I was so confused when I first got into internet marketing.  I didn’t even know what affiliate marketing was, let alone how it worked.

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.