The Proven Way to Make Money Online

Writing an email with a single link to a page full of ads is not the way to make money online. There are many ways to earn a decent living online, and some of them don't require being nearly as sleazy as spammers' tricks.

It's important to point out that there are already plenty of ads online. What the spammers are doing is only making the web a more full-of-ads place.

To be considered an affiliate, you must have at least 10 links on your site. And they're not welcome in my guest book: 

You can be an affiliate, but you must never sell your own stuff on your site (link or otherwise). You must not use banner ads, pop-ups, or any other virtual intruders in a visitor's experience to make money for yourself. Usually you'll get better results promoting other people's stuff than spamming other people's sites with your own ad space.

Spammers don't really care if they drive their own traffic away. They could be spamming a blog or website that they own and not even realize it. Spam is often a one-way street, causing more problems for the spammer than for the recipients.

The Golden Rule of Affiliate Programs:

Make sure you choose affiliate programs that will sell stuff that matches with your site's content. 

This is called the affiliate's "cookie". Make sure you always promote affiliate products on your site that are specifically related to your content.

You could review an affiliate program, or post a link on your site. Then you can go ahead and make an affiliate link for yourself.

This is to avoid conflicts of interest. You don't want your reputation tarnished because you promote such-and-such product and the company loses credibility because of that.

Spammy ad sites are unreliable, unless you get paid per hit (i.e., pay-per-click). You can count on payments from affiliate programs, as long as the site is receiving enough visitors to make money from its ads.

Widely known affiliate programs include eBay, Amazon, Google AdWords, Clickbank and Commission Junction (formerly LinkShare).

If you have an eBay account, you can earn commissions from eBay's affiliate program. So you can use eBay as both an e-commerce store and as a way to sell affiliate products.

It has quite a few things going for it:

The cost of signing up is minimal. It's available to anyone, worldwide — not just big American companies or UK ones. There are many affiliate programs besides eBay's (over 3,000). You can choose which ones to join so that your site content remains related to your product recommendations. Your site doesn't get cluttered with ads and links that don't match your content. You get to recommend products to people who have already expressed interest in what you have to say.

To learn how to use eBay as an affiliate, check out this article .

Amazon is a very popular e-commerce site, prone to lots of traffic. Probably the single best thing about Amazon's affiliate program is that you get paid recurring income. This means that if someone buys a product from your link and then buys the same product on a later date, you still get paid for the second (or third) sale.

It has a lot of things going for it:

You don't need to build an entire website.

Conclusion: it's a no-brainer to try out affiliate marketing. If you are not at least trying to earn money from your site, you are not trying hard enough.

One word of advice though — don't do anything that will drive your loyal fans away.

If you start adding ads on your site, make sure they're not "intrusive" ads, meaning they won't scare your visitors away.

Spam and sleaze will never help you make money online for the long haul. The money Spammers make is short term and unsustainable, even if it is a lot of money that most people would love to have in the short term.

What can be done about them? Probably nothing.