Unlike traditional businesses, a business on the Internet can be started with virtually no capital, with the exception of your website expense. You have to have a website if you want to do business on the Internet.

If you do not have your own product to advertise on your website, there are literally millions of affiliate programs on the Internet who do have products and will pay you commissions to sell their products from your website. You can choose to sell cell phones, or internet services, candles, furniture, or maybe insurance, the field is wide open. The affiliate program you choose will also handle all the money, shipping and correspondence with your customers. All you need to do is to generate the traffic to your new website in order to make the sale.

Often times the affiliate program you join will offer you free websites and that is great, but you will never generate enough free traffic to these affiliate sites to succeed without having your own website. Why you ask? For one, the search engines do not list affiliate sites and you definitely want to get listed in the search engines, this will be your biggest free traffic source.

One of the best ways to generate free traffic is to get involved in link exchanges. You will basically place a link to another site on your website and they will in turn place a link on their site to yours. Once you have exchanged several hundred links a portion of your link partners traffic will come to your site. The free websites you have been given via your affiliate program will not be able to be edited in anyway, thus link exchanges are not an option.

Link exchanges produce a double bonus also. Not only will you get traffic from your link partners, the search engines will place you higher in their listings when they see lots of links pointing to your site.

The Internet was created to provide information, so if you want to succeed on the Internet and generate lots of free traffic, you are going to have to provide information on your website.

Offering free and useful information will keep your visitors coming back to your website, and the double bonus here is that the search engines love content. The more content your website has will produce better listings in the search engines.

Once you have perfected this process of building a website, getting listed in the search engines and have developed a huge traffic stream to your website, your going to be making sales. It will start out slow and as you build links and content, the traffic will grow and so will your sales.

Affiliate programs can be a great stepping stone to get your foot in the door towards cashing in on the riches that the Internet provides. You can know the secrets of affiliate marketing through various e-books and guides that help in affiliate marketing.

As time goes by you will find that you have learned so much and have evolved into an Internet Guru and now it is time to take it one step farther, and start selling YOURSELF.

Using the knowledge that you have gained, you may want to venture into selling your services to other entrepreneurs just getting started. You could start a consulting business, or you may offer to build websites, or to help your clients get listed in the search engines. You may want to start writing E-Books and selling them. The possibilities are endless.

The Internet is a huge marketplace that is still virtually untapped. Do not waste another day worrying about how you are going to pay your creditors or provide for your family in the future. Start an Internet business today and see how your life can be changed for the better.