Making money on the Internet is a new way to earn a living. The traditional model is to find a job and go to a place of employment. The new model is getting more and more to work from a home office and make money using the Internet. Many people have the mistaken idea that making money online is easy. They reason that if only you can find the "secrets" of Internet marketing you can make a lot of money the easy way. This is a myth that is propagated by a great many unscrupulous individuals that prey on those not familiar with the Internet and the requirements for successful marketing campaigns. Internet marketing is indeed a relatively new way of making money.

The Internet itself is only about 50 years old. What started out as a university research tool has evolved into a global information highway. Early on astute marketers saw that it might be possible to commercialize the fledgling Internet. Starting from crude and simple sales messages that Internet has evolved into a sophisticated and very competitive, global marketplace.

The evolution of Internet marketing has brought about some new marketing requirements. A major problem that quickly developed with the Internet was how to find items of interest on the web. In fact, initially early marketers were confronted with the question of exactly what you put on the web to present your sales case and to convince people to buy a product or service. What evolved was the concept of designing so-called websites. Here again the evolution started as crude solicitations of business and rapidly developed into almost an art form. Today websites can be a simple as a single page promoting a single item or some websites can have hundreds of pages presenting a full virtual store to potential customers.

Getting back to the question of finding items on the Internet brings out the concept of "search engines". A not so obvious solution to the problem was the development of software wherein you could enter a word or phrase and miraculously the program would search the Internet and almost instantly locate one or more websites pertaining to your interest. This software was developed by several companies that rapidly evolved into internet giants such as Google and Yahoo.

With the advent of search engines, the competition among website designers to come up with methods whereby the search engines would identify their websites and present them to prospective customers began. This competition brought up the concept of "keywords", that is selected words and phrases that the search engines would quickly find and identify a website as being relevant to the search at hand. The genesis of keywords is identifying words and phrases that I web user might place of a search engine to find the topics in which they are interested. The search engines seek out websites based on their relevancy to the desired topic. With the advent of keywords and search engines it became imperative to design a website where the placement of keywords would optimize the presentation of a website to the search engines.

The object of all this is to have the search engine such as Google or Yahoo position a given website on the first page that is presented when a search is initiated. The reasoning behind this is that potential buyers will in a high percentage of the time elects to click on the first website that seems to give them the information and/or products that they desire. In short, the closer to position one in a given search results the more likely it is that a sale will result.

This description of the rudiments of Internet marketing barely scratch the surface of this new form of merchandising. My point being that making money online requires not only a new set of skills but a new way of thinking.