You've been using AdSense and affiliate marketing for a while now to make some extra money. Maybe you've gotten your extra income up to $300 a month with a little effort. Using the internet for "extra" income is nice, but wouldn't you like to take it further? How much further, you ask? How does turning that $300 a month into $2000 to $2000 a month sound to you? Pretty good, right?

You don't have to dedicate all of your free time to doing this either. You can make this kind of income happen with just 2 or 3 hours of your time a day, and sometimes less. the secret is in the type of programs you use and how you employ them. If you do it right, you could see that kind of turn around in profit in less than 3 months!

So what is this secret to success? Affiliate programs and AdWords (the flip side of AdSense). Search for a decent affiliate program. Use AdWords to promote it. It's that simple. The hardest part of making that successful is finding the right affiliate program to run. Half the battle there is knowing where to look.

There is a web site called Associate Programs, found at http://associateprograms.com/directory, that lists over ten thousand great affiliate programs. Browse the entire database and find a program you like. Sign up for it. You may go back and sign up for more than one, but for now concentrate on one good program. Knowing which affiliates are likely to be profitable is key - computer hardware would be more profitable than books in most cases, for example.

Now you need to fine tune your AdWords campaign. The first step in doing that is choosing the right key words. Tons of sites out there can help you with this, but I recommend SpyFU (http://spyfu.com) and ThemeZoom (http://themezoom.com) as being the most helpful. The right key words are the secret to driving the right traffic to your affiliate program. Keep in mind, even negative keywords and antonyms can help as much as synonyms - for every person searching for dog lover, there is another person searching for dog hater, if you get my drift.

In AdWords you can also use groups to control your ads. I develop my AdWords groups using Speed PPC (http://speedppc.com). It's a simple little tool that can make all the difference in creating effective AdWords groups. Now that you've created the perfect ad campaign for your affiliate program, you need to get it up on AdWords. Google provides a tool for that with their AdWords Editor (http://www.google.com/adwordseditor/).

Once the ad is up and running, you will need to keep track of how it is doing for you. You want the ad campaign to be successful and the amount of time it costs you to run it to be minimal. Tracking your cost versus sales will help make that happen. Don't be afraid to tweak your ad campaign, or even to scrap it entirely for one that has a better return. If it becomes successful, go back to Associate Programs and add more. The ultimate goal is to make this money using products you design, so that you reap all of the financial reward. But if you aren't ready to create your own products yet, then affiliate programs are the way to go. You should see your rewards grow as you get the hang of key words and how the AdWords program works.