Basically, you just sit back and wait for those huge commission checks to roll in.

Sound too good to be true? Good, because you guessed it. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I'm referring to affiliate 'links' opportunity sites that are becoming increasingly popular. 'All' you have to do is promote site.

In these schemes, you are given a free site into which you insert your affiliate link. That link becomes 'featured link' on your site. Featured link? Picture a site like Yahoo!, then try to pick out one link as being featured. Can't do it, can you?

As owner of a fr*ee site, you also earn a paltry commission when you sell one of these sites to someone else. Earning a commission on sale of a product or service from which no one benefits sounds like ML*M to me.

Now here's good part. For a 'small fee' company promises to do 'all work' of building masses of traffic to your affiliate site.

Oh wait. Before you can earn commissions from those links, you'll have to JOIN all those programs first. Until then, links belong to person who gave you fr*ee site, and any sales made from those links will be credited to him, not you.

Considering those sites typically consist of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of links to various affiliate programs, it's starting to look like you're going to have to do some work, doesn't it?

Unless your pockets are incredibly deep, broadbrush or 'mall' approach won't work for your small business. The cost to advertise to people across a large number of interest categories is prohibitive; and untargetted, unfocused visitors don't buy products.

To attract focused, interested visitors, you yourself must become focused and interested in your subject matter.

First you pick a topic, and then refine it. And then you refine it some more. And some more.

Let's say that you're a sports enthusiast.

You know that millions of people are also interested in sports, and you'd be willing to bet that 'sports' would be a lucrative niche and search term to advertise, right? Well, you're right on first count, but you'd lose money on second.

Let's check out demand using Overture's search term suggestion tool:

==> http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Although Overture reported over 800,000 searches for term 'sports' in April 2003, and you can have top listing for term for a 'mere' 21 cents, how many sales might you expect to generate with that popular term?

Not many!

Even if only one percent of that 800,000 searchers visited your site, and you had top listing at twenty-one cents, my guess is that you just wasted $1,680.00. The term 'sports' is just too unspecific.

If while doing keyword research using search term suggestion tool at Overture, you looked one line below 'sports', you'd see that second entry is 'sports car' with more almost 200 hundred thousand searches, or one quarter of all searches that included term 'sports'.