1. You obviously need a product, and I'm partial to affiliate marketing as a way to find that, but I'm going to assume that you will find something to sell that will make you money. I'm not trying to say that a product is not important, but you'll have to decide what you want to sell.

2. You need a pre-sell webpage, or a landing page. Your primary purpose is to provide a little bit of information and get your visitor excited enough to give you their contact information for future follow. You're not trying to make the sale, but you're just trying to get their name and e-mail address, or to get the click through to your sales page.

3. Once you've gotten your visitors contact information it needs to be sent via a sign-up form to an auto responder. I personally like Aweber, but there are a number of quality auto responders available online.

In your autoresponder you need to have a series of 5-10 prewritten messages that offer more information designed to build your credibility. When talking about the product you hope to sell in the initial first couple messages you may not even want to directly identify the product or website sales page.

4. Once you've gotten the contact information of your visitor they should be sent to your blog where you have additional articles that discuss more about the niche that your product is in. Blogging is extremely important today for attracting traffic and building credibility.

5. The final thing you want to do is to consistently mail to your list as you build it. The way to make money online is to sell products. Many people miss this point, and they spend all their time building relationships and this sort of thing when in reality that is important, but if you're not selling you are not making money.

What you're really doing here is creating a funnel for the traffic that you are attracting. As you can see in this example, a final we are talking about contains a quality product, a landing page or presale page, an auto responder for follow-up, a blog for search engine traffic in building your credibility, and a strategy to be sure you're selling all the time.

The only thing we haven't discussed is how to get traffic into the final. There are a number of different ways to do this, including pay per click advertising, article marketing, blogging and social bookmarking, forum marketing, classified ads, e-zine advertising, social networking, or just plain buying it.

The benefit of approaching how you make money online using this strategy is you are create a long term approach to your success. Having an e-mail marketing lists can pay off for you for many years to come.

Blogging can create search engine bait that can produce additional traffic for many years to come as well. Once you master this basic system you can do it over and over for any product that you want.

This is why I say this is the best way to make money at home online today. Give this a try and see how works for you.