Amid all noise and hype on Internet today, not many people realize that all ideas and techniques you can find are petty much useless if you don't first understand your business model. In other words, even most amazing Internet marketing technique will not work if you don't understand how to apply it to YOUR business.

The 3 most popular business models are:

1) Affiliate Marketing

This is perhaps most popular one out there, since there are absolutely no barriers to entry. Almost anyone can sign-up for an affiliate program for free and start promoting product or service on Internet with hopes that someone will buy, giving them instant commissions. Affiliate marketers don't carry any risk, since they do not pay for creation of product, they do not handle customer service and they do not need any up-front investments.

When you consider that those are top three things people want to avoid, it's no surprise that almost everyone and their neighbor promotes an affiliate program or another. In fact, if there is a single reason why Internet today is so proliferated with ads and banners, it's because of affiliate programs.

Even though there are so many affiliate marketers out there, only 5% ever make any money and only 1% makes big money. The "Super Affiliates" do it very differently from all other millions; therefore they earn big checks.

You can get a good idea of how to be a good affiliate marketer here: http://affiliatemarketing.sitesell.com/globalmillionaire.html

2) E-book and Information Publishing

Sitting at other end of spectrum, e-book authors need to be more disciplined in their approach to Internet marketing. Of course, they also need to invest more than affiliates do. While affiliates can get away trying to "get something for nothing" same is not true for e-book type of business.

If you're thinking about publishing and selling your own e-book online, and you think it's going to be easy, think again. You'll need to learn a lot more than affiliates are required to. You'll need to spend some amount of money getting your business up and running. However, when you do it right, payoff in this online business model is much more rewarding.

The reason why e-book marketers and "Infopreneurs" make more money is simple; they have very, very low production and maintenance costs. Anything digital doesn't cost a single cent to be produced in millions if necessary. Whatever initial start-up costs spent can be covered by selling just a few copies of high-margin e-books, and you can even recruit an army of affiliates who are more than willing to do all selling for you.

There are dozens of reasons why you should look up forums that are related to your market and post to them often. Here are 3 to get you started.

1- Get to Know Your Market as both an Associate and An Expert

The research alone is a good enough reason to at least sign up to some forums and read. Just by reading posts in forums, you can hear what your market concerns are, straight from consumers. You'll be able to find what their pains are - look particularly for frequent questions that don't appear to have solutions.

For example, if you sell timeshares, and you join travel communities, you may often hear questions asking for best times of year to visit a certain region or locale. With this information you could start a section at your site for every listing that tells cheapest time to travel for that area, best time of year for good weather, and other special bits of information a traveler might want.

When you're comfortable enough to begin posting, after watching conversation for a few days, or perhaps even a week, you might find that new people have questions that you can help them with. By consistently becoming go-to person, you increase your credibility as a knowledgeable expert, and people begin to trust your ability to provide information.

2- Increase Your Site's Visibility With More Targeted Links Back to Your Site

Many forums are run by hobbyists who aren't so much concerned with marking money from their visitors, as having an established community for discourse on certain issues. These forums will often allow you to leave a link to your site in every post. The ones that are open to public viewing for visitors are also frequently spidered by search engines.

If you set up your link correctly, you'll then have topical links back to your own forum. Even if search engine spiders can't see these links at forums that can be viewed by registered users only, you will also find that once you become a part of community, other members will click your link out of curiosity or because they're looking for something specific that you may have at your site.