Extra Income Streams" - We All Want Them, We Can All Use Them, But How Do We Get Them?

At the end of the day who couldn't do without a bit of extra cash, I bet even if you're in a good job on a good pay, you still could do with a bit more. Maybe your saving for your dream car or it's really as simple as buying better brands at your weekly shop or some beer money so you can go out with your mates a bit more :P...blatantly cigarette money too, but I wouldn't condone it, I don't smoke but I always have friends asking me for a few pounds towards their smoking habit :D whatever floats your boat I guess!

Well with the Internet nowadays that's entirely viable and possible, but unfortunately when people start looking to make money other ways or online, they're swept away by all the ridiculous claims on a lot of the sites around the web promising you million dollar houses and Porsches, Ferraris, 2 hour work days, the sun, sea, girls...and paradi...WOAAAH stop right there.

See it's very easy to get swept away with all of this crap, but hang on all you wanted to find out was how to get an extra bit of money. You weren't thinking of quitting your job or driving round in a Ferrari tomorrow were you! Unfortunately you came across that sales letter and read all these stupid promises and you just feel deflated and unmotivated and suddenly you've forgotten the reason why you got to that page in the first place...you just wondered about an extra income stream.

Well first things first. Yes the internet can definitely generate you a second source of income quite quickly. However it WILL require WORK on your behalf, and a little imagination too...

It's called affiliate marketing, I strongly suspect you've heard of it, especially if you're reading this article. If not it basically means you can sell other peoples' products online without handling stock, dealing with customers holding stock or customer support. All you do is send traffic to your personalised link and for every sale made going through your link, you get a commission, Fantastic right?

Again sounds simple? Well in theory yes it is, and it's really not that hard, you just collect the pay check usually at the end of the month.

1. This is where work and self discipline come in now. These are the top affiliate companies at the moment, but you can literally become an affiliate for near enough anything you want to sell

ClickBank
Paydotcom
Plimus
Amazon
Commission junction
eBay

Just quickly glance over those affiliate sites above and you will find absolutely thousands of affiliate programs to promote, all paying rather well (apart from Amazon, but they have a stupid amount of products you could potentially promote), some programs pay upwards of $100 or 100% commission on the product.

2.This is where the real work begins, once you've found something you preferably like or enjoy, you need to start doing a bit of market research with Google and of course all the Google tools, There's also free keyword tools such as overture and Google keyword selector tool which will further help your research, using all of these together will quite quickly help you to suss out whether your product is worth it or a dud.

I can't STRESS how much you should read several reviews of whatever you intend to promote first. Some people write "reviews" without actually bothering to buy the product and try it for themselves. You will find a lot of these, but go through several and you can quickly see if it's good or bad, sooner or later you will hit a genuine one.

Wait...you've probably read this all before and your sat there saying I can't be bothered..and it sounds like to much WORK<-that word again, well you don't get something for nothing

At the end of the day, this is how money is made on the internet, this is why it's all said so much. If you really want a bit of extra money that badly this is well worth doing especially because 9 times out of 10 this will provide you with a really good source of extra income, maybe equalling that of your current.

Bare in mind the internet is open for business 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year and 7 days a week...

Whats the opening times for your office or the retail store where you work?..

Straight away that's why the internet is such a good place to work in

3. MARKETING the hardest part right? Well you'd certainly think so. This should be the easiest, because if you done your market research correctly you should understand EXACTLY how to put this product to market, be very analytical with your research and notice the way other people are selling it, especially through paid advertising. This product is definitely selling well if loads of people are paying for the ads to the product to show up on first page. Notice what sites are on the front page naturally to, are they strictly related to the product? An article maybe? What pagerank is it?

Alot of free methods of advertising such as article marketing and things like squidoo are usually up top...now how hard is it for you to do this? Especially since you now know and have identified your market

Christopher Hibberd is 18 and Has Been Working Online For The Past two years since leaving school And He's Been doing everything from article marketing, SEO and Blogging to AdWords and affiliate marketing. In This Time He's Also Been Studying many Courses and programs while meeting like minded people in the process. He thinks he's now gotten to the bottom of why people struggle to make an income online.