A: I absolutely love this question! Why? Because I feel the same way. I started out my entrepreneurial career with a direct sales company that wanted me to try to sell products to my friends, family and their acquaintances. I absolutely hated it.

I hate bothering people I know – and even more so, I hate bothering people I don’t know. I got fired from one of my first retail sales job because I refused to sell (oops!). I should have known that direct sales wouldn’t work for me, but I was certainly glad when I turned my focus to the Internet.

When you do business online, your website is your sales person and you can draw in targeted traffic, instead of chasing people on the phone. When people arrive at your website, they were already interested in what you had to offer…unless they never would have came there. That’s much better than harrassing somebody on the phone!

Certainly, at some point, you’re going to sell products, even if they are somebody else’s through an affiliate program. This means you get a commission every time you refer a sale to another company. The other company processes the sale, ships the product and does the customer support. You just make the recommendations on your content-rich site (ex. You have a website about gardening and you recommend gardening tools, books and videos for purchase from other companies) and collect comissions.

Here’s a few places where you can find products to promote (there are plenty of websites that offer affiliate programs…just look around):

- LinkShare
- ShareASale
- ClickBank
- Commission Junction

Of course, if you really, really don’t want to sell, you could sign as an Adsense publisher and simply display Google’s ads on your informative websites (but I would never recommend making this as your only stream of income).

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