Is there a secret to internet marketing that will help you start making money online? That’s the question I know a lot of people ask themselves. I used to ask myself that exact question until it hit me right on the head like a bag of old shoes.

What I finally figured out is that these “so called secrets” were right under my round nose. I could almost smell it but I didn’t know what I was smelling;-).I had the same problem that most people have when they get online. You try to figure out that EXACT step by step formula that shows you what to do and when. But when you don’t find it you get frustrated and either complain or quit.

Here’s the problem: You will always learn more through experience than you’ll learn through someone telling you what the latest and greatest technique is. It’s almost too obvious to see why some people are successful and some people aren’t. The first thing I see is that most people that aren’t successful don’t have a website or their website looks like one thousand other websites out there. If you want to follow a formula that you believe works, you can’t do it exactly the same way “Johnny next door” does it. You have to do something a little different. Why would someone want to go to your website instead of all the other websites that look like yours? How can you make money online if you don’t even have a website? Why should visitors stay at your website if you don’t have anything on it worth staying around for?

So the trick is to learn what people are interested in and put that on your website, either for free or as paid content. A great way to find out what people are interested in is by just thinking about all the websites that you go to all the time. Do you like going to sports sites, Youtube, forums about race cars? Whatever you like doing or know is popular is where you want to start but not where you wanna stop. You can use a basic concept that another website is using but then you have to add your own interesting twist to it. A good example is GodTube.com which is like Youtube.com but for Christians. So they took an already popular idea, “video based communities” , and made their own niche for their community.

So basically what you need to do is create a website that’s based around a somewhat popular topic or industry with your own uniqueness to it. It’s a lot easier to start learning how to get traffic to your website when you have a site that people would love to know about. But if you don’t know how to create a website, then you gotta learn because it’s only complicated because you haven’t tried until you actually have one.

I’ve been reading on forums and getting a lot of questions by email about what the best way to start making money online is. Most of the answers that I get revolve around becoming an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is where a company pays you a percentage of their profit for every sale that you bring them. A lot of people like affiliate marketing because they don’t have to create their own products, or deal with customers. For these reasons many people have attempted to make money with affiliate marketing but they have failed.

One of the biggest affiliate networks online is Clickbank, which has over 10,000 downloadable products like online books, ebooks, and software. Many people have pulled their hair out trying to make money with Clickbank so I decided to do my own test with Clickbank starting in March of 2007. The test started very slowly but by the end of 2007 I had made over $8,200 with Clickbank. By the end of the year I was averaging about $1,200/month in commissions. So my estimation is that by next year I should make twenty to thirty thousand dollars in Clickbank affiliate earnings.

The whole reason behind this experiment is that I wanted to find a way to make additional income without using any of my email lists or spending a lot of time. At most I spend about 30 minutes a day on my Clickbank experiment, so anyone can do this that WANTS to do it. The trick is knowing the right things to do.

There are a few things that you have to do right in order to start making money as an affiliate marketer. The first thing you have to do is find products that are selling well, don’t try to promote products that no one wants to buy. I created a video for my internet marketing television membership that showed me going through this whole process step by step so if you’re a member or want to be one CLICK HERE to watch the videos. One I did next is I created a simple, but ugly, web page that reviewed this particular product. The product I was reviewing is a weight loss related product so it was something that I was interested in. So the next step is to try to become an affiliate with a product that you either have an interest in or you want to learn about. This way you won’t have a problem writing about it or doing research for it. So I went on to write a interesting review on this particular ebook on weight loss and I told a story to go along with the review. My next step was to put a very easy to see link to the weight loss site website at the end of the article so the reader could go ahead and place an order for the ebook once they got done reading the review on my website. Another tip is, if allowed, give the reader a bonus for ordering the product through the link at the end of the article. This will give the reader enough incentive to go ahead and order today. The last step is to get traffic to the web page that reviews the product that you’re an affiliate for.

The fastest way to get traffic to your website is by using pay per click advertising. The best known PPC adverting company is Google Adwords, so this is what I used for my Clickbank experiment. I set up an Google Adwords campaign for my weight loss ebook and set my bids to 30 cents per click. Which means that for every person that clicks through to my website, I won’t pay more than 30 cents for them to look at my website.

Now the most important piece to this puzzle is that keywords that visitors will use to get to your website. What are keywords? Keywords are the words that you type into the search engine when you’re looking for something. So the search engine that Adwords works with is Google.com. So whenever a person types in the words in Google.com that I’m bidding on and hit the search button, my ad will come up on the right side of the page depending on what price I bid on for my keywords. So the trick here is to only bid on keywords that either have the product name in it or is very specific. So to give you an example if the name of the product was “overnight weight loss genie”, my keywords would be “overnight weight loss genie”, “overnight weight loss genie review”,”overnight weight loss genie program”, etc. I wouldn’t use keywords like “weight loss” because they are too general and I would be wasting money.

So after about 16 hours of having the above particular campaign running, I had spent $1.60 in adverting and had already made my first $30 in commission. I went on to create over 100 pages that had different product on it and that’s how I’m able to now average over $1,200/month from Clickbank alone. This is only a small portion of my income but you should ask yourself, “what would an extra $1200 a month do for me?” I hope you find this helpful and if you have questions about this please ask. If you want to see the videos showing step by step how this works, go to Internet Marketing Televison by clicking HERE.