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Getting started in Internet marketing is actually a lot easier than one might think and it's possible to get started with very little or no investment at all. If you have a desire to make money online and possibly making a living at it, you only need a computer and an internet connection and you're on your way.

One thing you should understand right up front though, despite the many claims made by different internet marketers, you won't get rich overnight and you will have to devote more than just a few hours a week to becoming successful. It will take dedication and hard work to be successful with Internet marketing, but if you stick with it, you'll make it.

When people first get involved in making money online, they will start out with paid to read email and paid surveys. While it's easy to do and takes no investment at all, you won't make much money with either and isn't really Internet marketing so I'm not going to devote time to them in this article.

The term "internet marketing" can cover many different ways of making money online but whichever method you use, it's basically selling. You sell either your own or someone else's products or services and make a profit or commission for doing so.

The easiest way to get started is with a good affiliate program. There are good companies out there that will let you sign up with them (for free) and sell their products using their website personalized to you, called an affiliate page, so you don't need to invest in a domain name and web hosting to get started using this method.

Let me must give you one word of warning about these programs though. Some of them will ask you to pay a fee to join. This is a sign that they make most of their money through signups and not actually by selling products. A legitimate company will let you join for free and then will pay you a commission on the products you sell, not for getting other people to join.

Once you are in a good program, you can advertise the site using many different online marketing methods including free or paid online classified ads, click exchanges, banner exchanges, blogging, forums, chat rooms, email, articles, ezines, etc. Your affiliate page won't appear in any search engine listings though since the search engines don't index affiliate pages. To get listed in the search engines, you will need your own domain name and website.

Having your own domain and website is a lot easier than most people think. It's not even that expensive. You can register a domain name for $10 or less or sometimes free if you buy a hosting plan, which you can find for as little as $30 per year for a basic personal website. That's for the bare-bones, cheapest service available hosting plan but more realistically, you should be able to get good basic hosting for your website for between $50 and $100 per year at reliable services like godaddy, go-mama-hosting or dotster that includes domain registration and hosting.

You can even get free webhosting at places like 50megs.com but I don't really recommend it. While it's a way to get your own site for free, for giving you free hosting, they will place ads on your site. You don't have any control over what ads appear, so you may end up advertising your own competitors. Free webhosting doesn't really present a credible image either so paid hosting and your own domain name is the best way to go for complete control over what appears on your site and to have the most professional look and feel.

Once you have your own domain name registered and hosting set up, you can fill your website with whatever content you want such as whatever product or service you are selling. You don't need to be an expert in HTML either, but it helps to know a little. With WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) programs like Microsoft Front Page

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