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Ever since the Internet was introduced people have found ways to use it to earn money online. At present this is not only considered to be the highway of information but also the easiest vehicle to earn one's livelihood with the least or even no capital investment. Is the affiliate internet business one among those online enterprises that require zero capital?

What Is Required To Set Up An Affiliate Internet Business?

Affiliate programs are often touted to be zero investment online business opportunities and people from all over the world try to break into this market all the time. Is the belief that this is a method where you could earn without investing any money true? Before coming to any conclusion, let us look at what is required to launch this type of business.

1. Domain and web hosting - the first thing you would need is a virtual location on the Net, just as you would need a shop in the real world. On the Net this would mean you get a domain name (shop name) and a web host (location on the Net). You could get these for free, but if you want to succeed at this business, you would do good to avoid the free stuff and go for paid services - the lowest acceptable being about US $10 per month. Though you could use a blog (which is free) for affiliate internet business, a website is always a better choice.

2. Promotional letters - affiliate marketing is normally done through direct approach (sales letters) or indirect approach (advertisements). Creating a good set of sales letters for your autoresponder (system which distributes emails automatically at pre-programmed intervals) takes a lot of effort and time if you do it yourself; if you opt for hiring a writer for this task, this might set you back by about US $100.

3. Protection against theft - most of the affiliate businesses are based on promoting and selling digital products which are to be downloaded by the buyer after the payment is done. In order to have these digital products protected against theft, you need to get a special software which would ensure that your products are not pilfered without payment. One of the most popular software for this purpose is the DLGuard, which is priced at about US $120.

4. Tracking your performance - since the affiliate internet business depends upon your optimum performance, it is very important that you work out a monitoring system to keep a track on how many sales you are generating through what system or method so you would know what and where you should fine tune for better results. This will take many hours of your time, not to mention your effort in putting the system on the right track. Alternatively, you could hire a professional company to do this which would set you back by a few hundred dollars.

As you could see, there is a minimum investment required, but this would very much be under maximum US $500. At the same time you should be aware that some large affiliate programs would offer you all the required tools, including website and web hosting for promoting their product eliminating the need to spend anything on this. In this case zero investment affiliate internet business would be realty.