There are several types of websites you can set up:

Product or service orientated

Affiliate program orientated

Content/ad based

Product / Service Orientated:

With this type of website, you create a product or service, and then charge people for its use or access. This is time consuming if it is your first time, but highly profitable if it is a digital product. This is because with digital products such as ebooks, you only have to pay a few small fees such as web hosting, domain name, html compiler etc. There are no expensive overheads such as premises, which you would have with a brick and mortar business.

With this type of website, you should have a target market in mind and you should have a good knowledge of it.

Digital products can be a one time effort and then just collect the money with every purchase, where as a service may require the occasional maintenance.

Affiliate Program orientated:

With this type of website, all you need is an interest in a topic and a good knowledge of it, find the target market, then include a few affiliate links which are related to it. Obviously it's a bit more work intensive than that, but that's the gist of it.

The best thing to do would be to keep this website focused on one area, such as golf. Then perhaps you could include reviews of as many golf clubs on the market as you can, and for each one, include an affiliate link to a golf shop at the bottom of the review.

Please remember that you are not selling to the visitors of your site. You are just supposed to be providing them with information, your affiliate partner is the one that does all the selling. All you have to be concerned about is getting people to click on your affiliate link

Content/ Ad based website:

These are very profitable, but also take a very long time to start up. Marketershandbook.com is an example of a content based website. I have content for people to read, and I also have several advertisements on a few pages, this is what pays for the cost of development and maintenance. of the website.

Each of these articles has been search engine optimized for a specific keyword to bring in more traffic for that keyword, this in turn, generates highly targeted traffic which will be interested in the ads which are displayed, hopefully generating revenue.

This way everyone wins, you the reader get free valuable content, the advertiser's generate income though sales, and I generate our income from the advertisers. If you have the time, this is one of the best websites to choose in our opinion.

The best part is, even if you don't have knowledge of the area you want to write about, you can still do this type of website, however it will cost you more money. You can hire people to write the articles for you at quite a low price. If this is the route you want to take, then you should go down to elance.com. Its a website with more people dedicated to specific tasks than you could ever need. And it's completely free. I definitely recommend you check it out.

Stephen Warren is the creator and webmaster of http://www.marketershandbook.com, a completely free business and marketing resource which anyone may use.

freeserve.net@swarren30.fsnet.co.uk