Your recipe for online success

 Your perfect online business will be made up of just a handful
of ingredients. They will be your revenue ingredients and your
traffic ingredients. 

Your challenge is to mix them up in the 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 the way of, the 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 the 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
the income ingredients above, top marketers use all of them. 

1. Search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the art of getting
free traffic by being listed highly in search engines. if you
can get on the first page at Google for a popular search term
then you'll get traffic and plenty of it. The process can be
slow but is certainly worthwhile. 

2. Paid advertising. Most popularly this would be pay per click
advertising through Adwords or Overture or one of the many other
pay per click search engines. But it could be pay for inclusion,
banner advertising or sponsor ads in E-zines. 

3. Free advertising. The best way to get free advertising other
than your search engine listings is to write articles. Articles
like this one your reading will be added to other people's
websites and can be submitted to article directories. Everywhere
your article is placed there will also be a link to your site. 

4. Affiliates. If you have a product then you should operate
your own affiliate programme. That way others can promote your
product in return for a commission and in order to do that they
will have to send their visitors to your site. 

5. Joint ventures. A joint venture is like a customised
affiliate arrangement whereby another site owner promotes your
product to their list or on their site in return for commission.
A joint venture differs from an affiliate offer in that it will
be a custom or personalised arrangement negotiated between the
parties. 

6. Repeat visits. The two main ways of getting repeat visits to
your site are to have interesting content or to invite people to
return via a newsletter or other email that you send to previous
visitors. You will of course need to have a reason for these
visitors to return. Which brings us back to fresh content, but
it could be a special offer or bonus. Obviously in order to send
an e-mail you need to collect the visitors email address the
first time that they visit your site. 

These then are your basic ingredients. What you need is the
right recipe that mixes them all up into the perfect business
for you.