The Downside & The Otherside:

Many people want to learn how to make money on the internet and many more have fallen for scam after scam due to savvy marketing professional working for the darkside--I feel for those people. Not only were their hopes of making a residual income online completely shattered, their wallets came out of the siutation as beaten and bruised as their egos.

You took a leap of faith into the world of interneting marketing and were lied to by some Dark Sith Lord of Affiliate Marketing. You should have been rewarded by taking the path less trampled for trying something that everyone else said was foolish, not taken advantage of.

Let me start off by saying that I was a born skeptic. I never bought into any of those affiliate marketing gurus or any of that--I was put off immediately by the cheesy websites and god-awful review pages that looked like a three-yeard-old child had assembled during recess right after sniffing glue.

I'm not any smarter than anyone else and there's nothing really that special about me, but I have been around the interent since the earlier days of online evolution and I had seen enough scams pass through my life in physical form.

Plain and simple, I was lucky.

I had a friend who signed up for a course and he made a lot of money doing it. He made money by simply writing helpful articles online and pointing to his websites that would eventually lead people to the products they were looking for--he was an article marketer.

Article marketing has earned a bad reputation, but the idea behind the process isn't bad--the point for many of the affiliate marketers working for the good side of the force intend to help their customers and not mislead.

Internet marketing is real. Affiliate marketing is real. Residual online income is real.

It's all possible, but it's definitely not easy. Take it from someone who has been churning out articles and websites for two years now. I have made money online, but I have put the time in--once the mileage is in, the income will come...gradually.

In order to succeed in online marketing you'll need to be able to do a few things first:

• Search for things online
• Write understandable content
• Dedicate Yourself
• Take Action

I know it sounds simple, but it's not. Each of these things present a challenge of their own and I'm actually going to ellaborate a little on each of these below for you:

• Search - Type words into Google
• Write - Put letters into your own words
• Dedicate - Spend hours upon hours online research and writing everyday
• Take Action - Do not fall into a vicious cycle of reading and researching

It does still sound pretty simple, but dedication is a tricky thing when your prancing around one of the biggest time-wasters known to humanity: the internet.

Sometimes it takes a little faith in a program to get it off the ground, and the day that my friend began telling me about what was actually possible online, I took that leap. My initial out-of-pocket was around $40 and at the time to me a rather large investment.

But, I got to thinking about it, how many times do I waste my money on something that I don't need? Why not take a chance on something that is obviously working for someone else with similar interests to me?

So, I added up the money that I believed that I had wasted in the last month and justified that initial investment. Since then, I have been paid back numerous times over. I haven't looked back. Internet marketing is the "American Dream" for me.

This article is more or less my personal experience and a statement of belief in the internet marketing industry. I just want to used this to speak to the internet community and relay the message that there are real ways to make money online.

Just be warned, they do take time and you're more than likely not going to hit a homerun the first time out batting for the team--although, there are newcomers that do that very thing--I still envy them when I read their posts.