And just like the real world, it takes money to make money. The Internet has provided a very economical way to do business and there are some inexpensive Internet marketing options; but marketing is imperative to the success of an online business and productive marketing campaigns do require some cash down. That might be money for search engine campaigns, payment for a programmer or a web designer, or even just the fee for your hosting company, but you will need some money to get started; you get nothing for nothing.

I’m not going to promise you that there’s no risk involved here. There is. The size of the risk depends on how much you want to invest. You can start small with a cheap hosting company, a site you create yourself and so on. You’ll still make money like that; it will just take you a little longer. Alternatively, you can splurge right from the beginning by getting a pro to create your site and marketing it hard from the get-go. It’s entirely up to you.

Me, I started small and spent more money as it came in. How you do it will depend on how much spare cash you have and how confident you feel.

Checklist for Launching a Successful Internet Business

 Keywords and phrases

Have you developed a list of the keywords and phrases that will ensure good placement in the search engines?

Remember, you can think up keywords yourself, you can see which keywords your competitors are using, or you can simply pay a specialist company to find them for you. Once you’ve submitted your site to the search engines in all the keyword categories you want, it is crucial to monitor your traffic carefully and on a regular basis.

 Optimization

Have you identified what you need to do to ensure that your site is fully optimized? Do you have the means or resources to effectively complete the task?

Once you’ve figured out the keywords, you have to decide where to put them and how. You also have think about link exchanges to improve your ranking even more. Remember, the more sites link to you, the higher your position in the search engines - especially Google. 

 Content

Have you developed content that is not only attractive to your potential clients but also search engine friendly?  Do you have content and tools (other than your main text) that will assist with search engine ranking and drive visitors to your site?

Your content has to contain persuasive sales text with a fine sprinkling of crucial keywords. You also have to update it as often as necessary—not so often that it gets in the way of your business, but often enough to keep fresh traffic pouring in and the site interesting and attractive.  While displaying RSS feeds can help to "trick" search engines into thinking that you are constantly adding fresh content to your site, nothing will keep your visitors coming back to your site like good, fresh, quality, useful content.  Besides, with so many people using RSS feeds to trick the search engines, this "trick' is bound to become obsolete in the very near future.  This is not to say that displaying relevant RSS feeds is not a good idea.  But do not rely on them and use them solely to trick the search engines.  It will most likely come back to haunt you in the longrun.  There really no substitute for real, unique, and useful content.

 Traffic and promotion plan

Do you have a plan for promoting your site and driving traffic to it?

There are all sorts of ways you can bring traffic to your site. In this book, I mention just a few of them—the ones that I’ve found the most effective. When you set up your Internet business, you should have your entire promotion campaign planned out in your mind. You should know which methods you want to use, and what to do if they don’t yield the results you want in the time you want.

 Target Market

Have you identified your target market? Do you know how to reach them? Do you know what they want? Do you know how to attract them?

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