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In no way, shape or form do I condone this young mans behavior from Palm Beach.  Yet he went against all odds, dropped out of school and is making a six figure income by being a professional video game player.  18 year old Tom Taylor managed to create a small lucrative franchise through gaming contracts, product endorsements and game tutoring.

He is one of only about 100 professional gamers belonging to the Major League Gaming association founded in 2002.  In a good month, these gamers can bring home a few grand.  He signed a $250,000 contract six months after going pro.  At which time he hired a publicist, a financial advisor and a media trainer. 

The tutoring side of his business charges $65 an hour for those wanting to follow in his footsteps.  Showing aspiring teens how to excel or even go pro as a gamer using just his Xbox Live.

Making commission money as an affiliate is just getting a percentage of the profits by selling some one else’s product. You don’t need your own website to get started, but you will want one later as your profits grow. Above we all ready discussed the importance and power of original articles.

All you need is one good article, and a product to promote and you are ready for the next step.

You should all ready have a PayPal, USFreeAds and Craigs List account. Most people start off with Amazon and Clickbank. Every one knows Amazon, but when you are an affiliate you can write an article or review about a book, TV, jewelry, or what ever – sell it and make money. Clickbank is all digital information products like advanced online marketing, World of Warcraft, Dating, Camping, and so on. (Clickbank digital products payout an average of 50% commissions while Amazon is much less, but the price of what your selling through Amazon could easily make up for that.) If you can’t find what you are looking for there, another very popular affiliate membership site is Commission Junction.

How do you figure out what to sell? Look over the forums and groups that you all ready belong to over the Internet. What is a hot topic? What questions do they have? What problems do they need solved? Once you know that, find yourself something to offer them to answer there questions. Write your article and turn it into a mini web page on Squidoo or HubPages with your affiliate links.

That is it in a nutshell and you’ll notice that none of this costs anything but time. There are several ways to improve, tweak, and optimize this simple overview. Rest assured though, marketers are making thousands a week doing just this. If this affiliate marketing thing sounds like something you would like to pursue, then there is one more free term I must introduce…

Bum Marketing – A method of free marketing that, when taken to the extreme, will get you visitors to your offers 10+ years down the road. Travis Sago invented and perfected the method. He is a top notch guy and enjoys sharing and teaching it to others for free. Click on his site HERE and sign up for some tried and true marketing that will never grow old.

TIP: Once you start down this road you will be bombarded with offers and alternate methods of making money and new ways to market… DO NOT spread yourself thin by trying to learn it all. Get an understanding of how and why this works then you can branch out. Also be leery of old advice on how to advertise on Craigs List. They keep changing the rules because of cheaters and old information could get you banned from there if you abuse there site.

Resources:

Squidoo Profits

Hubpage Guide

Yet another way to profit from your writings is just to share it with the rest of the world and share the money earned from the ads placed with your article (or blog or picture or video). This is the most basic (and least effective) way of generating money from your articles or essays. But if you grasp the concept of how this works, you can graduate to affiliate marketing, bum marketing and Squidoo Lenses.

Take Flixya for example - Here people share there photos, videos and articles with no strings attached. Flixya places ads around your ‘stuff’ and when someone clicks one of those ads you get a portion of the profits. You can imagine that it would take a lot of pages of your content to produce a worth while profit. But when you take an article, with the proper keywords, ad an affiliate link, and create a Squidoo lens, you are on your way to making some real cash….. stick with me here.

Here are a few sites that share ad revenues

www.flixya.com/

www.daytipper.com/

www.chacha.com/

www.metacafe.com/

www.vume.com/

www.hubpages.com/

(Hubpages is like Squidoo where you can add your Amazon, Ebay, Adsense, banner or affiliate links for more chances to make money)

While you can grow a business and customer base through forums and ads, there are also places that will purchase your articles outright. Most will allow you to post your article and basically put it up for sale. People visit these sites just for the purpose of buying content. One site that will purchase your articles up front is Associated Content.

A 500 word article will fetch you $3 - $5 each but have been known to go up to $50 for an article. I’m not sure what made that one so special, but it is possible. When you submit an article to Associated Content, it will take a couple of days for them to read it and make an offer at which time you can except or decline. You can also chose between exclusive (not published anywhere else) or non-exclusive (you all ready have used it else were on the web).

Other sites that pay for articles:

www.constant-content.com

www.helium.com/

www.lifetips.com/

www.howtodothings.com/

www.shvoong.com/

www.articlewarehouse.com/

www.authorconnection.com/

If you are going to stick around with internet marketing, you will soon find out that original content is king. For this reason, ghost writers are is in high demand. Online marketers are always looking for original articles to put on there web pages or convert into E-books.

On average, a beginner can make $5 for a 500 word article. As you grow a reputation, it is easy to charges up to $30 per article. Once again, while there are thousands of ways to advertise your services, Warrior Forum and Digital Point are the most popular hangouts for Internet marketers. Scan through the posts looking for people asking for some one to write for them and use the private messaging feature. Do not respond to these sorts of inquiries though posting. Also take advantage of USFreeAds and Craigs List being as they are the largest, most popular sites for placing classified ads.