How to create that online money-spinner that works automatically, even when you sleep, is a question often asked.

One solution — rather an old one, it has to be said — is affiliate marketing. Essentially, this is signing up as an affiliate with a website selling products off its site. When anyone clicks over from your site and purchases the product, a “cookie” (a little scrap of software identifying you) registers a percentage of the price paid. This may vary from 4pc on the Amazon Associates scheme, to a bumper 50pc for selling an eproduct, like an ebook or ecourse.

Quite often you’ll find an “Affiliates” link in the footer on retail and other websites. An alternative is to use a mass afilliation scheme like Commission Junction or Tradedoubler, where you can choose from a large range of schemes from crafts to credit cards.

So long as the product or service matches the subject of your site, you should be able to make a start.

Many of the early Internet marketers started out on affiliate schemes. Some became millionaires quite quickly, by first doing well, then selling their own ebooks on how they did it.

The secret is to presell the product on your site before the client clicks through to the seller’s site. That way they are much more inclined to buy.

From there, it’s a numbers game. The more traffic your site generates, the more likely you are to get sales. That early lesson made serious affiliate marketers become experts in SEO — search-engine optimization — whereby the site figures prominently in Google and other search results for certain keywords.

An understanding of the keywords searched for for each product is also necessary to do well from this process. There are keyword aids available free on the net.

Affiliate marketing can be tough if you go about it the wrong way. But with hard work and a shrewd eye for a chance, you could do very well at it.

People make whole careers out of advising on how to get websites to feature prominently on search engines such as Google. The process is called search engine optimisation, but it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Duncan Jennings started his first website when he was 17. At 24, now owns www.econversions.com. He says :

“All websites want to appear at the top of the list when someone searches on Google. In response to a search, Google will take all the websites that are relevant and rank them according to the number and quality of other sites that have linked to them. If you can get links to your site on lots of others, you will be ranked higher and you will get more traffic. It builds from there.”

We hear many horror stories about personal loans. As it’s Halloween here’s a bit of advice for beginners.

If you’re looking to borrow a sum of money then the chances are that you’ll look to take out a personal loan rather than any other type. The term personal loan is simply used to describe standard types of borrowing – i.e. a loan taken out by a consumer rather than a business for general purposes (but not for a mortgage which is obviously dealt with by a mortgage loan).

The majority of personal loans can be used for any purpose and the chances are that your lender won’t even be hugely interested in what you want the money for. Their primary concern is checking that you’ll be able to repay your loan! This situation can be different with specialist loans (which also fall under the banner of personal loans) such as home improvement loans and car loans, for example. These loans are expected to be used for their specified purpose – i.e. a major DIY project or a car purchase.

Apart from this fact the majority of personal loans work in much the same way. You apply for your loan, get your money and then spend it as you intended. You will then make a regular payment (usually on a monthly basis) to your lender to repay the money you borrowed for the period of time in your loans agreement. This payment will be made up of a sum of money that goes to pay off the original sum you borrowed plus a sum that goes towards paying off the interest you’ll be charged. So, at the end of your loan term you’ll have repaid your original borrowings and the interest attached to your particular loan.

One difference worth noting here is that between unsecured and secured personal loans. Unsecured loans are given to consumers without security (or to those that choose not to use available security to get a loan). These loans will generally have higher interest rates attached to them than secured loan options and you may be restricted in how much you can actually borrow here. Secured loans, on the other hand, will have lower interest rates and can be taken out for higher sums. The reason behind this is the fact that this kind of loan will use your property (usually your home) as a guarantee against your loan. So, if you default on your repayments your lender has a cast-iron guarantee that they will get their money back via the property you used as security.

If you aren’t a home owner then you will generally be restricted to taking out unsecured loans here but, if you do own your own property, then you’ll have to make a choice between a secured or unsecured loan. This really boils down to personal preference and how comfortable you are using your home as security in order to get a better deal. In the majority of cases this isn’t an issue and most people will opt for secured loans to get the right kinds of rates and loan amounts for their purposes.

Do be careful to make sure that you understand both how personal loans work and how to get the best rates for the loans you take out before you sign up to anything. There are hundreds of sites on the Internet that can give you more detailed information or that can even help you apply for a loan – take a look online for personal loans in a UK search engine (such as msn.co.uk for example) before you start for some useful information.

Our guest writer, Gary Tallon, is a UK finance author with over 10 years of journalistic experience behind him. To read some more of his wisdom visit his http://cheap-personal-loans.blogspot.com & http://life-insurance-cover.blogspot.com blogs.

The Money Blog has no connection with the author or the websites.

There are many ways of finding a loan. Nowadays many people go online to dig out the crucial details of both lenders and loans. Here, John Mussi takes us through the process:

Researching the options available to you for a loan can be a long task, especially if you don’t take advantage of some of the features available to you on the internet. In addition to simply finding out basic loan information, you can whether certain types of loans are right for you and in the case of some lenders actually apply for your loan directly from the lender’s website.

In order to find out whether researching your loan options online is right for you and to learn how to do your research so as to optimize your experience, here is some information on online loan research options that you might find helpful.

Starting your search
When starting a search for loan information online, you should always use your preferred search engine to find the sites that may provide you with the information that you’re looking for. Use keywords for the type of loan or lender that you want information on, and you should receive several pages worth of results for potential lenders and financial information sites. Generally, the first page of results will offer you the most pertinent results for your search keywords, though some may also appear on the second page.

Of course, if you’re looking for a specific lender, you can search for their website or go directly to it if you have the website URL.

Researching physical lenders
If you’re looking for additional information on physical lenders in your area, you can likely find out about them and the loans that they offer form the lender’s website or from a portal website that has links and information on several different lenders of the same type.

Depending upon how complex the website is, you may be able to find either a large or a smaller amount of information on lender specifics or on certain types of loans. Even for those websites that are primitive and don’t offer much in the way of specific information, you can still find phone numbers and ways to contact customer support and make information requests.

You can also take time to research other methods of finding information, such as service reviews from online newspapers and e-zines as well as “best of” competitions that some communities have to determine which businesses in their area provides the best services.

Finding an online lender
In addition to simply finding information on physical lenders, you can use the internet to find a lender that does their business exclusively online. These lenders tend to offer competitive if not lower interest rates than their physical competitors, in large part due to the reduced overhead of doing their work online.

To find an online lender, you should begin in much the same way as you would begin your search for information on any other lender… utilize your preferred search engine or enter in the URL of an online lender’s website that you’ve seen advertised in newspapers, tabloids, or on the television.

Online lenders usually have large amounts of information on their services available on their website, though if you don’t find the information that you’re looking for then you will also have a variety of contact options available with which to request the information that you want.

When you can’t find the information that you want
It’s important to realize that a website, no matter how complex it may be, might not have the information that you’re looking for. If this is the case, feel free to use a contact form, send an e-mail, or call a provided phone number with your specific questions. That’s what they’re there for… to answer whatever questions you might have.

Our guest author is John Mussi, founder of Direct Online Loans which help homeowners find the best available loans via the www.directonlineloans.co.uk website. The Money Blog has no connections with this website.

Many people get very worried about their credit rating, or credit score as they say in the U.S. Here our American finance correspondent expalins a little about credit scores:

Credit scores are a lot like opinions – everybody has one. They got popular from the granddaddy of all credit scores – the FICO score, but since then they’ve come out of the woodwork. Which one is most important? The one that your lender is going to use!

Especially when you’re buying a house, it’s good to know which credit score will be used. For mortgages, lenders most often use the FICO score. FICO is named after the Fair Isaac Company, who developed the secret mathematical formula that makes up the FICO score. FICO is so entrenched that it is sometimes used as a criteria in determining whether or not your mortgage can be sold in the secondary market. The easier it is to sell your mortgage, the more likely it is that you can get good terms.

Nowadays, everybody else has a “credit score” and coincidentally, they look a lot like a FICO score. All of the major credit reporting companies have their own credit scores, and they’ll sell you their score if you let them. While it may be interesting to see variations among scores, it doesn’t do you much good. If you need a FICO score, get a FICO score. That way you’ll know exactly what the lender is looking at.

Where do you get a FICO score? One place to start is Fair Isaac’s consumer website: www.myfico.com. You can buy all three FICO scores (yes, you have three of them – one for each of the major credit reporting companies) for $44.85. If you know that your lender only uses one score, you can buy them individually for $14.95 each.