I've heard it said that the two biggest markets on the internet are:

See if you can guess.

Weight loss

and

How to make money on the internet

I'm one of those people who decided to find out how to make money on the internet, and did quite a bit of browsing through all the rubbish people were trying to sell people like me. 

Target market:  sad, desperate and poor people, single mothers, people who don't know much about computers and the internet, the sort of people who are vulnerable and easily sucked in.

Yep, that was me.

Products to sell: 

e-books about guaranteed systems, e-books that turn out to be one big long ad for a product, e-books that give you a long winded boring waffling rambling rave that contains a tiny little bit of information they should have just told you for free, e-books about how to write amazing 'killer' sales copy and use 'killer' words in your ads like 'killer'.

software products - mainly ones that don't work, are not relevant to what you are trying to do, are badly designed and full of bugs, that are already available free but you're a beginner so you don't know that yet, that are ridiculously complicated to use, so you can't actually tell if they work or not.

affiliate programmes - get other people to sell your product, which isn't really a product, it's the idea of selling a product, or getting other people to sell it.  There's MLM out there baby.

My advice if you are a novice at internet marketing:

Trust no one! 

Use the money back guarantee if you don't get what you needed.

Read this funny web page:  http://www.buymystupidebook.com/  (I just like it)

Get some gumboots for wading through the you know what

Learn about Adwords, by reading one of the basic books like Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd's The Ultimate Guide to AdWords.  It will not give you all the answers, but it will give you a good basic place to start.

Offer a product of real value, and ignore all the 'easy' affiliate stuff.  The advice I was given is that affiliate marketing is NOT for beginners, and I quite agree.

E-books are great - you can write something really specific that interests you, and market it to a very targeted audience, knowing you are offering something they actually want and need. 

The great thing about the internet, is that quality will win out!  The more I learn the more appalled I am and at the same time the more encouraged I am.  I see marketing everywhere I look now - everything, absolutely everything is marketing related to me.  It's not a concept I ever even considered before.  But with this sort of communication available to everybody, people are not going to be fooled so easily as we go along.

Quality and relevance.  And that's what Google loves, both for Pay Per Click and for SEO.