If you have just started out and decided to build an online business, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by all of the opportunities out there. Indeed there are many opportunities to earn online, so choosing the right one is important to your success. Here is an overview of some of the most common ways to make money on the internet and get your new business going.

Affiliate programs

In essence, an affiliate program pays you to promote a certain product or service and you get a commission in return. This commission amount will vary depending on a few factors, such as the type of product/service you are promoting, the merchant, as well as your past experience with that particular affiliate program. It is not uncommon for many programs to have tiered structures where you get to earn a higher commission amount if you drive a certain number of sales to them.

There are also various ways that the merchant will pay you per sale:

Fixed amount. Just like the name implies, you will get paid a specific dollar amount for each sale that you refer. This amount may vary depending on different products or services that are purchased by the referred customer.

Percentage of sale. This is most commonly used by merchants which sell dozens of different items which have different prices. The percentage that you get will once again vary greatly depending on what you are promoting. In the case of high priced physical goods, the commission percentages are usually quite low and range from 2 to 5%. But this is made up by the fact that the percentage will be based on an overall higher sale amount. For digital goods, such as ebooks and membership site subscriptions, it is not uncommon to be offered commissions ranging from 50% to 75%. However, it is worth noting that the sale price is much lower and normally ranges between $25 to $50.

Recurring commissions (also called revenue sharing or rev-share). This type of payment plan is sometimes offered by merchants who have a subscription based service, such as informational membership sites, dating sites, etc. You would get a percentage of the amount that a customer that you have referred to the site was billed. Once again, the exact percentage will vary, but is usually in the range of 25% to 75%.

Finding affiliate programs

As you have probably noticed, there is no shortage of affiliate programs that you can sign up to participate in. However, due to the complexity involved in running an affiliate program, many online merchants have chosen to join a bigger affiliate network. This network will take care of tracking the commissions owed and issuing payments to you after they have been paid by the merchant at the end of the month.

Some popular affiliate networks are: ClickBank (www.clickbank.com) for e-books, membership sites and digital products; Commission Junction (www.cj.com) and Linkshare (www.linkshare.com) regroup hundreds of different merchants, such as clothing retailers, online phone services, etc.

Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit started off as niche services that only tech savvy internet users used, but over the past couple of years, they’ve grown into some of the largest sites on the internet with millions of users spanning every niche you can think of. With such a diverse user base, it’s no wonder social bookmarking has become a central part of most online marketing strategies. Social bookmarking can provide a wide variety of benefits to your, your company, and your website.

The biggest and most apparent benefit of social bookmarking is traffic. If you put a link on a social bookmarking site, and that link gets popular, and eventually makes its way to the homepage of that social bookmarking site, you can be sure that the link will receive a great deal of traffic. With so many people visiting social bookmarking sites on a daily basis, it’s no surprise that popular links on said sites will receive enormous spikes in traffic.

One of the less obvious benefits of social bookmarking is that it allows you to build strong links to your site, and boost your search ranking. When you submit a link to a social bookmarking site, you get to choose the text that link displays. So, in essence, you’re creating a link to your site on a highly popular site with anchor text of your choosing. Because of the high quality of the linking systems used by social bookmarking sites, it’s common for a link on a site like Digg or Reddit to show up ahead of the site it links to in search results, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as your content is showing up near the top of search results, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s your actual site, or a social bookmarking site – you still get traffic from it either way.

As long as you’re pushing high quality content, social bookmarking sites are a great way to drive traffic to your site, and boost your search rank. As your link becomes popular across the internet, you’ll begin to see an increase in traffic, and in your search rank in no time. Just be sure to use keyword rich anchor text for your links, and make sure your content is high quality, and you’ll see results in no time.