If you have spent more than an hour or two looking for online business opportunities then you will know there are plenty of people promising fast roads to online wealth. The truth is that most successful online businesses have succeeded because of their owner’s hard work. Fortunately there are genuine business opportunities for those who don’t mind rolling up their sleeves and working online.

Start Your Own Online Publication

There are several types of online publication you could publish. You could launch a web site on your favorite topic. You could start writing a blog. Or you could publish a weekly newsletter sent to subscribers by email.

Whichever type of publication you choose, you must endeavor to build up a good following of readers and visitors. You will be able to earn revenue from advertising, such as Google AdSense, and from sales of your own products and services. If you don’t have any product to sell, consider selling e-books or other information products.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs have emerged in recent years as one of the best ways for companies to market their products and services on the Internet, and they have created opportunities for people wanting to quickly start an online business. Let’s look at how affiliate programs work.

The company, also known as a ‘merchant’, offers a product or service. As an affiliate you sign up to promote the company’s product. Your task as an affiliate is to send a stream of visitors to the company’s web site. You do this using a customized link that allows the company to identify which affiliate referred the visitor. Whenever a visitor sent by you buys a product from the company, you earn a commission.

At ClickBank for example, many e-books typically sell for $30 to $50 and affiliates can earn around 60% for a referral. Many affiliates promote affiliate products through their own web pages and by placing advertisements at Pay-Per-Click search engines.

Article Marketing

On the web, content is king, and good content is hard to come by. That is why one of the best online business opportunities is article marketing. It involves writing articles that webmasters can use for free on their web sites, provided that they include your "About the Author" resource box at the end of the article.

Your author’s resource box should include a live link to your web site or to a product that you want to promote. So article marketing can be used to build traffic to your own web site, or you can drive traffic to landing pages that promote popular affiliate products.

Those are three legitimate online business opportunities for you to consider. All of them require little or no investment and all of them allow you to get started immediately.