Most people who start an online business today want to know how to start making money fairly quickly. They usually look to becoming affiliates of some company's products or services. The ease of never having to deal with clients, processing, accepting money, or shipping definitely has its appeal to the newbie online marketer.

Being an affiliate is certainly a way to start making money online. It's relatively quick, easy, and pain free, not to mention you can make some good money selling other people's products and services and earning a healthy commission on each sale.

Once you've found out how to start making money as an affiliate, you may reach a plateau in your business life and want to try something different that will earn you even more money online.

A good next step would be to check out the benefits of having your own affiliate program. It may seem like a lot of work at first, but if you aren't happy with how much you're making online as an affiliate, then having your own affiliate program can possibly explode your earnings.

When you have your own affiliate program, you are going beyond selling other people's products and services and earning a commission on the sales. This often isn't enough to sustain you, so you think about creating your own unique product.

It doesn't have to be difficult, as it can be a short report you put together from the articles you've written, or an e-book you create to give away as a freebie to your prospects. When you've been in business for a while, you will likely have a few articles you've written to promote your business.

Simply put them together into a report or e-book, and you've got your own product. At this point, you can then use other people on the net to promote your product. This is a tremendous way of getting involved with viral marketing, where a whole network of people are promoting your product, not just you.

Think of how much more you can make when it's not just you promoting a product, but potentially thousands of people advertising and doing the work for you! In this case, you have to pay out commissions from the sales to your affiliates.

You may wonder if this will really teach you how to start making money online when you are paying affiliates to make sales for you. But when you consider how much more promotion your business will get from others doing the promoting, you will have a lot more sales, and a lot to hand out to your affiliates.

When you have your own affiliate program, you are going to need to have a script installed that allows you to track affiliate sales and a merchant account that allows you to accept credit cards online.

If you don't want to do that, then you can simply give your affiliates their own website just like your sales page to promote, and sign up at a site like Clickbank for them to track your affiliate sales for you.

Once you have your affiliate program in place, you are learning quickly how to start making money online. But as with all internet marketing, you can't stop there - you have to be considerate of your affiliates by making everything as easy as possible for them, and you need to promote your affiliate program to get the word out that it exists.

You don't want to underestimate the power of this sort of viral marketing online. A key point to remember is that if you're not making enough money being an affiliate for someone else, then think of making others affiliates for you! This is how you start making money with affiliate programs!