It doesn't cost a lot to get involved in e-commerce, as any good bootstrapper knows.

This weekend I attended a (wince) free Internet marketing seminar at the Zollinger Art Center on the campus of Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, where, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, Utah-based StoresOnline Inc. presented a 90 minute pitch to 26 people interested in making money online.

StoresOnline Inc. offers what amounts to an e-commerce website package with a $2,800 design and program fee and a $2,700 hosting and support fee. The "free" conference was a primer for a $20 full day training session on how to bring in traffic, use affiliate programs and do drop shipping. For attending, you get the design fee knocked off the price tag.

So here's some of the promised information without the charge:

• Instead of attending a $20 training session just take a look at Wikipedia's explanation of PageRank, still a key element of the Google search engine, to understand how sites wind up on the top of searches.

• For an explanation on affiliate programs and how they can make money for your e-commerce site just check out one of the first such programs of its kind at Amazon.com.

• And don't pay a lot for an e-commerce site. Hosting can be found for next to nothing just by searching the Net at sites like doteasy and at a moderate price at register.com and other providers.

I'll cover drop shipping in a future post.