It is important to take time into account, as well as cash outlay.

The internet offers an unbelievable opportunity to anyone to make a successful living, regardless of age, location, education or business experience, amongst other factors. Not all highly successful internet marketers have high level business qualifications, with many years of business experience. In fact the opposite is often true. Many of the highest earners in internet marketing come from ordinary, everyday backgrounds.

There are only two factors that all have in common, (although not necessarily in equal quantities) and those are time and money. Those more fortunate individuals who have plenty of cash to spend on marketing may have very little free time, while some of us may be able to make more time, to compensate for a shortage of cash.

In your quest for a top home based business, the cold hard reality is that you will never make money from an internet business until you can attract sufficient quality customers to your site, and then persuade them to purchase goods or services from you.

Pay per click advertising is available for you to buy at a pre-determined price per click. This buys you visitors, but obviously does not guarantee you any sales.

Article writing has proven itself to be an extremely cost effective method of drawing visitors to your site. This isn't necessarily the quickest way of attracting traffic, but if used correctly will definitely attract a steady stream of visitors. Choose subjects for articles with a close link to the theme of your business, so as to ensure a link between your site and your visitors.

It is still important to calculate (roughly) what you are spending, including even a simple cost estimate of your time. This, added to other expenses such as website hosting, auto responders, advertising and marketing, domain names, and so on, will give you some idea of how much your marketing effort costs in total.

Don't forget to keep track of all related business expenses, otherwise you have no idea of how profitable your business really is. This in turn may convince you to use those methods that are most efficient in terms of sales per cash outlay.