Today there is in the region of 190 million websites and growing on a day-by-day basis. According to Technorati there is one blog started every second.

The World Wide Web isn't the 1995 pond any more, but a vast cyber-ocean of millions and millions of websites written in nearly every language known to man.

It is a vast online repository of the good, the bad and the ugly. The good being all the websites we all know and love and visit regularly; the bad being the spam and Made for AdSense (MFA) sites, and the ugly being the nasty child pornography.

Your little website is but a drop in this binary ocean.

Now the advice given out again and again by SEO hubs such as Search Engine Land and SEOmoz that if you follow a certain number of rules about online optimization and if you write quality, original material you will succeed. No you won't.

Here's some words of wisdom from opinionated designer Eric Kajaluoto:

"No one is looking at you. No one is listening to you. You don't believe me but I'm right. Even if you create a portable fountain-of-youth, your start-up's biggest challenge will be to get anyone to pay attention. Really - it is that hard".

Wow, that paragraph either acted like a sledgehammer on your expectations or it resonated with your experience.

It's this sort of advice that should be given to all the kids hanging around Digital Point, the biggest Search Engine Optimization (SEO) forum on the web. Started in 2004 it has, at the time of writing, nearly 300,000 members and over 11 million posts. Most of those members are young men under the age of 21 and all chasing the pot of gold that they think lies over the rainbow.

And now here is the key to being a success on the internet: spending money.

Don't bother submitting a press release to one of the free services, pay for a premium service that actually distributes far and wide for you; don't bother submitting your site to hundreds of those spam-filled free directories, at the very least pay for inclusion in Yahoo and directories. These are established, quality directories not here-today-gone-tomorrow affairs. And if you site isn't professionally designed, forget it - first impressions, both on the net and off, count for everything.

More than anything pay money out for a serious PPC ad campaign. Done correctly, this is the difference between success and failure for a new startup.

So happy amateurs get out of the kitchen if you can't stand the heat. If you don't have money in your wallet that you can slap on the table then move over and retire from the game because you are wasting your time and clogging up the pipes.