During the past couple of years, the internet has fast emerged as one of the most powerful marketing mediums available to marketers. With instant placement and unparalleled ease in response tracking it has become a vital part to any advertising campaign. Today, online marketing accounts for a large chunk of the billions that companies pour into product marketing and advertising.

When one thinks of online marketing, the first thought is ‘advertising’ in the conventional sense of the word where one places an advert online and waits for a response. This however is the old form and is only a very small part of the success that is obtained marketing online. The most prevalent (but possibly less known) way is through an army of specialist internet marketers or website owners, more commonly known as affiliates, through a method known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways of generating product sales online. It works on the basic principle that for every online product sale made through this army of internet marketers, a commission is paid. This commission can range from a few cents to $1,000’s of dollars

The question is what does this have to do with me? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, online marketing sales will be over $17 billion (U.S alone) by 2010, with the global online population projected to reach 1.8 billion. If you own a website or blog or post to Facebook or twitter or YouTube or are generally ‘on the internet’, you have the opportunity to share in a part of the commission on these sales and start earning money.

One of the more innovative techniques to hit the internet recently is a concept called content locking. The logic behind content locking is simple. You have a website which people visit or you have free content that people want to view. You want to earn money from your visitors. All you do is put a line of text in your page from a company such as Leadbolt.com. This in a very non-disruptive way displays adverts before your visitors can view your site/content (hence the term ‘content lock’). The visitor clicks on the advertisement and or completes a survey or purchases a product and you earn money.

All of this is achieved through the click of a mouse and your content becomes ‘monetized’ (meaning you end up making money from your website where you may have otherwise missed out). Content locking is the most effective new generation internet marketing tool because of its potential to give value as opposed to just collecting information from users, which most lead generation methods do. Content locking is especially effective because it gets users in their early stages of buying as a majority of website visitors aren’t actual buyers but rather information seekers.

True, the ‘traditional’ affiliate tools can generate sales leads that are in advanced stages of buying but the downside to this is that by this time, most users will have provided a lot of information in the form of email addresses, names and other contacts and with more requests for information, potential buyers will likely run away. The magic with content locking is that it is the perfect tool to reach potential buyers in their earliest buying stages and ‘lock’ them up, thereby providing more valuable leads and earning you money.

At the moment, there are just a handful of companies (also known as networks) which offer the ability to content lock. The leader in the space - Leadbolt.com provides you with simple to follow instructions and gets you up to speed quickly and easily. Making money has never been so easy.

What have you got to loose? If you have a website/blog or have something valuable you want to put online and make money from but don’t actually want to charge for, use this incredible technique and let it work for you