There are lots of people out there who say they would like to run their own business. They are usually, though not always, referring to running an online business.

It is no surprise that so many people see this as a real possibility. They are constantly being sold on the idea that you can buy a make money online product and be swept into a world of Ferrari sports cars, glamorous yachts and be surrounded by beautiful women, or men, whichever takes your fancy.

Many of these prospective entrepreneurs are to be found on various online marketing forums asking for advice and giving their 'knowledge' gained from reading far too many sales pages. Nothing beats experience and unless you walk the walk you should be cautious about talking the talk. Inexperienced people frequently seem to mislead other beginner online marketers and prospective online business owners but that is the downside of everybody having a voice on the internet. With so much general babble it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the genuine, experience based knowledge from the chatter of the enthusiastic but inexperienced.

We are all entitled to an opinion but when we are saying emphatically that something is the case we should be talking with knowledge and experience of putting those ideas into practice and making them work for us. Too many seem eager to relay what they have read elsewhere that may or may not be correct and they wouldn't know because they never tried it.

They say we now live in the information age and that knowledge is power but when there is so much chatter it is difficult to hear clearly. Most of everything you need to know about online marketing is available for free online, somewhere.

Marketing is hardly a new business and the old established ideas of marketers of old generally still work today, albeit that the system has been updated to work online. It is still about having a product or service to sell and finding a customer who might need that product and then convincing them that they would be happier with your product than without it.

So, if you want to run an online business for free you can. Get yourself a hubpage and write about a product. Get a blogger blog and tell the world about your service. Just be careful what you read and don't assume that because someone has a gazillion posts on a forum they must know what they are talking about. It is interesting to see many people with a lot of posts to their name writing about how they plan to set up a blog soon and start making money online. To those people I say, Stop wasting your time writing forum posts and start writing some content on your own blog.

The cost of setting up your own website with your own domain on your own rented hosting space is minimal. We are talking around $20 to get started and $75 tops, for a year. It is not a huge amount of money yet we see people grumbling about the cost of it. OK, I know times are hard and some people dream of having twenty dollars left at the end of the month. I understand that. If that is you go the free route. Set up Hubpages, Squidoo lenses and write articles for EzineArticles, Goarticles and Article Dashboard. You can make money using free resources and if you are really short of cash start that way.

Most people can afford $20 dollars to spend on various different things and it is only a question of priorities that prevents them. If you can afford to go to a movie you can probably afford to own your own website, run your own online business and potentially make a bit of money. It will cost you around $9 to $10 dollars to register a domain name, from $5  per month for server space. (My server recommendation Is Hostgator. Click here for more info)  You might possibly make a lot more than your twenty dollars and you might multiply that number by ten, hundreds or even thousands of times. It is possible but that is not to say it is easy and it requires work, knowledge and dedication together with a slice of good luck.

If you decided to run a real brick and mortar business, how much do you suppose that would cost you? You probably need finance of around $50,000 to $100,000 to run just about any serious realworld business these days so what is twenty dollars? $20 is what it would cost you to get your shop window cleaned before opening. It is a tiny and insignificant amount of money to run a business with.

I know what it is like to struggle to pay the bills. I know how hard it can seem to get an online business generating decent returns that enable you to live a comfortable life but if you want to run your own online business and build something worthwhile that can earn you real money you have to be prepared to invest something into your business.

Now I am not saying you should spend the rent money on internet marketing products. I say exactly the opposite. Do not spend money you cannot afford to lose buying ebooks, guides and courses. Spend time researching for free instead but don't avoid ever getting started. Use the free route. It works and it can earn you some money to invest in your own domains and server space.

Note I said invest. You are not in this to spend money for the sake of it. When you buy a product or a service for your internet marketing business you should be buying with a purpose. Figure out how this new purchase will fit in with your business and how it will improve your efficiency, your returns or your visitor numbers.

What is an online business? IT'S A BUSINESS. Businesses are there to make money, not to keep spending money on the latest hyped up idea that everyone is telling you is essential to your business. It may be essential and it may be effective but it also could just be that these guys and gals promoting it will make some money from convincing you to buy it and they may never have even seen the product before.

I must declare an interest here. I have my automated offers blog attached to this site and while I do like a reccommend the wordpress plugin that runs the publishing of these offers which only costs about $5 if you are interested, I have no idea what is being published on there. It has new products and offers appearing most days. I look at them now and again but they appear as if by magic and I have no experience or knowledge about them. Most seem pretty good and they are usually priced very reasonably but you have to make the choice and decide if they are suitable or not. Don't listen to me or trust the salespages to tell you if you should purchase or not. Use your own judgment and make up your own mind.

There is a lot of good information out there for free and lots of good reports and guides available for just a few dollars. If you want to run your own online business then you should approach the whole thing as a business person and be prepared to invest, what you can afford, in yourself and the business. Avoid the temptation to buy everything out there. Be selective, think about your reasons and benefits for buying anything and how it can help you make money online.

If you had a real bricks and mortar store you wouldn't buy everything from every salesman who walked in and offered you their goods and nor should you do that online. Spend more time working on your websites and less time reading sales pages and participating on forums and you might actually find you are beginning to build an online business.

One thing about the web is that it is so darn big. How the heck are you supposed to get your website on the first page of the search engines when there are a million other website owners trying to do the same thing? There are two answers to this question. The first, and arguably the most important, is that you must have content that gives the search engines a reason to rank a page on your site highly. If you want to rank for dog training then your webpage had better say a lot about dog training with lots of related words like puppy training, dog treat training or other similar sorts of terms. This is all food for the search engine robots and you need to convince them your site is a good place to send their traffic.

The second important thing you can do to boost the importance of your webpage is to get plenty of backlinks.

You will probably have heard this many times before. You may have got yourself a few backlinks from blog commentating and maybe a few hubpages links, even a few from squidoo or some blogger blog links but it takes a lot of time and it's hard work and while we don't mind a bit of hard work on the road to success with our internet business we would prefer to do more productive things than to numb our brains to death looking for blogs to comment on wouldn't we?

Ah yes, there is something else we can do. Write articles and fire them off to article directories to get some juicy backlinks. Yes, that works and it is a decent long term strategy to build the reputation of your website by having some decent backlinks but once again, it can be brain numbing. How many articles can you write about dog training before your head explodes? Mine does as soon as I even think about writing twenty articles on the same subject. Is there an alternative? Well, yes it would seem there is, read on.

I have been trying out a package of two programs. You can buy them separately or save a bit by purchasing both together. Believe me, the package together makes an amazing combination that will get you lots of backlinks and will save you hours in writing and rewriting articles. The main program is MagicArticleRewriter and having looked at a few article spinning programs I can tell you this one is a goody.

A lot of the cheaper article spinning programs will try to replace words for you and frequently make a real hash of it. The trouble with the English language is that it has similar words with very different meanings, even the same word with different meanings, so when you try to change a word automatically you end up with an article that reads like it was written by an idiot or a martian, or a combination of the two.

This program doesn't try to do everything for you but what it does do is make it real easy to find alternative words and phrases and then simply enter them into the spinnable formatted article. It also allows you to use your own mind and make alterations as you see fit. It is fast and easy to do and there isn't much more can be said about that. It just works.

The real icing on the cake comes when you add the second program in the package. This one is an articlesubmitter and it will automatically publish your unique articles, which it gets from the article spinner program, to about 700 different article directories all over the internet. Not just that but it does a lot of the signin and confirm operations that are required when you first sign up with an article directory. You don't have to send the articles all out at once either. You can set a schedule for how many you want to be sent out each day or every few days or whatever.

Together these two packages make getting backlinks almost fun. You can get a lot of backlinks over a fairly short period of time without a lot of effort and the content you are publishing is good stuff. None of your robot written junk here. Just good articles that you have written or, if you use PLR to start with, edited. This is a great package and you have a 60 day money back guarantee so check it out. I think you will love it too. There's a video on the salespage that shows it in operation so you will see how clever and simple to use it is. Go take a look here ...<MagicArticleRewriter>

You will have noticed I have been raving about the commission automator plugin that I am super impressed with. I think you should buy i if you have any blogs that sell stuff. Anyway, the plugin has several options for how often you add offers to your blog.

Since I wanted to see it in full action I had it posting a lot of offers to this blog over 24 hours. Trouble with that was that it made the real articles get buried way down under all those offers. Now the sensible thing would be to switch to just publishing an offer every couple of days or maybe once a week but I started thinking about another possibility. What if I could add a second blog to this one that only published the offers and let you switch between the two!

I started to experiment and installed a second blog in another directory and set it all up and whilst it appeared to work just fine there was a problem with the fact that if you clicked on the header of a post on the Offers blog it took you back to the main blog,

I did a quick search online but the only thing I found were questions from people who had suffered a similar problem and hadn't apparently solved it. So, I put my thinking cap on and had a lightbulb moment. You know? One of those moments when if life was a cartoon a big speech ballooon with a picture of a lightbulb would have appeared over the top of my head.
The solution lay in the htaccess file.

If you use permalinks to change the name of your post as it appears in the address bar the server relies on the information in the htaccess file to tell it where to find the files and mine was reverting to the domain htaccess file which told it to look at the main blog installation.

So, to solve the problem all I had to do was to edit a copy of the htaccess file and save it to the new blog folder. I did this and bingo! Everything started working properly as intended.

So, now if you want to find the offers you can click on a link on the side menu and it opens a new window to the second blog on this domain with just the juicy offers there and I can keep all my, hopefully, interesting articles here and easier to find.

So, can you add a second blog on a domain, yes you can. In fact you could us the same database but I don't really see the need. I have always believed you should KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I still recommend the commissions automator plugin for your blogs but it might be best if you only add offers every couple of days which is easy to set up which just one click. If you do want to publish more you can simply add another blog and do as I have done which keeps things tidy and uncluttered. I hope this has helped. Feel free to comment below.