With so many ebooks, courses, tools, and coaches available for anyone who wants to utilize those resources, it’s amazing that more people don’t succeed.  If so many successful people are selling the exact formula they used to succeed, why aren’t more people succeeding?  It seems so simple.  Follow the formula.  Succeed!

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it doesn’t work that way in most cases.  Most people that try to succeed online don’t make a ton of money.  They aren’t able to quit their day job a month after they create a website.  Most people don’t find great success online.

In general, people want things to be easy.  They want things to be given to them.  They want to buy success and they will pay anywhere from $17 to $1997 to get it.  People don’t want to hear the truth and smart sales people aren’t going to mention it.  But, it takes more than just knowledge to succeed online.  It takes knowledge plus action.

No doubt about it, the technical skills of internet marketing play a factor.  You need to understand web development, SEO, traffic, social media, backlinks, blah, blah, blah. However, those things you can learn.  You can learn how to build a website.  You can learn how to optimize your site for search engines.  But, there are some things you just can’t get from an ebook.

Once you learn the fundamentals of internet marketing, focus on these 3 skills that could very well determine whether you succeed or fail.  Stop looking for a solution in an ebook and start looking within yourself.

EXECUTION

The ability to execute is a requirement for succeeding in any business.  There is a big difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it.  Take a look at football.  In football, a running back’s job is to run the football into the end zone.  Simple, right?  Well, the person that will find the most success is the one that executes the best play after play.  It’s easy to know what needs to be done, the hard part comes in doing it well on a regular basis.

No different in internet marketing.  You might have a lot of knowledge about the internet marketing process, but that doesn’t guarantee success.  With internet marketing, execution means creating good content every day.  Creating backlinks every day.  Preparing articles.  Submitting email messages to subscribers.  Creating products. The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is that without execution, you will struggle to make any money online.

OVERCOME

It’d be nice if your road to success was paved with rainbows and candy canes.  That’s usually not the case.  Your ability to overcome obstacles and setbacks will play a huge role in whether you succeed or fail.

Regardless of how well you plan, you will face obstacles.  Maybe your website gets hacked.  Maybe Google removes your website from their index.  Maybe your first 3 products are complete bombs.  There are a lot of things that can go wrong in your journey, the key is to learn from them and move on.

PERSISTENCE

Although many people in the make money online world like to sell the dream of instant success, it usually takes a bit longer than that.  It’s hard to work day after day wondering if your effort will ever pay off.  It’s natural to want to see instant results, especially when you put so much effort into your project.  But, the nature of the internet can make persistence a valuable asset.

If it only took a month to get to the front page of Google for high traffic keywords, no one would ever stay there.  As soon as you got to the front page, someone else would come along and knock you out of your prime spot.  Search engines reward persistence and longevity.  The longer you stick around, and execute on a regular basis, the more success you will find in the form of backlinks, traffic, visitors and ultimately revenue.

CONCLUSION

Ask yourself this question.  If the top 20 gurus in your field (whoever you think that is) gave you (for free) all of their most valuable products, would that make you more likely to succeed?  Sure, you might learn some new methods, discover some new resources, start using a new tool, but whether you succeed or fail will still fall 100% on your shoulders.

If you want to significantly increase your chances of success online, make sure you are pounding the 3 qualities above into your soul.  I’m not saying learning new things is not helpful, because it is.  You need to know what you’re doing.  But, knowledge alone will not ensure your success.  The sooner you realize that you will never find success in any one product, the sooner you can start focusing on the things that really matter – execution, overcoming obstacles and being persistent.

TRADITIONAL MARKETING

First, let’s look at this from a traditional marketing standpoint.  Traditional marketing is marketing in the real world.  Advertising on billboards, in magazines, on the sides of buses.  Those are indirect advertising methods.  Today, it’s common to include a web address in traditional advertising, which is why you should care about your domain name for traditional marketing purposes.
If you have a business that will be doing a lot of indirect marketing, advertising, or communicating directly with people, you should think about a few things.

Do you want dashes in your website?  Dashes look spammy in domain names.  Especially if you have more than one dash in your domain name.  It also makes it more difficult to get your website to the first page of Google search results.  Type in any random phrase and see how many of the domain names have hyphens compared to how many don’t.

Dashes in your domain name can also make it difficult to communicate your web address to people.  Sometimes you might have to explain that it is the hyphen character, not the word hyphen.  When you tell people your web address, they’ll often forget the dash.  If you don’t own the same domain name without the dash, you could be inadvertently sending traffic to a competitor.  You want to make it as easy as possible for people to visit your website, so adding a dash to your domain name can often be a liability.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a very important role in choosing a domain name.  First of all, you’ll have to check to see if the domain name you want is available.  Most of the really good domain names aren’t available.  You might also want to check to see if that domain name, user id, or phrase is available on other websites you’ll be creating to supplement your website.  For example, is the exact Twitter name available?  Facebook page?  Youtube?  Take that into consideration depending on how far you’re extending your marketing efforts.

One thing that can make a big difference with your internet marketing efforts is having an exact match keyword domain.  For example, if I want to target the keyword phrase, “make money online” for my website, an exact match domain would be makemoneyonline.com, or makemoneyonline.net, etc.

Many people that make money online with niche websites will only enter a market if they can get an exact match domain name.  It makes it a little easier to get to the first page of search engine results when you have an exact match domain name, although Google is “turning down” the importance of an exact match domain.

Since a lot of exact match domain names are taken, many people choose a phrase match domain name.  That means the phrase is in the domain, but extra words or numbers are added to the front or back of the keyword phrase.  For example, makemoneyonlineBS would be a phrase match domain.

The top level domain (TLD) is what comes at the end of the domain, such as .com, .net, .org.  People always wonder what’s the best to have.  From an SEO perspective, .com is the best to have.  I haven’t done any testing of my own, but I have seen numerous studies that convinced me it’s easier to get on the first page of search results with a .com TLD, followed by .net and .org.

I’m not saying that you can’t get to number one with any of the other TLD’s, it’s just a little bit easier with a .com at the end.  Run a search on any keyword phrase and take a look at how many of the results end in .com.  It’s pretty typical to find most are .com, no matter what you type in at Google.

Anytime you see new TLD names come on the market, be skeptical.  It might be tempting because now you can get an exact match domain name, but the search engines don’t always trust the new TLD’s and there’s a reason for that.

When a new domain name comes on the market, many domain companies sell them cheap hoping that people will adopt the new TLD and they’ll ultimately make more sales.  When you have very cheap domain names, such as .info when it came out, spammers buy these domain names and use them to build spam websites, send spam emails, etc.  They do it because it’s cheap and they can burn through 10 of them for the same price as one .com domain name.  Take that into consideration before you buy that cheap TLD domain name.

BRANDING

After reading about the benefits of exact match domain names and keywords in domain names, you may be wondering why anyone would want to choose a brand name for their domain instead of one with keywords.  The simplified answer is that a brand name can help you stand out.

When you use a generic domain, such as makemoneyonline.com, you blend in with all the rest of the keyword based websites.  It might help you from an SEO perspective, but it won’t help you gain a larger audience. If Google had gone with search4websites.com, things might not have turned out so good for them.  All the major companies I can think of have brand name domains, not generic keyword phrases.

Another plus for unique brand names is that you can use the domain for anything you want.  If you try to start a website about dogs and it doesn’t work out, you can use the same domain for an entirely different project.  If you used the domain name dogworld.com, it wouldn’t make much sense to use that domain later for a wedding website.  Obviously, no one thinks that their website will fail, but sometimes things don’t work out as expected.

Before you choose a unique brand name, do a search using Google.  Even if the domain name is available and the twitter name is available, run a search.  You might be surprised at what you find.  It’s better to check it out before you invest the time and energy only to later discover that there’s a popular sex product with the same name you decided to use.

One thing thing that deserves special attention with respect to brand names is using your own personal name.  When you use your own name for your website, it limits your options.  If you create a successful website using your own name, you are an essential part of that company.  It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to sell your website to someone else.  There’s nothing wrong with doing it that way, it just limits your options.

CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME

Consider the factors above before you choose a domain name.  Obviously, many things will be determined by the type of website you’re starting.  If you’re buying a domain just for a small niche website, you’ll probably want an exact match domain.  If you’re launching a major website with the potential for serious growth, you might want to go with a unique brand name.  Know the different factors of choosing a domain name and you can’t go wrong.

If you master these 3 methods, you will learn how to make money online and your business will skyrocket.

PRODUCE HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT

A great way to get traffic is to create content that people want to see. It sounds so simple, but the fact is that many people overlook this method.
It may not be easy to create great content, but the payoff can be worth it. When you create content that people want, they’ll help you spread the word and it might be more work to create the content, but it will be less work to promote the content and get visitors to your website.

In order to create great content, make sure you truly understand your market. The better you know your market’s wants, needs and desires, the easier it’ll be for you to provide solutions for them. Once you identify what they want, simply give it to them.

You should also know what else is available in your market. If your content isn’t unique in any way, then you need to find a way to make your content unique. Use your own personal style to make the content entertaining, or edgy, or compelling; whatever you need to do to make your content stand out above your competition.

It may not be easy to create top-quality content, but if you do, people will read it, like it and link to it. Experiment with different writing techniques and find out what works best in your market. Once you figure out what works, the traffic will follow.

WRITE A GUEST POST

Guest posting is similar to article marketing but can provide much better results. For guest posting, you need to find websites that are in similar or related markets. But, you want to find sites that have more traffic than your website.

When you write a guest post on another website, you get a backlink from a good website and you get direct traffic from the readers of that website.

The key to guest posting is providing value to the readers of the host website. Make sure your article is very high-quality because other website owners care about their readers (hopefully) and want to provide them with quality content.

Do some research and find out what kind of material they’ve already written about. Find a topic that hasn’t been covered or expand on a topic that’s already been written about. Provide something of value for the readers and create a win-win situation.

ADVERTISING

One of the fastest ways to get people to your website is to buy advertising. It’s not the cheapest way, but it’s fast.

Two great resources to start with advertising is Google AdWords and Facebook. They’re both very simple to use and both very effective.

Facebook allows you to target your market based on a large number of factors. You can direct your ad only to females on their birthday, or you can target people who belong to specific groups. Facebook is a great resource for cheap advertising specifically directed towards the market you want.

With both Facebook and Google AdWords you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It’s called Pay Per Click (PPC). Your ad could be displayed 200 times, but if only 1 person out of those 200 clicks on your ad, you pay for that 1 click.

GET WEBSITE TRAFFIC

If you want to get targeted website traffic, focus on providing value to your market. The more value you can provide, the more trust you will build, which leads to more sales and a stable business.

First things first.  A keyword is a word, or phrase, that people type into search engines to find things.  If I want to find information about digital photography, then I go to Google and type in digital photography.  Simple, right?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT KEYWORDS?

If you have a website and you want visitors to find your site when they use Google, Bing or Yahoo, then you need to figure out what keywords people are using that are related to your website.

Once you find good keywords for your market, then you can target those keywords and start to optimize your website for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO).  We’ll get into SEO later.  Right now, let’s focus on keywords.

Here’s an example.  Let’s say you have a photography website and you sell an ebook teaching people how to take good pictures.  You want to find out what people are typing in at Google so you can target those keywords and get potential buyers to your website.

Use common sense and think about what people might type in at Google if they want to learn how to take good pictures.  For example, “how to take good pictures,” “digital photography course,” or “digital photography tips.”  These are keywords that people might type in at Google to find related websites.

THE GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL

An awesome free tool to use for keyword research is the Google Keyword Tool.  It gives you keywords, competition, local monthly search volume, global monthly search volume and more.

If you go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in the 3 phrases I mentioned above, you’ll see the results below (I customized the search type and settings, which I will show you how to do in a free video coming soon).

Let’s start with the competition column.  First thing you should notice is that the 3 keyword phrases have different levels of competition.  The competition bar is just a general indicator of how competitive that keyword is.

When I say competitive, that generally means – how many websites are trying to rank for the top spot and how many people are trying to buy ads based on that keyword?

One thing I didn’t mention previously is that people who buy ads through Google AdWords (the ads that appear on search results) also target keywords.  They choose what keywords they want their ads to show up for.  When someone types in that keyword, the ad shows up.

That’s why if you look at the image above, on the far right hand side, you’ll see Estimated Avg. CPC (cost per click).  That is the average price people are paying every time someone clicks on their ad.  If it’s low (for example .05) that means pretty much no one is buying ads for that keyword.  That’s a good indication that it’s not a profitable keyword.  If the CPC is very high, then that indicates that it’s a profitable keyword and people are making money from that keyword.  Although, there are always exceptions to the rules.

Before we get back to the keywords above, you should understand that some keywords will be profitable and some won’t.  Find the keywords that indicate a person is ready to buy.  Buying keywords are profitable.  Avoid the people that are in the research phase.  Those are not profitable.

For example, do you think this person is ready to spend money if they type in “online digital photography course?”  Yes.  That’s a good buying keyword.  That’s why in the image above, you can see it only gets 260 local searches per month, but people are still willing to pay an avg CPC of $7.69.  Focus on keywords that indicate a person is ready to spend money.

In the image above, the competition is very different for the 3 keyword phrases.  These are general indicators, but if you hover your mouse over the green bar, Google will tell you low, medium or high competition.  They can be helpful to an extent, but we won’t be making any decisions based on that information.

Let’s look at the first keyword phrase – “how to take good pictures.”  The competition for this is low, based on Google’s green bar.  The avg CPC is also pretty low compared to the others.  These factors suggest that this might not be a profitable keyword even though it gets a good amount of traffic.

Another indicator that this is not a good keyword is that the keyword phrase is very broad.  It doesn’t specify digital camera or film camera.  It’s just a very broad phrase and that person could be looking at a lot of different things.  This person may not be ready to buy because they’re still in the research phase.

This might be a good keyword to try if you’re using Google AdSense.  That way they don’t have to buy anything and you could still make money when they click on your ads.  If you compare this phrase to “online digital photography course,” you should be able to see the difference between the two.

One is very broad and the other is very specific and focused.  If you have a website that offers an online digital photography course, you might get a few bites if you target the broad phrase, but your conversions will likely be much better if you target the latter phrase.

Monthly search volume is important, of course.  You want to get a good amount of traffic  so you can make money but the more traffic, the more competitive the market is.  The key is to find the hidden gems that have a lot of traffic with little competition.

Some people don’t like to go below 1,000 local search volume.  Some people will go as low as 100 local search volume.  The number isn’t as important as the potential to make money.  If you have a very expensive product for sale, you might not need a ton of traffic.  Personally, I like to stay close to 1,000 minimum.  Go big or go home, as they say.

Even if you get to the number one spot in Google search results, you won’t get 100% of the people clicking through to your site.  It varies by markets and geographic location, but you might expect to get somewhere around 40%-50% of the global search volume visiting your website.

Let’s take a look at “digital photography course,” for example.  If you were number one for that keyword you might get 200 – 300 visitors from that keyword every month (since local is 210 and global is 880.  If you sell a product for $40, with a conversion rate of 2%, then you could potentially make $160 to $240 per month from that keyword.

Remember that the numbers Google provides are estimates.  These are rough estimates that we’re talking about.  You could do worse, you could do better.  I always like to be very conservative with my estimates so that I am pleasantly surprised when I get more traffic and make more money than I thought.  But, it’s important to understand how to interpret the numbers and what to expect based on those numbers when you’re choosing keywords.

NUMBER OF WEBSITES

A lot of people recommend using the number of websites as an indicator of how difficult it would be to rank for a specific keyword.

The idea is that if you go to Google and type in a keyword phrase with quotes around it, that will tell you how many websites have that phrase match.  Some people say that if there are over 10,000 websites, that’s too competitive.  Some say if it’s over 100,000 that’s too many.  I don’t use this method and here’s why.

I’ve made it to the first page of Google fairly quickly for phrases that have returned over 1,000,000 results with the quotes around it.  And, I’ve had trouble ranking for keywords that have returned 11,000 results.  This method doesn’t take into consideration how strong the top 5 results are.  That’s what you should be concerned with, because that’s where you want to be (actually you want to be in the top 3).

QUALITY OF WEBSITES

If you’re looking at a keyword phrase to determine how difficult it’s gonna be to rank in the top 3, you should look at the top results and look at the SEO quality of the websites.

When you look at the  SEO quality, that means you look for the keyword phrase in the url, the title, the meta description and the content on their page.  If the keyword phrase is found in all of those places, it’s an indication that the webpage is well optimized and might be difficult to outrank.

The image above is the search results for digital photography course.  You can see that the top result has a partial match url, the phrase is in the title and the meta description.  The other results are not as strong.  It might be difficult to outrank the first result, but the others might be doable.

In addition to the SEO quality, take a look at the overall quality of the website.  Does it look like a mess?  Is it user-friendly?  Does it have good content?  How are they monetizing the site?

Check out the quality of the site and ask yourself if it looks like a nice site or does it look like a site that you could easily do a better job of creating.

PAGERANK

After I click on the link for the first webpage, we can look at a few more things that are signals for how difficult it would be to rank for this keyword.  One factor is Pagerank.

Pagerank (PR) is a number, from 0 to 10, assigned by Google to indicate the general strength of a webpage.  In this case, the website is a PR 5, which is a strong site.  That’s another indication that this page will be hard to beat for that keyword.

If you see webpages at the top of search results with PR1 and PR2, that’s a good sign because it will be much easier to outrank those pages.  When you get to PR3 and up, it becomes a little more difficult depending on how well those pages are optimized for search engines.
PR isn’t everything though.

Just because a webpage is a PR5 doesn’t mean that it’s optimized for the specific keyword you’re researching.  If you look at the search results, it’s not in order of PR, it’s in the order that Google determines based on over 200 signals.  A PR2 webpage can rank number 1 for a keyword while a PR 5 website is ranked number 10.  Use PR as one factor, NOT the ultimate factor.

On a side note, you can check the PR of any webpage (as well as backlinks and more) if you install the free toolbar from SEO Book on your Firefox browser.  They have awesome free tools at SEO Book, including Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox and the SEO toolbar.

BACKLINKS

The number of backlinks to a webpage, as well as the quality of those backlinks is another indication of how hard it would be to outrank any particular webpage.

For example, the digital photography course webpage has over 2,000 backlinks to the domain and over 1,000 backlinks to the page.  That may seem like a lot of backlinks but the quality of those backlinks is much more important.  Many websites build backlinks through commenting on blogs, so those would be low-quality links that would be fairly easy to outrank.

I’m not gonna get into how to research backlinks at this point, because there are different tools and different methods and that could be an article in itself (and probably will be).  The thing to remember is that when you’re choosing a keyword, consider the number and quality of the backlinks of the webpages that you’ll be trying to outrank.

MARKET RESEARCH

Market research is an important part of selecting a market to enter, as well as a part of choosing good keyword phrases.  The more you know about your market, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to offer something of value to them.  The bottom line is that to make money online you have to provide people something of value that they’re willing to pay for.

The more you focus in on what the market really wants and how you can fill that void, the easier it will be for you to succeed.

Check out the top websites in the market.  Visit forums.  Find out what people are talking about.  Find out what kind of things they’re interested in.  Specifically, look for questions that people ask over and over again.  If you can answer those questions, turn it into a product and charge money for it, you’ll be on your way to making money online.

CONCLUSION

Don’t let this step scare you.  The more experience you have, the easier it will be to choose good keywords.  Even when you do have experience, sometimes you’ll still be surprised by how difficult it is to rank for some keywords and how easy it is to rank for other keywords.

If you’re really unsure of how to choose a good keyword phrase, choose the least competitive keyword you can find in the market you’re looking at.  Optimize your website for that keyword.  Build backlinks and watch what it takes to get to the top spot in Google.

Once you make it there, you build confidence, you learn what to do and you can move up to a more competitive keyword with more traffic.  The key is to choose a keyword, stick with it and move forward.

What do you find difficult about choosing keywords?

It took me a long time and a lot of money to put all of the pieces together.  I had to sift through a lot of garbage to find the best resources, the best tools, and the best methods.

What I found, I am sharing with you.  You don’t have to sift through the crap.  Take a shortcut by using the information on this site to start making money online sooner rather than later.

Keep in mind this article gives you the big picture.  You should always learn and improve your strategies but this article shows you how all the pieces fit together.  That was one of the things that really helped me when I was just starting out.  Once I saw the big picture it was much easier for me to see why things needed to be done.

Here are the fundamental steps of how to make money online.

BE PREPARED MENTALLY

It’s a shame that so many people in the internet marketing world promote quick and easy solutions for everything.  Success rarely happens quickly or easily.  The reasons that they promote it that way is because it works.  People want quick and easy.

The truth is that in most cases, you will have to put in some hard work on a regular basis.  The sooner you get that in your head, the better off you’ll be.

Make sure you’re doing things the right way and don’t let lack of instant success stop you.  If it takes you 1 year, so be it.  If it takes you 3 months, great!  Whatever you do, treat your online venture like a business that you have to invest time, energy and hard work in.

MANAGE YOUR TIME EFFECTIVELY

If you want a serious advantage, pay close attention to your time management.  That means prioritize and do the most important things first.  Wasting time online will prevent you from getting results, without a doubt.

Once your ready to start, focus on creating content, backlinks, or driving traffic.  In most cases, those 3 things will be the things that generate your revenue.

Notice I did NOT say checking your email, tweaking your website, reading blog posts, reading ebooks, watching videos.  Spend 80% of your time on THE MOST IMPORTANT tasks and then take care of the other things.

RESEARCH IS CRUCIAL

Keyword and market research go hand in hand.  Your goal with research should be to understand your market and identify profitable keywords to use with your website.

Even if you already know what market you want to enter, you should still do market research to find out the common problems in your market.  When you know the problems, you can provide solutions.  People will be happy to pay for solutions to their problems.

If you choose keywords that are extremely competitive, it can take a long, long time to get search engine traffic.  You want to find keywords that are not too competitive but that receive enough traffic to be profitable.  Finding good keywords is a combination of art and science.

Don’t get stuck on choosing keywords.  It is important, but it’s more important to get started.  You’ll never make money if you spend weeks or months worrying about what keywords to target.

If you can’t decide on a keyword, find a keyword with extremely low competition and try to take it to the first spot in Google search results.  You’ll build confidence, you’ll learn what needs to be done and then you can move up to a more competitive keyword.  Even if it doesn’t generate any revenue, it’ll be a great learning experience.

SEO – SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

SEO is very important for search engine marketing.  If you want free traffic when people type in specific keywords, you need to understand SEO.

You can break SEO down into two two components.  On-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is everything you do on your website that helps you rank better in the search engine results.  This includes things like including your keywords in your domain name, title, meta description, headings, content and internal links.

Off-page SEO basically boils down to building backlinks.  There are a lot of different ways to build backlinks, but I’m not getting into it now.  The important thing to remember is that without backlinks, you will not rank for profitable keywords.

CREATE TOP QUALITY CONTENT

Before you build your website, can I make a suggestion?  Create your content first.  There are two primary benefits for doing this.

First, awesome, unique content will attract visitors to your site, people will want to link to your site and it will help conversions on your site.  By creating your content before you choose a design for yoru website, you have to focus on the quality of your content, not just fill in spaces where something needs to go.

The second benefit of creating your content first is that it makes it easier to choose a design that’s appropriate for your content.  It’s better to have awesome content and then find a design that fits the content, as opposed to finding a design and then creating content JUST because it fits into the space you need filled.

Obviously, there are many different types of websites, so this won’t apply in every case.  But, if at all possible, create your content before you design your website.  Then find a design that will showcase your awesome content with the most important information front and center.

TIME TO CREATE YOUR WEBSITE

It’s finally time to get your website up and running.  Buy your domain name, buy website hosting and install WordPress.

Now, before you buy your domain name, there are some things to consider before you decide on a domain name.  Do you want a domain with keywords in it, or do you want a brand domain name?  These issues are important enough that they need a full article, which I will be creating soon.

If you don’t have a domain or web hosting yet, I recommend WestHost (affiliate link).  I’ve been through a lot of hosting companies and WestHost is the best one yet.  Check back soon for a full review (a legitimate review, not the typical BS affiliate review) and my specific reasons.

WordPress is super easy to install and you don’t have to have a ton of technical knowledge to use it.  You can change the entire look of your website just by installing a new theme, which takes a couple clicks of the mouse.

If you’re into affiliate marketing, there is an amazing theme for WordPress called Optimize Press (affiliate link).  Optimize Press is based on the WordPress platform and allows you to create sales pages, squeeze pages, launch pages, membership sites, and blogs.  It’s really an awesome tool and it’s great for creating all kinds of affiliate sites.  Click this link to check out Optimize Press (affiliate link).

Another great resource for building WordPress websites easily is Theme Forest (affiliate link).  They have tons of different themes and they have themes that look more like regular websites as opposed to the typical blog style websites.

One more resource for building websites I want to mention is Thesis (affiliate link).  Thesis is sometimes called a “framework” because you can buy skins to work with it, but it’s basically a WordPress theme that gives you a lot of simple control of how you customize the look of the blog.

One great feature in Thesis for internet marketers is the fact that you can click a button and change the theme to have one, two or three columns.  If you want to build a one column squeeze page or sales page, it couldn’t be easier.  Check it out here – Thesis (affiliate link).

Don’t spend a lot of time building your website.  Yes, it’s important to have a good design that’s functional but you can always change it later.  A mediocre design is not gonna keep you from getting traffic.  It might not help your conversions when people visit your site but you can always change it later.  It’s much more important to get your site up and running, and focus on getting traffic to your site.

GET WEBSITE TRAFFIC

Now we’re into the good stuff.  Website traffic.  Without traffic, what good is a website?

There are a lot of ways to get website traffic.  You can buy advertisements.  You can write guest posts on popular sites.  You can write awesome content.  You can do article marketing.  You can use social media.  You can also try search engine marketing.

Search engine marketing is using SEO techniques to rank well in the search engine results.  When someone goes to Google and types in a keyword related to your website, you want to be at the top of the list.  It’s free.  It’s targeted.  It’s awesome!

It can take some time to rank well for competitive keywords.  On the other hand, when you find those really obscure, but profitable keywords, you could make it to the top of search results within a few months.  It all depends on the market, the keywords, and your strategy.

MAKE MONEY ONLINE

The main purpose of most websites is to make money.  Why create a website that doesn’t generate revenue?  If you have people visiting your website, you need to find out what they’re willing to pay for.  Or, maybe your strategy is to put up ads and make money from the ads.

In order to make money, you need to be in touch with your visitors.  What do they want?  What are they willing to pay for?  How can you help them?

There are a lot of options for making money online and you need to test and find out which one is best for your website, or maybe it’s a combination of different methods.  If you have a product that’s not converting, maybe you need a new product.  Maybe a membership site is best for you.  Test the different options and let the numbers guide you.

LET THE NUMBERS GUIDE YOU

As I just mentioned, analyzing your data is very important.  Why?  Because it makes things easy for you.  You don’t have to guess what to do.  The data can tell you what to do.  If you have an analytics program installed, you look at the numbers and there’s your answer.

If you want to know what type of content to create, look at your most viewed content.  If you want to know what keywords to target, look at the keywords that are converting the best.  If you want to know which sales page converts best, look at the numbers.  They don’t lie.

There are some analytics tools that you can buy, but two of the best tools are from Google and they’re free.  Make sure you install and use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  They’re both very powerful and give you great information that you can use to make your site even better.

SUMMARY

That’s it.  That’s the process of making money online.  You can always learn better methods for doing something.  You can learn about new resources that will help you or new tools that can make you more productive.  But, everything in the world of internet marketing is based on the fundamental principles described above.

Use this information along with the more detailed articles on this site to get your online career moving.  It’s not about searching for the secret formula that will automatically generate revenue with no work whatsoever.  It’s about executing the steps above to the best of your ability day after day.

Do you want more info on a specific area above?  Use the comments below to let me know what you’d like to see.

I want to give you the information you need to start making money online. No hype. No BS. Just the best information available

I’ve seen affiliate membership sites that have TONS of information. So much information, so unorganized, that it’s almost impossible to make sense of it. People learning internet marketing need to learn the basics organized in a way that’s easy to understand. Once you build your foundation, you’ll have the skills to take it to the next level when you’re ready.

Part of the problem when you’re trying to learn internet marketing is that you don’t know which advice to take and which advice to run away from. My plan is to lay it all out for you as simply as I can. I’m going to give you the who, what, where, when, why and how of making money online.

Come back soon for all the awesome updates and free information that will get you on the right path.

Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t always live up to the fantasy.  When you’re the boss, you’re responsible for everything.  Invoices need to be paid?  You’re responsible.  Unhappy customer?  You are responsible.  Need more clients?  You are responsible.  I think you get the point.

If you’re not careful, you can actually end up with less free time for yourself when you’re self-employed compared to the amount of time you’d have working for someone else.
There are a ton of things that need to be done when you run your own business, especially in the internet marketing world.

That’s why it’s important to design your business based on the lifestyle you want to live.  Set up the business based on your terms, don’t let the business dictate your lifestyle.  If you set up your business based on the premise that you’ll sacrifice everything UNTIL you reach a certain level of income or success, you just kidding yourself.

Start by asking yourself these 3 questions.

1. What do you want to do on a day to day basis?

If your answer is sit around and watch TV, you’re probably not cut out to be an entrepreneur anyway.  If there is something you like to do on a regular basis, then you’re off to a good start.

Let’s take a look at a of couple examples.  If you don’t like to write, don’t start a blog.  That’s what bloggers do – they write.  They write content for their blog.  They write content so others can learn SEO.  They write content for email marketing campaigns.

If you want to interact with people every day, don’t become a programmer.  If you want to be miserable, start a business doing something that you don’t like to do.  Otherwise, figure out what you can do day after day that will make you happy.

The main point of this question is to be honest with yourself about what you like to do.  If you run a business, you’re going to be spending a lot of time working.  Don’t JUST start a business.  First, design your life and fit the business into it.

2. How can you help people?

Once you answer question 1, you need to figure out how you can help people doing what you want to do.  Is there something that you are really good at?  Do you have a special knowledge that could be used to help people?  What can you do to add value to people’s lives?

3. How can you combine 1 and 2 to generate a consistent revenue?

Now that you have the answers to 1 and 2, put them together.  Develop a business model that combines both things and that’s what you need to focus on.  Use what you know and help people.  If you understand yourself and you understand the market, simply give them what they want.

If you want to live a fulfilling life, focus on what you want to do on a regular basis, determine how you can help people while doing it, and generate a revenue by combining the two.  It’s a simple formula that can help you design the life you’ve always wanted and make money online while doing it.

Open Cobra is a new website that is dedicated to ranking well for the difficult phrase of make money online.  Within a year, they are trying to get to the first page of search results.  While doing this, they will be sharing all of the information they come across.  They will be sharing strategies, methods, tools, keywords, traffic stats and much more.  It should be an interesting experiment to keep track of.  For more information, visit Open Cobra directly.

The best way to get traffic to your website is to show up at the top of the search engine results.

Check out this article on targeted internet marketing to find out what it’s all about.

Stop procrastinating, follow the steps I outlined on page 1 and begin your journey in the world of internet marketing.

Step 1 – Go to Superbad Internet Marketing and Learn

Step 2 – Buy Your Domain and Get Your Website Online

Step 3 – Sign Up for an email auto responder and Create Your Forms

Step 4 – Focus, Get to Work and Build Traffic

Good Luck!