If you don’t have the knowledge or time to create your own online business, you can sell other people’s products. This is known as affiliate marketing. It is a very simple and fast way to start making money online. However, you should know a few key factors or you will become very frustrated and quit as do the majority who try to make money with affiliates.

First, choose your market. You need to do this before you choose any products to sell - finding the products to sell isn’t hard…determining the market that you will sell to is. Do this by thinking about things that interest you, such as hobbies. Think about things that you know about a great deal. Make a list of things that you enjoy doing, such as gardening.

From that list, you will choose a topic for your website. Now, in many cases, you don’t need a website to do affiliate marketing, but it is recommended that you have your very own website. Of course, you don’t want to market several different types of products that are not related to one another on your website, so your website needs to be specific to one topic. This is called your niche.

Let’s say that you’ve decided that you are indeed most interested in gardening, and that you want to start a gardening website. First, you need to go to Yahoo Search Marketing and see how popular that topic is. Visit http://www.overture.com and click on resource center. Use the keyword

selector tool to determine how popular your niche is. If it isn’t popular, you might want to rethink your niche until you find a topic that is popular in

search engines.

Once you’ve chosen your topic, you need content - lots and lots of content. You can write your own content, use other peoples content, or hire someone to write content for you. If you write your own content, make sure that you are writing content that is related to your niche, and that it is targeting your keywords for your topic. You can learn more about this at The IM Connection at http://www.imconnection.com .

If you don’t want to write your own content, you can use content that other’s have written. There are many article directories, which are sometimes called article banks, around the internet. Just go to any search engine and type in ‘articles.’ At these sites, you will find tons of content that is free for use on your website - as long as the author is credited, and you do not change the article in anyway. You can get original articles written for you inexpensively at a site like Rent A Coder at http://www.rentacoder.com .

Now, you need a website. You simply choose a web host and get signed up, and choose your domain name. The domain name needs to be as closely related to your niche as possible. For example, www.gardening.com would be perfect - but it is probably taken. You will have to try many variations to get a domain name that will work for your site.

If you don’t know HTML, and you don’t have the first clue as to how to design a website, don’t panic. You can either hire someone to do this for you, or use tools that are provided by your web host. We were all beginners at one point, and you will get over this hump!

While your site is being designed, you need to start deciding which affiliate programs you will join. Affiliate marketing for beginners should start at

one of the affiliate directories, such as http://www.affiliateprograms.com . Here, you will find tons of affiliate programs that you can join, and they

are listed by category. Of course, our category is gardening. Simply click on your category and you will see all the programs that you can join. Look for programs that pay at least a 40 - 50% commission. Programs paying less than 40% may not be worth your time, unless they are high ticket items.

You can add Google’s Adsense Ads to your webpages. I find it is more effective to have only affiliate products OR Adsense and not both on the same page. Visitors will get distracted from one or the other and sometimes leave without clicking on either.

You can read a 7 step report, How to Make Money With Adsense at:

http://www.build-an-ebusiness-on-a-shoestring.com/niche-profits.htm