It’s a dream that’s been around since the dawn of time, or at least since humans started using money as a medium of exchange; making fast easy money, and lots of it. With the advent of the Internet, that dream of fast, easy money can be a reality for more people than ever before. One of the great things about pursuing a business online is that you can begin with very little money, at home, and rapidly grow your business until you are making an excellent, full time income. If you play your cards right, you won’t have to work full time to do it either.

Oh, you may have to put in substantial effort at first to get everything rolling, and the money may not be truly easy, but earning money on the Internet is a relatively simple process. Unlike so many other businesses you won’t need to stock inventory, build or rent a store front, or hire employees (at some point you may want to, however). Another huge advantage to an Internet business is that you can see the effect of changes in your marketing efforts very quickly, allowing you to rapidly make changes before you’ve expended much of your marketing budget. What’s even better is that you actually need very little in your marketing budget at all.

There are many great ways to make fast, easy money on the Internet, but here are three of the best. They were chosen for their simplicity, earnings potential, and effectiveness when starting with little or no money. Many people make hundreds of extra dollars a week using these methods, while putting in only an hour or two a week. Some people have embraced a more ambitious approach, and are earning many, many times this amount. You can decide how much money you want to make.

One proven way to make money on the Internet is through the use of affiliate marketing, also known as “selling other people’s stuff”. An affiliate marketer simply refers people to another company’s website. If that referral generates the desired response, the affiliate earns a commission. The desired response can be a sale, a lead, or some other response. Most companies pay a percentage of the order’s sales price for an affiliate commission, but some pay a set fee. Leads generated by the affiliate are usually paid on a per lead basis. Lead referral fees range from a few cents per lead to over $20 per lead. You can see how affiliate payments add up in a hurry.

Another way to make a large amount of money online in a short period of time is to start your own online storefront. Don’t worry, you won’t need a garage full of merchandise and a UPS account to make this happen. Most people who are successful using an online storefront use vendors called drop shippers. Drop shippers take care of fulfilling your orders for you. They store, pack, and ship the products ordered by your customers without you ever touching it. They’ll even include one of your invoices so it looks like the products your customer ordered were shipped directly from your warehouse.

When a visitor to your website orders something, you simply process the customer’s credit card and email the order along to the appropriate vendor along with the customer’s ship to address. The customer receives the product and you pay the vendor by credit card. You pocket the difference between the vendor’s price and your sales price to the customer. What could be simpler? You can make a tremendous amount of money this way, but in return, you must provide some sort of customer service infrastructure to answer questions, process returns and work out any snafus that may come up.

The third way to make fast, easy money on the Internet is using online pay per click advertising. The best known of these programs are Google’s Adsense and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture), although many other exist. You’ve probably seen these ads many times, in fact, they’re probably some of these ads on the page you’re looking at now. They are the small ads strewn throughout many websites, either along the side, or grouped in blocks within the page’s content. Google Adsense ads will have a small “Ads by Google” tag line under the ads, so they’re easy to recognize.

You simply put these ads on your website and every time someone clicks on one of them, you get paid. It’s usually only a few cents or so per click, but highly trafficked websites that have highly paid ads can generate Do not abuse them, by clicking on the ads or having friends do it for you. Such violations are against the terms of service with most pay per click programs and will get you dropped from the program. They key to generating a large revenue stream with pay per click programs is to have websites that generate large amounts of traffic.

The great thing is that you don’t have to worry about selling anything. You just provide visitors with valuable information and a way to leave your site when they are through. When the do so, you’ll most likely make some money. Some Google Adsense publishers are reported to make thousands of dollars a week. In fact, Google used to send paychecks UPS Next Day Air to publishers that made over $10,000 per month. Those that got paid this way were members of the informal “UPS Club”.

Just from these three ways, you can see there is tremendous potential to make fast, easy money on the Internet. Thousands of small entrepreneurs are making great livings on line, and haven’t had a day job in years. You could be next.