Earning money online can be shown in a couple steps:
Get an Affiliate Product - I would Recommend clickbank.com
Create a website for a product you would like to promote. Now this can be either a paid website or maybe a free blog. Of course, a paid website would bring in more cash.
Generate Traffic To Your Website Using Articles - This is the topic I will cover in this article
Start earning money online!
Do Article Marketing To Get Traffic To Your Site IF:
You do not mind writing articles. If you hate writing then article marketing probably isn't for you.
You don't put up the same article on your site. If you write a great article, put it up on YOUR site and add social bookmarking to it. People will like it, digg it, etc.
You can work with another webmaster. This way, you can add more sources to your articles and the other webmaster will also add your name to their article.
These three things should help you decide whether you want to use articles to generate traffic to your site. However...
I Hate Writing!
Now just because you don't like writing doesn't mean you can't do article marketing. The way to use article marketing if you don't want to write anything is simple. Pay somebody else! That's right! You can pay somebody else to write articles for you for about $1 - $20 depending on word count. Now this is where it gets interesting. There is another site called isnare.com that will distribute the content FOR YOU for about $1 - $2 per article.