I have been asked on many occasions - "What's the most important ingredient to succeeding online?". There is no single key for this and in my opinion there are at least 4 for succeeding online. This does not mean that there are no other keys to online success, just that these are the ones that work for me. I have listed them below and in random order.

One of the keys to online success is being organized and disciplined. In the end, it really does not matter if you are the smartest person in the world; but if you cannot sit down and do a single day's work, it really will not count. There are cases of many people with high IQ's who have not gotten anywhere in their lives, all because they lacked the necessary discipline and organizational skill sets to put anything together. Take my mum for example, a wonderful talented pianist and an opera singer as well, but in the end, because of poor organizational skills she never managed to make her career go anywhere. It may suck for me on many levels but that is how it is.

Another key to online success is to create ones own products and services. True, one can make money as an affiliate marketer by promoting the products of other people. But the catch is that you would be in competition with the other affiliate marketers promoting the same affiliate product. By creating your own product or service, you would not need to compete with any other affiliate marketer and what is more, you can actually use them to promote your product. By doing this, I have managed to quadrupled my income within 12 months.

Advertising is the key that is really essential when it comes to seeing any kind of success at all. Your site may well be the best designed or even the greatest one to date, but if no one knows about its existence, it will be difficult to make even a dime off it. I am not going to get into 'how setting up an online site without any promotion is useless'. I'll save that for a later article. The crux here is that until and unless you utilize one of the many proven methods of promotion for your site, your chances of success are slim to none.

Last but not least, there's communication and to be more precise, writing. Ponder over all the tasks that you will perform in your business; they all involve writing in one way or the other. From the sales pages to actual content, from setting auto responder emails to responding to customer inquiries, they all involve writing at every level. If you cannot communicate effectively then you cannot corner the niche market. You can always outsource this but that would prove to be a bit expensive.

These are my 4 keys to success. There may be others, many others but these are the ones that really count as far as I'm concerned.