How does a "newbie", begin the journey of starting his or her online business? This a question for the ages. There are several parts to the answer. First and foremost you must have a product or service to sell/promote. After that, you must determine if there is a market for your product. Then you must determine how much competition you will be up against.

After you have selected a product or service, whether it is your own or someone elses, (afilliate), it is time to set up a website of some sort. This can be a Blog, a simple squeeze page, or a full blown website with multiple pages. You can advertise someone elses website but this is not really the way to go if you plan on building a name for yourself, which is crucial. Also, you need to start building a list of people/prospects who have shown an interest in what you have to offer.

Ok, now that you have a website, you need to start advertising your product or service. This is where it really gets crazy. There are alot of ways to get your products in front of people's eyes.

There are paid methods and there are free methods. The paid methods can be very tricky because there are a ton of companies on the internet that claim they will get you a lot of traffic to your site, but in reality they just take your money and you never see the traffic. I'm not saying there aren't good companies out there, but you really have to do your homework before forking out your hard earned cash or you will lose interest in no time. This is one of the many reasons only about five percent of online startups make it at all. Scary, Huh?

One example of a very good paid method is something called pay per click. This is an excellent way to promote your business, but if you are not thorougly familiar on all the ins an outs, then you will just be wasting your time and money. Now, like I said earlier there a many ways to promote your online business using free methods. These ways of advertising are excellent but will take time instead of your money. BUT... in the long run this is far and away the best way to go.

A few examples of these are Article marketing, press releases, you tube, my space, SEO, blogging and forums. All of these take time, but once you are set up and running, you need to develop a routine of what you will do on a daily basis and then you stick to that schedule and you will start to see results.

I wrote this article to give just a simple basic overview of what it takes to start an online business. My next article and thereafter will be to introduce and explain in laymen's terms all the steps mentioned above.