If you create an ebusiness according to these simple cliches, you will not become wildly successful overnight. You will not find that silver bullet to turn everything around. You will simply create a solid, practical business with linear increases that achieves realistic outcomes and will one day--with enough work--become that profit-pulling empire you have dreamed of since day one.

That's great. But how do I apply these ethereal parcels of "wisdom" to my real ebusiness?--Through structural adjustments and long-term planning, two most important parts of building a successful, long-term internet business.

Unfortunately, too many new internet marketers--in their eagerness to see immediate results--refuse to plan anything. Instead, they rush forward, purchasing products and services and piles of nonsense that, no matter how good they are, cannot be useful unless implemented within a solid business plan.

They get frustrated. They give up. They fail.

Other internet marketers, weary of trying new plans, constantly pound away on unprofitable ideas that also will never achieve long-term results. They purchase thousands of clicks, impressions, and guaranteed visitors. They never remake amount they spent on advertising.

They get frustrated. They give up. They fail.

They never sit down and create plans. They never follow up with those plans and revise them as they go. They make no structural adjustments to their businesses to reflect their successes and failures.

They react to everything immediately or just stagnate altogether.

But you are different. You will no longer do this. You know that content really is king. And that if you want to succeed, you really must work hard.

You know that when you make a new product, you had better be thinking outside of box or else you will be smacked-down by those stupid cliches that make you cringe whenever someone repeats them.

So set goals and try to achieve them. Make your business results-oriented. Stop hinging your entire internet business career on a single marketing fad. Don't count your e-chickens before they hatch!

. . .And most importantly of all, always remember: if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.

2. Conversion Rates If your web site draws lots of visitors, you'll want to know what percentage of those visitors are buying, and if not buying, at least signing up for your ezine. With these conversion rates you can determine how to increase your online sales.

Barbara has a subscription-based web site that pulls in over twelve hundred visitors a day, yet only seven people a day contact her and site only generates sales a couple of times a week. Is this best she can do? Probably not.

You can prompt 10-50% of people who visit your web site to contact you and then work on converting these qualified leads to sales. For Barbara, all it took was a few changes in her layout and copy for her to add two to three hundred people a day to her list of qualified leads and increase sales to dozens each day.

One of most important things to identify and measure is where sales come from. If you advertise with Google or in ezines and see that an ad has more than paid for itself in leads generated and sales, you'll know its worth running again.

Just asking people where they heard of you or how they arrived at your web site is useful. When I asked one client how they found my site, they explained how they had been searching web using phrase, "marketing services" and how difficult it had been to find site.

My advertising hadn't targeted phrase "marketing services", so I quickly added it to list of keywords for my ads. The result? The next day someone came to my site via my targeted ad and bought every marketing manual I sell.

Don't let marketing be a mystery. Start analyzing what is and isn't working so you know what to fix. If your marketing is working, use these same numbers to set new goals for lead generation and salës conversions and be even more successful.