3 best and cheapest ways to start out in Internet Marketing

I’m just passing my 4th month in this exciting journey that is Internet Marketing, and after having tried a couple of things that a newbie usually tries, here are the things that worked for me best so far. Criteria for my choice is twofold:  time involved, and costs involved.

1. Surprising, as I didn’t consider it that strongly in one of my previous posts, Potpie Girl’s One Week Marketing program. And here is why. First of all costs, none, except purchasing her program, which obviously you need to if you want to get started with it.
   Setup costs: buying once her program. No domain name to buy, no hosting, no other hidden costs involved. Time. Although it did take me a bit of time to learn how to use Squidoo, once I got the hang of it, it became very easy and fun too, adding all those ‘buy now’ arrows and calls to action, pictures and videos. Not a boring way to work. I’ve created the Squidoo pages, worked a bit on them to bring them to first page (PotPieGirl explains it all with step by step info and screenshots) and then I forgot all about them. I didn’t even update the lenses as she recommends with new tags, etc, so Google see them as fresh. I simply forgot about them. And last month (so after around 3 months since I set them up), the money started rolling in. People are now clicking on the Buy now button, going to the seller’s page and with my Clickbank affiliate code I get the commission (for one particular product around $52 every time a person buys it). This is absolutely one case of set it up and forget about it and the money will be rolling in. Think I will go back to Squidoo and do more lenses with other affiliate products? Bet I do!
2. The Niche Blogger program. Honestly, I thought this program would be hands down number 1 for me, but although I do earn with it about as much as with my Squidoo lenses, there is a bit more work involved, and so do costs.
   Costs: buy a domain and hosting for each of your blogs.
   Time: Quite a lot, as you need to update the blog quite often for Google to keep you up in ranking (and firstly to get up there!). But it’s fun, and it’s a nice way to have a nice passive income for a long time to come (including Google Adsense).
3. Site Flipping. I’ve only flipped one site so far, but it went quite fast and for a nice change of money.  So if you get good at it, you can rinse and repeat quite often.
   Costs: domain setup + hosting, depending on where you sell the site (I sell at Sitepoint) there is a fee involved in setting up the auction (for startup sites $10).
   Time: less time than working on your Niche Blogger blogs, but you do need at least 10 articles on the site, plus a bit of traffic generating action (some Ezine articles, etc)

What didn’t work well for me so far:

1. Direct affiliation (creating landing pages that will bring the buyers to click on the links and purchase the product from the seller). I think this is because it’s already quite an old way of doing things, and people see through it very quickly. It might work better when you’re no longer a newbie and you know how to make a proper pre-sell page that will entice people to click and buy.
2. My own ebook - not yet as I haven’t focused on it so far.
3. Working with public domain material. Quite difficult to get into because they’re all over the place on the internet and for free as well. For newbies I recommend staying away from it.

Other things, I haven’t tried yet, but I’m open to suggestions. Please feel free to add your comments and what worked and didn’t work for you below.