If you are online looking for ways to make money, you'll no doubt be bombarded with places and people trying to convince you to learn affiliate marketing to make money.

But even some of the best places where you can learn affiliate marketing fail to tell you how much money - if any - is needed to start, what the real risks are for the method they teach, and how scaleable the method is.

If you do want to learn affiliate marketing...great. It is an excellent way to earn money online. However don't go into it thinking you'll make a fortune overnight. You won't.

What I'll help you do here is figure out what is the best way for you to learn affiliate marketing based on your time availability, available money, credit history, and risk tolerance.

There are affiliate marketing methods that require little or no money. And then there are affiliate marketing methods that require that you buy advertising and leverage your profits into buying more and more advertising over time.

I'll help you figure out which method or methods are right for you.

And remember you can always start with free or low-cost ways to profit from affiliate marketing and then use that money to move into methods that require you to buy advertising. For many people that can be a great solutions.

The book Google Cash became so insanely popular at one point that it started a seemingly never-ending flood of knock-offs having to do with using Google Adwords to promote affiliate programs. Anyone and everyone started writing books about adwords affiliate marketing. And anyone and everyone started promoting these books - even if they had never had real success using pay per click themselves.

But the net effect was an internet marketplace flooded with books about making money using adwords to promote affiliate products. And while it's true that there's still big money to be made using this method - it is definitely not the best way for the person starting to learn affiliate marketing to proceed.

I've actually made a full-time living for years with this method - and I still would not recommend it as the best place for a beginning affiliate marketer to start.

There seems to be a frenzy of activity these days of people chasing after the ultimate search engine loophole. Sometimes they aren't really loopholes, but merely realizations of what an individual search engine wants.

With Google it's easy in a sense. Google wants great content, great visitor experiences, and easy navigation. They don't want misleading labels on webpages - especially when it applies to Adsense. And they definitely do NOT want sites disabling the back button - a rookie mistake that I still see week to week.

MSN and Yahoo are still trying to catch up with the "Google Experience" so they are usually the ones to get slammed with many of the less-than-straightforward SEO gaming techniques.

Web 2.0 affiliate marketing systems are the place to start.

First a quick definition of Web 2.0 which WikiPedia defines as "a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services - such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies - which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.

Probaby the most important part of this definition for the person trying to learn affiliate marketing is the "hosted services". What this means is that there are websites that will host services such as easy to use page-builders which makes it very easy for you to build a web presence for free and without needing much - if any - real technical skills.

The reason why this is important is because you eliminate a lot of headaches - such as how to build, upload, and manage websites - that hinder the progress of a lot of beginning affiliate marketers. And even if you are capable of doing or learning how to build and manage your own website, you're still better of starting with Web 2.0 services so that you can spend your time focusing on the marketing part of affiliate marketing.

Currently, I think the best system for a beginner to use to start to learn affilaite marketing is through the Surefire Success System. It's a terrific system because it shows you how to get paid up front while also generating residual income.

In fact you'll learn multiple ways to generate income using free and low-cost traffic generation techniques.

The other great thing about the system is the fact that you get access to a very organized forum where there are many people that will help you to succeed.

If you want other ideas, you may want to check out this list of the 10 best home based business ideas.

There are two major categories of affiliate marketing training that you should avoid:

• Rebate Processor Jobs - these are sites that sell you the opportunity to become a rebate processor, but all they really do is provide you with some pretty terrible affiliate marketing training.
• Data Entry Jobs - pretty much the same as above except this time the sites pretend that they are offering you a data entry job.