This is by far the most under estimated and over-influenced question on the internet. The term alone screams scam even though its only a few short words, the question "How Do I Make Money Online?" is usually one of the first things people ask when they want to essentially learn how to make a decent income online, unfortunately if you were to type this term into Google or ask any experienced person you will find the response to be conflicting, the shame of it is everyday people who are hard working, honest, and who truly want to learn how it's done are getting scammed.
There are very logical ways to make money online and there are other ways that the majority of people seem to flock to, all because the internet has been mis-labeled as an easy source of cash for everyone who knows how to use a computer, this is simply not true, the true term is that the internet hold the potential to bring you a large sum of money but only if you're willing to work just as hard if not harder than you would at something offline.
The few tips I can give you to help protect yourself is don't ever, ever, ever buy a product or sign up for a service that resembles a get rich quick scheme, if it's too good to be true then it probably is, if you come across a website with titles like "Make $5,000 in your sleep" or "This Product will make you a millionaire by the end of this year", run the other way, close the browser, don't click on any advertisements on the site and move on, I know it's very tempting to sign up for these programs but all you'll get yourself into is more debt.
Another thing to be very cautious about is the Affiliate Marketing industry, not because it's a bad industry to get into but because of how many people get suckered into buying the online marketing eBooks, there are thousands of them usually for a low price of $97 dollars which is a bunch of crap, don't ever buy an internet marketing eBook, if you want to spend money to learn this stuff then go to your local bookstore and buy a marketing and selling book, even if its focused on the offline industries, those books will give you 1,000 times more information than any online internet marketing eBook will.
A little overview of what's included in these books are all exactly the same recycled information, each one of them will introduce you to very broad terms and that is it, sure it might help you learn what Arbitrage, Affiliates, MFA, SEO, SEM, PPC mean but they will never actually teach you how it's done, no you see their only goal is to make even more money from you buy including their affiliate products in those books and then getting you to buy an additional product that will supposedly make you rich overnight. That's a lie and people like this should be stopped but with such low-level law informant online they can get away with this garbage.
The variety of ways to make money online are vast but let's say you wanted to get into the affiliate marketing industry, my advice is to read up and learn about selling, general marketing, SEO, SEM, and PPC, information on these terms are vast and FREE resources can be found across the internet, each one will help you learn about the industry and each one will easily set you in the right direction when wanting to learn how to make a honest living online.
One last thing to watch out for is crappy industry forums like Warrior Forums which up-sell everything that is useless and 50 years old, not to mention they sell and re-sell massive amounts of useless eBooks to their members but they provide you with no real value, if your super new try out Digital Point, or Site Point for some introductions but if you're a bit more advanced in web development, SEO, SEM, PPC, any aspect then the best online forum to learn from is called Wicked Fire.
That is it for this introductory article, it's just a simple warning when you're just starting out and just know that if someone is trying to sell you an eBook about internet marketing you can easily find that information for free at another location, my own blog titled "Principle Of Marketing" is one of those free resources which covers all aspects of PPC, SEO, SEM, Arbitrage, and more.