Now, assuming you've got your market targeted, you know who your customers are going to be and how you're going to reach them with your product or service. And you have all your costs as well as time requirements itemized. The next step is to set your plan in motion and start making money.

Here is most important "secret" of all, relating to starting and building a profitable home-based business, so read very carefully. Regardless of what kind of business you start, you must have capital and available time to sustain your business through first six months of operation. Specifically, you must not count on receiving or spending any money coming in from your business on yourself or for your bills during those first six months. All income from your business during those first six months should be reinvested in your business in order for it to grow and reach our planned first year potential.

Once you've passed that first six months milestone, you can set up a small monthly salary for yourself, and begin enjoying fruits of your labor. But first six months or operation for any business are critical, so do not plan to use any of money your business generates for yourself during that period.

If you've got your business plan properly organized, and have implemented plan, you should at end of your first year be able to begin thinking about hiring other people to alleviate some of your work-load. Remember this: Starting a successful business is not a means towards either a job for yourself or a way to keep busy. It should be regarded as beginning of an enterprise that will grow and prosper, with you as top dog. Eventually, you'll have other people doing all work for you, even run ning entire operation, while you vacation in Bahamas or Hawaii and collect or receive regular income from your initial efforts.

Then you need to find a domain name www.value-name.com works just fine and is cheap. Look for a domain name that contains your key words and is fairly easy to remember, shorter better for simplicity. (ie: avoid picking www.This-is-My-Business-Site-and-You-Should-Look-at-It12345.com)

Next Step...... Adding Content / Products

If your page is going to be informational there are many great article services out there. Here are a few.....

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/netwrite-publish-announce/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network/ http:/ hePhantomWriters.com

If you are going to sell actual products you'll probably want to look into working with a dropshipper (unless you have a big garage to store all products you will be selling) There are many out there. Here is one I've heard great things about.....

http://www.mydssd.com

And then...... Exchanging Links

The best way to move up in search engines (to gain traffic) is to have many related pages linking to yours. Link exchange websites like Link Partners are a great way to find sites to exchange relevant links with. Much of this can be automated to save you time and effort....... all you have to do is approve links you want and decline ones you don't.

You can also do a search in a few of major search engines for your selected keywords....... sites that pop up at top of search are ones you would ideally like to exchange links with to boost your rankings.

Last one........ Get an Auto Responder

This is a service that will send automatic e-mail messages for you at pre-programmed times that you select. Set one up to send out occasional information about your site to your members, use it to keep in touch with your customers, get feedback about your site to help you improve..... etc. You won't actually NEED this feature until you are getting heavy traffic to your site, but it's a handy time saving tool for busy webmasters.

That's basically it! Rinse and Repeat.

Of course there's always more things that you might like to try to improve your business but those are basics. Try new things and track results. See what works for your site and go from there. The secret to online business is to jump in and get wet...... do SOMETHING and work on improving things from there...... one step at a time.

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