Your challenge is to mix them up in best way to suit your business needs and your niche in order to gain maximum profit.

Assuming your niche has already been determined by looking for a hungry crowd that you can put your site in way of, next step in planning your online business will be to choose your income ingredients.

When it comes down to it there are three basic ways that you can earn money with your own website.

1. You could create your own product that you sell to visitors. This might be an e-book, a video or audio course or maybe some kind of a membership service. Or maybe it’s a hard product, by that I mean something that you can touch and that you have to physically ship to your customers.

2. You could sell other people's products either by buying resale rights to a product or by joining affiliate programs and promoting other people's products for commission.

3. You could sell advertising on your site and earn revenue this way. This may be by selling space on your site but more likely would be by showing Adsense or similar ads.

Probably you will want to do all of above.

The third step will be to determine how you will get traffic. You have a few choices in this regard and below I have detailed six sources of traffic that you can use for your site. As with income ingredients above, top marketers use all of them.

Are you a headless newbie?

I know I was when twelve month ago when I started looking into setting up an online business. Whichever way I turned people were willing to offer me advice, e-books, freebies, newsletters, amazing money making opportunities, advertising, search engine placement and much more. This was great but my head started spinning and my credit card started to melt and worst of all I wasn't making a cent.

I learnt a lot during this time and have started to see my commission cheques increase so here are my top 5 tips to help newbie with credit card rush to stop sit back and actually start earning some money.

1: Before you sign up for anything read sales page fully and see what you are actually getting for your money. Many of these pages contain a lot of information and tendacy is to skim them for interesting parts ie: How much does it cost. This is exactly what they are desinged to do, so slow down and read everything fully. When I first started I signed up for several programs just because they seemed to offer a lot for not a lot of money, this was true but none of it was at all useful.

2: Join some relevant forums and ask questions about affiliate programs you are interested in. People are only too happy to help and you will get some good honest feedback both good and bad.