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.

UPDATE: Offers are now listed seperately here..Products For Sale (opens in a new window so you can easily return after looking)

I want all my visitors to be aware that I am currently running a wordpress plugin on this site which publishes offers for products automatically. I don't even see the offers before they are published and so you should not consider them recommendations from me. If they are listed as being in the 'Auto Posted Offers' category I may not even have seen the offer myself so you should do your own due diligence and decide if the offer is right for you or not.
The offers are for fairly low priced products that fulfill a specific purpose and if you feel that would benefit your website it may be a few dollars well spent.

The plugin appears to work very nicely. Released by Ken Reno and Richard Wing it is in the beta stage at the moment while they finalise the code ready for full public release. It's called Commissions Automator and it automatically makes posts to your WordPress blog of various offers for products related to websites and internet marketing. It also posts to your Twitter account, and even then the link contains your own affiliate ID, so you earn instant commissions, directly to your PayPal account on any sales made through your links.

The shocker is that instead of $67, they are letting BETA users get access right now for less than $5! For that money I am inclined to say you can hardly go wrong. One sale could easily pay for it and from what I have seen so far the offers are pretty good too.

There is another neat thing about using this tool and that is that your blog gets fresh content added regularly. They may only be offers but at least your blog won't be gathering dust if you leave it alone for a few days, or weeks. The only other thing to think about is how many offers you want to publish each day or every few days. It could easily swamp your own posts and bury them several pages deep in your blog if you have it posting too many offers but that is all part of experimenting what works best for your own blog. So far, I am very impressed and it gets my fullest recommendation and at the current price, it is, in the marketers words, A Steal!

You can take a look here and read more about it Commissions Automator

UPDATE: Offers are now listed seperately here..Products For Sale (opens in a new window so you can easily return after looking)

When we first start out with the idea we can make money on internet websites we build one or two sites and sit back waiting for the world to come to our door. Sorry to disappoint you but that just ain't gonna happen. There may be the odd exception where something you say or offer attracts some attention and gets picked up by a few popular websites which could mean you could find yourself swamped by traffic but that happens rarely and you are fortunate if you had this happen to you. If it does happen make sure you follow it up by offering more of it on your website.

For the rest of us for whom building and running websites is a more long term way of making money on internet we have to provide something of value to our visitors and offer something that enables us to make money with websites we manage. So, if you want people to come to your website you are going to have to tell the world it exists. You need publicity and that can be in the form of links on other sites or talk about your website on the web and in the real world. When you first start out either of these options seems difficult.

Let's step back for a moment and look at the basics of your website. What have you got to offer there? Why would people want to visit it and what will they do when they get there? You need to offer them something to give them a reason for being there. Do you solve a problem for them? Can you advise them on the best way to do.. something?

You also need to think about why the search engines would rate your site well. Do you have interesting and original content? Is it relevant to what people are searching for? You need to be giving them something of value, as I hope I am doing here by talking about the subject of good quality content for websites. Once you have written, or purchased,  a few good quality original articles you can publish them on your website and you will have something of value to offer the visitors when they arrive.

Ok, you have a website with some good quality content that is useful and interesting for your visitors but  next you need to think about how you can benefit too. How will you make money from your visitors and earn money with your website?

The first thing most new webmasters want do is add AdSense ads to website. It is easy to sign up for once you have a website with some decent content and you can put AdSense on your website, simple and fast. A lot of the more experienced webmasters might dismiss AdSense but it is perfect for beginners and it can make you some decent money every month once your websites become established and are attracting visitors.

There are various books, ebooks and video guides explaining how to get the best returns from AdSense ads but when you are starting out you just want to get something online. I'll see if I can dig something up later to offer as a gift, or at least very cheap,  for my website visitors. I do have various products available to sell or giveaway to help new webmasters develop their knowledge and experience so watch this space and I will make it worth your while visiting. See what I mean about giving your visitors something of value? If I can offer you something that will encourage you to visit again we both win. I get more traffic to my website and you get something useful to you. We all benefit.

There are lots of other ways of monetizing a website and I will write about them in another post. Actually I may write several about this as it is a big subject to discus. I will also point you in the direction of some good offers you might want to add to your websites to help you make money on websites you own. So, watch this space. In the meantime you can sign up with Google AdSense at Google

Nothing happens when you do nothing, so do something on your website today.