There are literally hundreds of techniques to make money online. The range and scale is staggering. Anything from a few small ads on a site at a cost of a few dollars to setting up your own website with search optimised pages and full online shopping facilities.

Don't get scared, both simple and complex methods can make you money and really you are only limited by your imagination. In this article I will explain a bit about a few of the more effective techniques available and the technologies that can get you up and running in no time at all. Its important that you chose a technique that sits well with you. It should fit in with the amount of time you have spare and also your ability to spend a few dollars getting going. Nothing ventured nothing gained!

Basically, most techniques boil down the the following basic integers:

1. Find a product to sell.
2. Find a good way of advertising this product to a willing market.
3. Make your customer part with their money.

Ok so what do you sella nd where do you get it? Actually the sky is the limit.

Selling other peoples stuff: The most simple way to get you online marketing wings is to sell other peoples stuff. Basically about 90% of the main shopping sites on the web have affiliate programs. You may have heard this word affiliate floating about. Basically, this means you act as an agent for other sites and sell their stuff. Every time you sell something, you get commission of anything up to 50%. Some products pay even more..

I recommend starting with selling information products. This is very simple to get into and a site called clickbank.com is actually the only source of products you need to get started and it's free to sign up. The absolute star part of this technique is that you don't need a website at all! You can actually direct people straight to the sales page for the product itself. They handle the online transactions and make the product available to download by the customer.. all you do is get a cheque at the end of the month. clickbank offers a full user interface allowing you to check on your sales performance day by day.

Clickbank is far from the only place to find products. cj.com is another I recommend. Although not a straight forward as clickbank, cj offers a wide range of products from a number of the web's most lucrative markets such as credit cards, mortgages, dvd, voip etc..

So, now you have a product you want to sell. Let's say it's a book on losing your belly fast. How the hell are you gonna find people who want such a book?

Targeted advertising with Google Adwords: Adwords is simply genius, as you would expect from the guys at google. To see adwords at work simply type a search string into google.Try "lose my belly". Now, in the column on the right of the main search results window, you will find a vertical row of adverts called sponsored links. These are adwords adverts that people have written to attract people interested in losing their belly!

The great thing about adwords is you get to chose the exact phrases for which your advert will be shown and you pay a few pence to several dollars depending how many other advertisers also want your search term. Basically, the more you pay and the number of clicks you get, determine how high up you appear. Not much use being on page 25 of the search results is there!

With a bit of lateral thinking you can come up with a list of many phrases which your target customer could type. This is where a bit of experience and thought goes a long way. It is possible to get several hundred hits per day and pay no more than 5c per click. Amazing value for highly targeted traffic.

Adwords is also free to sign up and you can get going or as little as 5 dollars up front. www.adwords.com

These techniques will hopefully give you lots to think about. No other method will cost you as little to get going and is in my opnion quite as strong an introduction to the power of the web for making money fast. The basic idea can be expanded to marketing your own information product, setting up and advertising your own online store. These tools and methods can be up and running and earning you money in a matter of hours..