Can You Really Make Money Online?

You may have seen ads online claiming that you can make money from home, but can you really make money online? The answer is "yes", but it isn't always as easy as it sounds.

There are certainly work at home jobs that allow you to make money online. In these, you work for a particular company and you may perform administrative assistant or customer service tasks. Legitimate opportunities like this, however, are hard to find.

Most of the ads you'll see encourage you to make money through something called affiliate marketing. Companies pay you a percentage of the sales that you send them from your website. Think of it this way--how many times have you recommended a product to a family member or friend? Wouldn't it be nice if the company paid you when your friend bought their product. In affiliate marketing, they do.

These "make money online" ads often lead you to purchase a product that tells you how to make money through affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, it involves choosing a topic, finding a product that fits in with the topic, creating a website, sending traffic to that website and showing ads that match the topic's audience. It sounds a bit complicated at first, but it can actually be quite easy to get started. In many cases, beyond the initial cost of the information on how to do this, you don't have to spend additional money to get started.

However, you can't just create a website and expect to be making millions of dollars overnight. You have to have visitors to the site to see what you have to offer. This can take a bit more work, but again, there are both free and paid ways to do this.

Can you really make money online? Yes, you can. But as with most things in life, you'll actually have to work for this money. After a bit of hard work, however, you'll be able to work less and less while earning more and more money.