However, although it is a attractive proposition, the idea of setting up you own web based business can be extremely daunting. Many of the skills involved elude the average person. First you need to develop a product to sell. Then you need to design, develop and set up a web site to sell the product. Next you may have to create a method for shipment of the product. Lastly you will have to handle customers and have a system for dealing with complaints and tracking.

There is a much simpler way to get your feet wet in the world of Internet business. It is called affiliate marketing and it allows you to avoid most if not all of the hassles involved in setting up an online business.

Creating an affiliate marketing business is not all that difficult. Your first task will be to set a simple web site that will link to the companies with which you will do business, acting as an affiliate. There are numerous basic web page creation programs on the Internet. Some are even free. Your site will need only to be functional enough to refer your visitors to the companies you are representing.

Many people are now using free blogs as their primary web site. These blog sites are free to use and can be very effective. You can set them up to look like a stand-alone web page and the functionality is very good. You can check them out at www.blogger.com or www.webpress.com. These are two of the biggest free sites.

Next you need to find some products to represent or act as an affiliate. There are a myriad of sites where you can find products that you will be comfortable in representing. Some of the more well known are www.clickbank.com, www.paydotcom.com and www.amazon.com. Looking through these sites will allow you to find products that you will feel comfortable promoting.

To make you web site more productive, you should provide something other than just links on your site. You will be far more successful if you can provide some useful content. This can be in the form of an article or better yet a product review. These should relate directly to the products that you represent and you should include links to these products within the article or review. Doing this will increase the time that people remain on your site and will also make you money.

If you are not a writer, you can find many places where you can get these articles written for you at a very reasonable price. Creating good content is one key in creating a profitable web site. The other option is for you to copy relevant articles from such places as Ezine.com. Provided they are copied in full with the credits you can use them on your site. Just be sure that you follow the guidelines of the content provider so that you do not violate copyright laws.

Providing good content will allow your site to prosper and as you ad content it will begin to be found by the search engine spiders as well as web surfers. The more relevant information you can ad to your site the better it will appear in web searches. When people find your site and discover that it contains good content they will read more and more. If you have judiciously sprinkled links throughout your pages they will get clicked and you will start making sales of products you represent.

There are no guarantees that affiliate marketing will create your fortune immediately. In fact the odds are strongly against it. What it will provide for you is a beginning into the world of the Internet. You will rapidly begin to learn what does work and what does not work. As you progress you will get better and better and with persistence and creative thought you can begin to see a steady growth in your business. By sticking with it and continually expanding your education you can rid yourself of that JOB and begin to see the good life you imagined.