There are countless ways to earn a living online. The following is a list of steps that I refer to as the “Shampoo of Online Success”. What do you hopefully do in the shower regularly? Wash, rinse, repeat, wash rinse, repeat, etc. Repeating digital products or duplicating success on the Internet can be surprisingly easy. Here’s a great list of steps that I found scouring the forums.
1 Find a niche
Check out some forums, usergroups, and places like yahoo answers. See what kind of questions people are asking. Look for popular topics.
2 Keyword research
You can use the free tool over at digitalpoint.
Suppose you type in ‘any keyword’;
It will return to you a list of related key words and how often they are searched a day. Then go to Google and search the keyword (with ” ” around it) and see how many sites it will return. The fewer the better for now. Once you get the hang of online marketing I wouldn’t really worry about competition. Just build the better mouse trap.
3 Get a web hosting account
They are pretty cheap. Around 10 bucks a month for a good shared host. Stay away for free web hosts. They are not worth it. I strongly recommend hostgator.com. You can host unlimited domains there, and there price is under $10 a month. If money is an issue, do a search for hostgator coupons enter the code when you signup and the first month is only 1 penny.
4 Find or create your product
You can write your own info product or you can go to clickbank.com and chose a product for there. You will get a commission for each sale. (There are novels I could write about in this step, but to keep this post readable I’m assuming you have a product in mind.)
5 Create your site
Now you will want to create a content site. This only needs to be a few pages. You will want to put 10 articles on the site. Make good use of the keywords you researched. Also put out product on the site.
6 Set up an auto responder
This is optional if you REALLY don’t have the money, but it’s something you will need to do eventually. This will collect peoples emails on your website. You write a small report (you can base it off of your articles to save time) Have your visitors sign up to get the free report. Make sure you include a link to you product in the report.
7 Marketing
Remember those forums you looked up to find a good niche? You should start posting (not spamming) on them. Help people out, become an expert in your niche. You don’t really have to be an expert…but you should look like one. Share and help as many people as you can. Include a link you your site in you signature. Also places like yahoo answers. You can answer peoples questions and include a link in your resource box.
You will also want to submit articles to article directories such as EzineArticles.com.
Another good marketing tip is to exchange links with site in the same niche as you.
There are a lot of different marketing techniques you can use (too many to go into here, but this should get you started) Just search around the forums here.
8 Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Do this with several different niches. The more sites you have going, the more money you have coming in.
Give it a try! 
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Your last sentence could just as easy read: Do this with several different niches. The more sites you have going, the more money you have going OUT.
$10 for the URL, $5/month hosting, $10/month for the autoresponder, hundreds of hours invested in unique content…and sometimes for no return.
John Carlton gave me a bit of advice that I will always treasure. He said, and I paraphrase, 80% of the people trying to make money on the Internet make one huge mistake, they choose the wrong niche. Just because people are looking for information about a topic doesn’t mean they’re spending money on it.
Consequently, I think you should add a very, VERY important step. Before you do all this work, you should test your niche idea. This can easily be done with Google Adwords, or even Adsense. And even though you’ll invest a few dollars up front for the ads, you’ll know immediately if there’s a hungry market willing to spend money on your niche.
Ralphs last blog post..Link Building with Bing
Marketing is probably the only thing that I’m so lazy to do :{
Michael Aulias last blog post..Mozilla Firefox 3.5b99
Yea i think what ralph said is THE most important thing on that list.
this is exactly where I’m at i have my website now - it’s not so much for any type of marketing or work purpose - just my hobby but also my learning tool so I definitely thank you lots for all these good posts. it will help me out on my online learning curve.
Evess last blog post..1
I have never had a problem with this but i know it is common. I wonder if this is common when it comes to cheap hosting or reseller hosting accounts.
The keyword research tool at DP is awesome, a great way to find keywords.
Just started a website with your advices. I was wondering what monetizing techniques do you recommend for wordpress !?
I recommend the WhyDoWork Adsense plugin! You need a decent amount of traffic to earn well with AdSense but it is fairly hands off.
You could also place Clickbank or other affiliate links in the code positions if you don’t want to do AdSense. Check it out here: http://www.whydowork.com/blog/whydowork-adsense-plugin/