Generally people think that to run a business they need to invest heavily. With the popularity of Internet increasing day by day you don't have to invest even a single penny. Starting an online business can be one of the easiest ways to start a business and earn from home. You don't even need an office. The only requirement is a computer with an Internet connection.

How to Start an Online Business with Minimal Investment Now the question in your mind would be that if you don't need an office, and you don't need to invest then what do you need to do? You need to become an affiliate for a good company and start selling their products to earn commissions. For this you don't need to have your own product but actually you are just promoting someone else's product to get paid.

However, it should be made very clear that this does not mean you don't have to work at all and by becoming an affiliate you can start getting money by merely sitting at home. After all, you need to promote the products through your web site or newsletter.

Get a Free Web Site

To have a web site you don't need to be a web expert. Without knowing any web language you can create a web site which will be your virtual office. There are a lot of web sites offering free web space without any cost. Web sites such as www.angelfire.com provide an option where you can get a free web space. You just have to register yourself and you can easily develop your own web site by just clicking a few links. No need to have HTML knowledge as you can directly configure your site and choose different background colors for your web site. They even provide very useful tools like page hit counter to have a record of the number of visitors visiting your site.

Since free web site services almost always require you to show the advertisements of the company hosting your site, once you start earning money, it is often a good idea to pay a web hosting company to serve your web site.

Research Affiliate Companies

Don't expect high returns from day one. Every business takes some time to establish and to earn

Promote Your Business

The success of an affiliate marketing business is promotion. If your site can draw people's attention and then direct them to the affiliate company's web site then your earning potential is limitless.

To be successful it helps to spend time doing initial research to choose the right affiliate program that can give you maximum profits. Then you will need to follow through with a good marketing plan. While choosing the affiliate program, give thought to the process you'll be following to promote the sales of the product. Since you would be more involved in the pre-sales, your web site should have good content regarding the product. If the conversion rate of the prospects to actual buyers is high from your site then you can consider yourself a good affiliate. Initial time spent on deciding the right product to promote is key to fetching good dividends later on.
About the Author

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com.