website and deliver regular emails to them via an autoresponder. Again, the autoresponder may cost some money, but again, it's not much.

Once you have a website you can also create sales pages on which you give a personal testimonial on the product or service you are promoting. You can load these onto traffic exchanges and this will put you ahead of those affiliates who are only using the merchant's web page.

So, is it possible to make money with free business opportunities online? Well, yes. But you are far more likely to be successful if you spend a little bit of money on website hosting and an autoresponder. Compared to more traditional home business start-ups, this is a tiny outlay.