An open letter to out-of-work, retired, stay at home individuals.

You can make money online.

A Real Business is where you promote and sell real products of quality. The Internet is a very powerful way to make it work, on a shoestring. Starting and being successful in the Internet business is much easier than you might think. However, you need to have a quality WEB site and a solid marketing plan.

My advice is to not pursue any work-from-home program at all. There is no way to make a steady income with any of them. The way to make money is by starting your own legitimate business where you sell a product or provide a service. There are no shortcuts to success.

I launched my first website more than seven years ago to support my distribution business of professional projection equipment. I used my site mainly as sales support for my clients. I never promoted it to the wide web. Over the years I accumulated dozens and dozens of Internet marketing material looking at the day when I will retire, and will have time to dedicate myself to using my site as a business. Two years ago my business dried up and I was forced to retire. Since then, I have been trading foreign currency (Forex) and working on my site to turn it into a real On-Line business.

For more than a year, I have been experimenting or rather testing the various "secrets" from my very large collection of how-to e-books. I learned that there is no secret. The secret is a good website, knowledge of how to promote it and a lot of hard work and dedication, just like starting/growing any business. My main focus is to be able to maintain a top position with the search engines at a low direct cost to me, if possible to trade my time for a zero marketing cost.

Is this possible? Yes if you do it right.

Before we go into how-to, please note the following:

Starting a home business is hard work and don't let anyone tell you differently. The pleasure comes from finding an opportunity that you really enjoy working on, but effort is still required. Don't just jump into the first opportunity you see.

While many promote the ease of online business, they fail to mention the effort and time it takes to make a website successful. It's an easy business because you can set it up and it works 24 hours a day. But in reality, while it maybe easy, the success of your website costs a lot of time and effort.

Your WEB site is your business

Make your website Content Rich. The design and content should be done with your prospective customer in mind. Do not clutter the website with excessive graphics and animation. If anything, add more content, especially quality content. The search engines are content hungry and more content means more keywords. Try to use text instead of images where possible. Organize your website into different pages and avoid stuffing all the keywords and phrases into one page.

Getting all of your pages indexed is very important. A site map is a page that has text links to all of the pages of your site. A site map serves two purposes: It helps users find what they are looking for as well as it helps search engine robots land on the interior pages. After you build your site map page, be sure to make a link to it from your home page and the other important pages of your website. And so on… Make sure you understand how you design and structure your site.

When I set up my first website, I designed it as a tutorial for my clients doing business with on a daily basis. I did not even consider keywords, or Google. It took months to be indexed. When Sony Video picked it up and linked it to their site, all of a sudden I was in the top pages of Google with nothing to sell. Content is by far the most important element for your site.

There is plenty of information you can get for free about how to design and structure your website. If it is too confusing, check my site for help. I am using only two tools: WEB structuring and keywords selection.

How to Use Keywords

The topic of how keywords can help you with the WEB business might sound trivial. It is not. Search for low competition keywords. Those are keywords that have at least 300 searches a month and that have less than 5000 competing pages in Google (when entered between quotation marks.) Try to find 5 to 10 good keywords related to the same topic. The idea is to focus on keywords for which you can get a first page ranking in Google, Msn and Yahoo. You also have to understand how to place your keyword or use them in some kind of context in your content as well as your site.

The Best Internet Advertising Is Free Classified Ads

There are many ways to get search engine exposure, one of which is free advertising.

Hundreds of websites are designed specifically to support classified ads. They provide a free service for interested parties looking for goods and services. They make money mostly from Google ad sense and premium advertising. The ads submitter, which is a simple form, makes it easy to place your ads any time, around the clock. Look for sites that provide specific ads for your particular product or service. Another benefit is that the search engines crawl them very often and pick up your URL or name. Most of internet advertising companies provide up to three slots to advertise any product or service for free. An additional advantage is their targeted structure, specific services and goods. Make sure the Google page rank of the selected site is reasonable. These sites can be found by searching for free ads.

You must believe in your business to succeed. If you don’t believe that it’s possible for you to have a successful home based business or make your living from home, you won’t. It’s that simple.

Tr Cojoc