You will have heard talk about how you can make a living working online at home in your underpants. It's a standard sort of phrase to emphasize how you don't have to get up and go to work in the office or factory that has kept you in chains for a lot of your working life.

Buy this product and m,ake your fortune while working at the kitchen table in your underpants. You have probably seen that sort of marketing phrase around and it makes a great image to convince people to buy internet marketing ebooks, courses, memberships and DVDs. We all want tot spend a couple of hours a week working on a laptop and then go off to the beach for the rest of the day. Who wouldn't enjoy that?

There's often a real truth behind the idea of someone working at home in their underpants and it is not for the reasons promoted in the sales pahges. They say that only 2% of people are real action takers. The sales pages often play to the idea that you hardly have to do any work to make a fortune and many people fall for that. Let's be honest here, our enthusiasm for the dream means that most of us fall for that stuff and those who don't are probably cynics who wouldn't believe it if they won the lottery. No, the reason a lot of people are sat around in their underpants is because they spent all their spare cash buying one course after another, one ebook after another and one DVD instruction course after another.

If you spend all your time and money buying new marketing products you are very likely doomed to fail. You have to make use of what you buy and that can take time. If you carefully read the sales page for a marketing guide or product and you think it sounds like it could work for you and you decide to buy it then spend some time working with it.

Don't just read it and move on to another product. Read it and put it into practice. Most likely it is a plan of action that will require you to continue taking action over a period of time. Try to make use of it every day and be consistent. Keep it up. Doing almost anything everyday will start to have some effect after a couple of months or so.

It hardly matters what you do so long as you keep doing it. Obviously some actions are more effective than others but if all you did was to write one comment on someones blog each day at least after a year you would have 365 backlinks from those comments.  That may not make you rich but you will at least have achieved something. Buying new products all the time and always looking for the magic button that makes you rich is probably just going to leave you poorer.

Maybe there will be a new magic button product out one day but it seems unlikely that it will work for all of it's buyers. Very few 'Gurus' do all their own work. Most will outsource it to staff or employ staff from around the world to do all the repetetive and routine stuff that works. You could do that too but in the meantime just take a product you have that you think makes a lot of sense and work it.

Follow the plan and keep doing it until it either works or you are sure that it is never going to work for you. Mosy internet marketing products offered for sale will have some sort of stratagy or plan that will work if it is done enough and very few will work if you just try them once and then give up. My tip for your next year online is to do something everyday in a focused and consistent fashion and with a little luck you may well find it begins working for you much better than buying all the new products and giving up on them after a very short trial.

Make this your mantra. Consistency and focus. Stick to one thing and do it well and with a little luck next year you will be sat at home in your underpants because you want to and not because you have no money to buy more clothes.

A common question people ask is how can they write a blog when they do not consider themselves to be a writer.

We grow up admiring people who can write and we are educated to believe that writing is a special talent that few people have. It is true that if you want to write a masterpiece that will be remembered fondly in a few hundreds years time then you do need to have a significant talnt as a writer but if all you want to do is write a blog then you need not worry so much.

If you want to write a blog just get on and write it. Punctuation is not terribly important unless you are writing about English grammer. Spelling is only important if you are writing about spelling. Yes, we should all try to spell properly to make ourselves clear but most blogs will have a spelling checker built in or there are online spellcheck websites and most computers will have some sort of spellcheck program or word processor.

If you need a small quick word processor program I use an excellent little free program called Jarte which has the facility to spellcheck in different languages amongst many other features but it is quick and simple to use to write an earticle before you publish it on your blog. Find it here... Jarte There is a Pro version available for a fee but I have never tried that as for me the simple free version does all I need.

So, you want to write but are still unsure? What do you do when you get together with friends or family? You talk, right? If you are telling them about something, you just tell them. Why should writing be any different to that. The answer is it can be exactly like that. If you write an article as if you were talking to someone and explaining something, you won't go too far wrong.

It actually makes articles more easy to read and enjoyable if you write as you would talk if the person was there with you. It makes your blog feel more relaxed, friendly and approachable.

Some of bloggers are well known for poor spelling but many don't even bother to use a spellcheck when they have one. They feel it is more honest and natural if you read the words exactly as originally typed.

If you feel you have something worthwhile to say then just say it. Don't go worrying about getting it perfect. Most people who visit your blog to read it will now be worrying about it being grammatically perfect so just get on and write the article you have in your head.

There's something very important you need to know about setting up a new wordpress blog on your own hosting server. Once you have gone through the process of installing wordpress which is easy to do if you are using a cpanel server, as most are, as all you have to do is go use the Fantastico button and select wordpress and click install new. Entering your chosen login details and password entry and a click and you will have wordpress installed on your server. It doesn't get a lot easier than that.

Once you have installed wordpress there is a certain amount of setting up to do before you start posting blog entries. I may explain more about the specifics another time if people ask me to but there is one very important thing you should do before you begin posting to your blog.

I am assuming you want to get visitors to your blog and for that you will want the search engines to check out your blog and link to it when searches are made for what your blog is all about. If this does apply to you read on.

When you install wordpress, version 2.8.6 is the current one as I write this, you must click on settings and then on privacy. You will see two options and if you do want the search engines to see your blog you should change the setting to Visible to everyone as by default it seems to set your blog to be private and invisible to the search engines.

Blog Visibility
I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers

I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Once that is done you will find that you have a ping list visible on the 'Writing' settings page and you can add a list of sites to ping when you make a new post, which all goes to help your blog become more well known and helps attract visitors.