I just got back from a relaxing three week vacation in sunny Orlando, Florida and even though I had a great time I’m ready to get back to work. I consider myself to be very fortunate to be able and make money online and just want to take a moment and offer a little encouragement.

My wife calls it “pulling money out of thin air”. It must seem like that to her. I write ebooks and also market other peoples products, I’ve put years into learning, failing, dusting myself off and trying again, but to her, I sit in front of the computer for a few hours and checks start coming in and the Paypal account starts filling up with money.

She just shakes her head.

I was able to drive my kids to their first days of kindergarten and I still drive and pick them up daily, they are now in the 8th & 9th grades. I never had to worry about day care, I’ve never missed a teachers meeting or school play. I attend all sporting events they are involved in and take them to their martial arts class.

I get hands on in their science fair projects and have the time to brush up on my Algebra skills to help them along, although both are pretty bright and don’t need much help there, thank goodness.

I don’t worry about what they’re doing after school and who they’re hanging out with.

I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to go to the restroom, I eat lunch when I’m hungry, I don’t worry about rush hour traffic and best of all, I have complete control over how much money I earn.

I have a great life. I take things at my own speed. I enjoy sitting outside on nice days and just taking in the fresh air while reading a book.

But, it wasn’t always that way.

I spend many years in a hectic work evironment as a manager in the Rent-to-Own industry. I worked 6 days a week and anywhere from 10-14/hrs a day. I constantly worried about meeting sales goals, hitting collection standards and all the million other stresses of working for someone else. I made pretty good money but there was never any time to enjoy it.

I was working my life away. Every day passed was another day gone that I could never get back. I just accepted the fact that one day I was going to wake up and be 80 yrs old and wonder what life was supposed to be all about anyway.

Then one day, I got fired. The Rent-to-Own industry was in a consolidation stage for many years with the big companies buying up all the smaller chains and mom & pop locations. Each time the new company came in and promised everyones jobs were safe and then turn around and walk everyone out the door while bringing in their own teams. I had survived dozens of these acquisitions before and it was bound to happen eventually. Every manager in our market was terminated.

Looking back, this was one of the greatest days of my life.

I had unemployment benefits and time on my hands so I started looking for a way to never again have to rely on someone else for my financial stability.

Was it easy? NO
Was it worth it? YES

I made mistakes, plenty of them but I never gave up.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was thinking I could make money without investing any. I struggled with all the free hosting resources and concentrated on free traffic sources and put all of my energy into promoting other peoples products, which turns out to be a lot like having a real job, making money for someone else. (I do still affiliate market but I’ve become much smarter about it).

At the time I started, there weren’t any information products for sale to guide me. If you are new or just thinking about getting into internet marketing, you are very lucky that there have been many people come before you who’ve mapped their successes and are willing to share them with you.

This lead to one of the major obstacles for people starting out today. Information overload! Everywhere you look there’s sales letter after sales letter touting the piles of money to be made by site flipping, bum marketing, building adsense networks, affiliate marketing, and so on. It’s so that you just don’t know where to start.

I do all of the above and you can to… after you get your first income streams flowing, you’ll have more time and knowledge to start dabbling in other areas. But first, let’s get down to the basics.

The solid foundation you need to start making money online.

Register a domain – This will cost you about $10 and is your first priority. Eventually you may end up with hundreds but for now you want to start with at least one. You can skip ahead to creating your own products because you will want to register a domain for your first product.

Set up a webhosting account – This will run you about $10 a month or less at HostGator. This is where your domains will reside and be made available to the world. You are able to host as many domains as you like on one hosting account.

Sign up for an AUtoresponder service – One common theme regardless of the methods you may have researched for starting your own internet business is “build a list”, “the money’s in the list”. An autoresponder service like Aweber allows you to have an unlimited amount of subscriber lists. People that visit your websites will have the opportunity to subscribe to your mailing list, usually in exchange for a free report, discount or training series. Once they’ve subscribed, you are able to automagically send them information until they either purchase or unsubscribe.

Learn how to create your own products – This is the quickest way to success. Even if you don’t know how to write, everything can be outsourced (Rent A Coder), from the writing of the ebook to the sales letter for a very modest price. When you create your own products, you control the price, you control the distribution and you are in the position to recruit other affiliate marketers though the large affiliate network systems to promote your products for you. They do the work, you split the sales with them and you pocket money with little or no effort.

Learn how to master Google Adwords to bring buying customers to your sales pages. – While you could stop at the step above and be happy with 50% of the selling price, you can bring your own buying customers to your sales pages and keep 100% of the profit. Mastering Google Adwords will also allow you to make even more money should you decide to venture into affiliate marketing yourself at some point.

That’s really the rock solid foundation for building your successful online business. Don’t make it any harder than that and don’t allow yourself to get sidetracked by the next great thing. Develop your plan and stick to it.

As time goes one and you start making money online, you may wish to invest in more tools to further automate your online business and that’s ok, but only do this when the business can support itself and when you are absolutely certain that the tools you purchase actually reduce your workload or pay for themselves in some other way rather than just getting caught up in buying because they are there and look cool.

I hope you’ve found some encouragement in this post and maybe even have a more clearly defined idea of what steps you need to take to get started down the right path. Don’t run in tomorrow and quit your job! Start slowly, follow the steps above and set it firmly in your mind that you can build a profitable online business.

I’ll end this with the two most important words I’ve ever ran across in internet marketing…

TAKE ACTION

Till next time,
Gail

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