To get rid of your day job and make money online, you have to take several different factors into account during your decision process. When you work from home, do you want a job where your pay is directly proportional to the amount of work you do? To most people, the ideal work from home opportunity involves making an automated income online where they work to increase their income rather than work just for a steady paycheck.

You don’t necessarily have to develop and market your own products to begin making money online on autopilot. In fact, when starting an online business that revolves around selling your own products, you will have to interact with your customers on a regular basis unless you outsource these tasks. These tasks involve customer support, continual marketing, product development, and even shipping and order processing. Arguably, the easiest and most cost-effective way to start making money online is with affiliate marketing. This means you generate sales leads, and the vendor takes care of the rest from that point on.

There are a myriad of affiliate networks on the web that make it possible to sell millions of products. You are paid generous commissions just to refer customers to those products. You can get paid per lead or per sale and even per click. Commissions are highest for a complete sale and lowest for pay per click, but you won’t make any money if you don’t have the traffic. Getting general traffic is extremely easy with paid traffic campaigns, but the problem there is that they don’t convert very well and it costs money. You also don’t want just any free traffic. You need traffic comprised of visitors with buying intent.

Affiliates used to rely strictly on search engine optimization for generating free buyer traffic, and this made their online business extremely vulnerable. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and criteria for rankings, and the success of affiliate websites were directly related to search engine rankings. Social media marketing has become an extremely important aspect to any type of business. Social networking has become a huge part of most people’s lives, and businesses that have gone online are leveraging this new source of advertising with great success. However, on top of taking advantage of social media’s viral traffic potential, you will still want to optimize your websites for keywords to also rank in the search engines.

Placing links on high-traffic websites is a great way to start getting targeted visitors to your website. However, you will need to make sure that you are placing your links on websites and blogs that are relevant to your niche or topic you are discussing. If you place links on sites that are not relevant, you are going to get very little traffic through those links. Google looks at these links as backlinks, and they also want to see that you have placed them on relevant websites in efforts to provide helpful information in your niche.

Aside from the traditional methods of creating backlinks, social media backlinks and social signals are also a high quality way to promote your website. Google is now favoring relevant and quality backlinks that also attract human traffic. If users actually click on your backlinks and stay on your website, this must mean that your content is quality and that you placed your backlinks in relevant areas. Google basically wants to see that you are active and engaged in your niche and that you are really placing links on other sites solely in efforts to obtain human traffic and not just to rank in the search engines. It's not easy to make money online, but it can be extremely profitable with enough dedication and passion.