The thought of owning my own online business has been on my mind for quite some time; several years in fact. So long that when the idea first popped into my head I was not even old enough to be able to obtain what I needed to start my own business. My main goal was to make money on my own while I'm in college. After spending a summer working at a retail store in an amusement park, I did not want to work a low paying, highly stressful summer job again since those are the jobs usually available to teenagers. It probably all started when I probably saw some late night infomercial about online buisness and the idea stuck. I've come a long way since then.

Over the years I have had several business ideas. A while back I wanted to make money selling items on eBay after watching one of those infomercials. I even tried learning about wholesale, drop shipping, all that good stuff. At the time I wasn't old enough to buy this $97 ebook which claimed to teach one everything to know about running an eBay business, and guaranteed that it could help make a ton of money from eBay. Time passed and the whole idea of eBay sort of slipped away. Then one day while reading some free ebooks I had managed to obtain, the idea of making money online from affiliates was brought to my attention.

The idea of affiliates was very simple: promote a site that sells a product/service/whatever, and when you refer someone to that site who ends up buying something, you get a commission, a part of the profit. That is easier said than done. How does one go about promoting these sites? How does one find items to promote that will actually sell? What should promote and be affiliated with in the first place? These questions and many more are questions that befall pretty much anyone interested in making money through affiliates. Personally, I have no knowledge of HTML whatsoever and have no idea how to build my own affiliate site. There is also the problem of getting traffic; people to see your affiliate site and (hopefully) click on your affiliate link and buy what is being promoted. After all, it doesn't matter how cool your site looks if nobody sees it.

My solution? A site called "Plug in Profit". There was no way possible for some idiot like me to make my own site, find the right affiliates and promote my site to make money, so Plug in Profits did all of that and more for me. It hooked me up with all of these affiliate networks to join so I could promote their products right away. On top of it all, the start up capital for me for this entire system was less than the price of that $97 ebook about eBay business. Ah, the irony of it all...

The journey is far from over right now, and it may never truly end, but I know I'll be ready for whatever comes next.