Those who have a deep desire to earn an extra income from home will eventually look into affiliate marketing or pay per click marketing programs. These are legit businesses and even a very new internet marketer can earn the first bucks with these programs. Still, most people will never get beyond $100 monthly for certain reasons. So how exactly can the Average Joe make money through the internet?

The best advice I can give you is to come up with a well structured business plan and then work that plan for several months. You need to start a real business, just like you would start an offline business. There will be many obstacles and you might even fail with your first couple of businesses. Here is what separates the losers from the winners... The losers will give up... The winners will learn from their mistakes and make their next business much better.

Another advice is to concentrate on Listbuilding... even if you are outside the IM niche, your list will always be your major source of income. You can market affiliate products through your list or simply send them visitors to different websites that you have created.

Most people will tell you to find a special niche to market to. That's not a bad advice but you need to understand one important fact: Finding a real niche is hard nowadays... remember, there are thousands of people out there who are trying the exact same thing. That means the competition is there, regardless of the niche.

What you need to do to succeed is be better than others, provide better content, better support, better products... Basically stand out of the crowd.

You can start with a WordPress Blog and write about your favorite topic. You can review websites, products or post news related to your niche. A WordPress Blog is probably the easiest way to start out with internet marketing, simply because driving traffic to WordPress Blogs is easy and you can make your first bucks from adsense or affiliate offers. A WordPress blog can be setup and ready to go within 20 minutes... most hosting providers even have an automated installation for WordPress.

But understand that your own blog is just one piece of your internet business. You should have several blogs, websites and opt-in lists, so that you not only rely on one income source. Having several websites gives you also the advantage of doing cross promotions and cross linking.

Let me sum up what for me are the most important factors or steps towards a successful online business.

1.) You need a website that converts visitors into signups for your autoresponder. This can be a squeeze page, a membership site or your blog that includes a signup form for your autoresponder.

2.) You need backend offers to convert signups into sales. Simply place a One-Time-Offer on your signups after they have signed up for your opt-in list. You also send out emails through your autoresponder and make special offers or promote affiliate products.

3.) You need to test and track all aspects of your website to get a higher signup rate. If you can double your signup rate, then you will automatically double your sales. Increasing the signup rate is done by testing different elements on your website or blog. This can be the headline, the call to action or any other element.

4.) You need to test and track all aspects of your backend offers to get a higher sales rate. Test and track different offers, different prices and different approaches. You will find out that you can easily double your sales rate by testing and tracking.

5.) You need to test and track different traffic sources to get the best Return of Investment, no matter if you invest time of money. You need to know where your quality traffic comes from, otherwise you won't succeed on the long run.

6.) You need to offer top customer support to make more than 1 sale from 1 customer. It's easier to sell a current customer a second item... much easier than getting new customers. That only happens if you provide a top support and top products.

7.) You need to concentrate on building your own opt-in list... that's major important! Yeah, we had that before but I say it again because you simply can't go without your own-opt in list.

A successful online business can not be created overnight, you need to stick with it for months and optimize all aspects to make your business profitable.