1 YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE.



You need to know what you will be selling. I know this may sound very basic but it's the first thing you need to get clear on.

You may wish to add other products as you go along but you need to start with one product or service Will you be promoting your own physical product that you need to personally package up and send off to your buyers? Have you joined a network-marketing group and decided to sell their products on the Internet? You may decide to join an affiliate program to avoid all the hassles of having your own product and dealing with money transactions directly.

What ever you choose make sure there is a market for your product or service.

If there's no market then you will have a hard time making your business successful. If the market is massive there will be huge competition.

The best way to look at your future market is to do a keyword search.

Write down a few ideas and enter in the terms you think someone might type into a search engine to find that product or service. You can use the FREE tool Good Key Words to do this. This soft ware will show you how many people typed in a particular set of words looking for information on a particular thing over the last month.

What ever it is that you've decided on I suggest that you will do much better in the long run if you have some type of connection with your product or service. If you are passionate about something you will be more informed about it. You will be able to put your heart and soul into making your business.

2 YOUR DOMAIN NAME

Domain NameYou may already have a domain name. If so then you will want to check that it is a great domain name. If it isn't then consider changing it. Domain names are cheap but they are also very important. Don't just choose one out of the blue. They should be highly reflective of your business Your domain name will work better for you if it includes your keywords.

I recommend getting your domain name and hosting from the same place. It will save you a lot of trouble. I didn't do this when I started so I hope you will. It took me a whole week to get this small problem sorted. You really don't need this when you're excited about getting your new site on line.

3 GET A HOST FOR YOUR WEBSITE

You want to do this BEFORE you get a website. As you are constructing your website you will be putting it online the whole time. Yes it will be under construction but you need the host at the start. Don't worry about how unfinished your site may look. No one is going to come across it on the Internet until you start advertising it.

4 GET YOUR WEBSITE

You must have a website of your own. You will run into all sorts of dead ends with out one. It's great to question other people's advice but this isn't one of those situations.

How do you get your own website?

You can make one yourself. Nvu offers FREE software and instruction. If you follow them step-by-step you will have your own site in no time.

You can use the template method. There are sites that will give you free templates and some will ask money for their templates.

If you really feel you are not up to it then you could pay someone else to do it for you.

Choose an option you are comfortable with.

I strongly advise you to consider learning about organic search engine optimisation (SEO) at the same time. I know it's a lot of new information all at once but it will save you countless hours and days, maybe even weeks if you have a basic understanding of SEO BEFORE constructing your website. Otherwise you may find that when you do get around to learning about organic SEO you will have to redo your whole site.

5 WORK OUT YOUR ADVERTISING PLAN

Now you have a fabulous domain name and a helpful efficient Host.

You've been learning many new things and you are excited about how fabulous your website is looking.

Now you need to start advertising. There are two types of advertising. There is the free kind and the paid kind. I won't be going into paid advertising in this article. When your first starting you probably don't want to be spending a lot of money on paid advertising. There are lots of free things you can do to advertise your new business.I love freebies

If you have read about organic Search Engine Optimisation you will understand the benefits of taking this approach. You will also understand that it is not to your advantage to submit your site to the search engines. You know it is better and quicker to get them to come to you. You now need to set up your Links campaign.

6 LINKS AND HOW TO GET THEM

The idea with links is to get as many appropriate links out into the Internet community as you can. There are many ways to do this. Getting your links campaign going is easy and fun but it is an ongoing thing. Don't run your self into the ground trying to do it all at once. Set yourself a daily schedule and keep to it. Over time your site will benefit hugely and your links will take on a life of their own.

Two important points about your links is to make sure they are appropriate and variable.

I'm so happy to be able to share this with you. It may sound obvious and very simple BUT I didn't realise it when I first started. As a consequence I had sent out heaps of articles and made heaps of entries into forums with very unhelpful links in my signature boxes. It was very time consuming going back into all these forums to change my signature boxes. It was interesting though as while I was doing this I noticed that some sites had changed my signature box for me. WHY? Because I had affiliate links in there and a moderator had kindly removed them for me. Being new I hadn't realised that this was a no no.

Now I do and so do you.

Some forums and places that accept articles don't seem to mind. You have your own domain now so cover all bases and don't use your affiliate domain here. You've got more important things to do than worry and keep track of who does and who does not allow affiliate links. So don't waste your time. Use your own domain name and put great links out there. They will serve you well.

The best types of links include your keywords. For example if one of your keywords is ?running shoes? you would not choose ?click here? to go to my website. Your links also need to have a bit of variety. To make them look more natural to the search engines The anchor text in our example might be

shoes for running

varieties of running shoes

comparisons of running shoes

advice about running shoes.

7 WHERE DO I PUT MY LINKS?

You now know about links so where do you put them? The best places to put them are in the signature box of your articles, blogs and forums. Previously we mentioned that the links campaign will be on going and that you shouldn't try to do it all at once. You need to set up a routine that fits into your life. For example I suggest you write one article per week, make one blog entry every day and make one entry or comment in one forum every day. This is an absolute bare minimum but the important thing is to choose a schedule that you can keep to and to do it everyday.

I suggest that you start with article writing. You will find that once you have the article writing bit under wraps you will have plenty of material for your blogs and you will have lots to say in the forums. Also once you have written your first article and distributed it you will have put many links out to all sorts of places.

When I started I went with the free article distribution method. There are heaps of places to send your articles to. I thought this would be the best way to go.

One thought I had at the time was, what if I can't do this? If I commit to a paid service or buy soft ware to do it and I find out I just can't write articles then I'll have wasted my money. I'm happy that I took this route in the sense that I soon realised that I could write articles.

Distributing the articles myself one by one was exhausting. I was getting really tired and making submission errors, which I would then have to go back and correct. I was spending hours submitting them and this was starting to have a negative effect on my creativity. I decided for my own sanity that the free article submission route wasn't for me. It was better to spend my time writing more articles and getting more links out there to as many places as I could.

I looked at submission soft ware and decided it wasn't for me. It looked too complicated and I would still have to spend far too much time involved in submitting them. Also when I wanted to head off for a holiday I couldn't just log in on any old computer to use the service I had to use my original ISP server address

For me it was an easy choice to pay an article distribution service to do this for me.

I went from submitting to 50 free places each week to reaching over 42,000 people on over 500 article announcement forums, groups and website with the click of a button and I can do this anywhere in the world so long as I have access to a computer of course.

There are a million and one free online advertising venues. I'm not sure if they are a waste of time at this stage. Try them yourself when you have completed all your other tasks and have nothing better to do.

The list of other things you can do is almost endless. I think I've covered the most important ones. If you follow everything you will be a very busy bee and you will be well on your way to a successful home business on the Internet.

So how are you going with all your tasks?

I know. I know .

It's not what the ads promised at all.

Make $10,000 over night with no apparent effort.

Lets face it you are on a steep learning curve.

You have come this far so keep going.

Your rewards are just around the corner.