Guest post by Dean Cullingham

Everyone knows that the best way to be successful in your chosen business is to promote it to as many people as possible. This will usually be done in the form of advertising. Either by posters, leaflets, newspapers, radio, TV or even good old 'word of mouth'. Exactly the same goes for making a success of your online business. This is no real problem to an established online marketeer. The secret is to try and reach a fresh audience who are looking for the opportunity or product that your site provides. But, what if you're just starting out and you have no money to get yourself started. What do you do?

Do not give up. Plenty of people have been successful even when starting with nothing, it just takes a little time. In fact the only thing that you need to get started is an internet connection, computer (obviously) and some time. You also need a goal. It could be to earn just a few extra bucks each month or to provide your family income for life.

Step One: Building a Website
The fact that you're reading this article shows you already have the right idea. Get yourself a website. Using your favorite search engine look for 'free blog site' or 'free website'. When you find one that you like the look of sign up and give it a try. Spend some time adding content and customizing it the way you like it. Remember that the content you add should be unique (do not duplicate or copy other sites). This will help you in the long run get a better page ranking and more visitors to your site. Once you are happy with you site you need to promote it.

Step Two: Getting Your Site Noticed
Not as easy as it used to be because there are so many sites competing for attention. If you create a site, add lots of content and update it fairly often it will eventually get noticed by the search engines but this can take many months or even years. So how do you help the process along? Fortunately this needs nothing more than a little time and effort. Simply start adding articles and comments on popular websites with a link back in your signature to your website. If you wrote and submitted a new (again must be unique) article twice a week and posted it on some popular blogs you would effectively have around 100 links back to your site after 12 months. This has two major benefits. Firstly people who check out the blogs may see your article and follow your link directly and secondly the search engines will do exactly the same. When they find lots of links to your site and the number is increasing they will deduce that your site is popular and give your site a higher ranking. Even just adding a few links will start the process off.

Step Three: Getting Your Site to Earn Some Money
This is where things get interesting. This essentially means selling advertising on your site. There are many articles on the web that can give specific details. The easiest to use are the 'ready made advertising campaigns' run by the big search engines and other organizations. Simply sign up and paste the code that they provide onto your site. You can also sell space directly to local businesses if you want too. If your site is interesting, has enough content and enough visitors you will soon be earning enough cash to move onto better things.

Step Four: Making a Living
This is generally considered the 'ultimate goal' for many online marketeers. Many fail at this stage because there are many (I mean thousands) of 'systems' claiming to make you rich overnight. To avoid the worst of these you will need to research the companies you are interested in. The number one rule for avoiding failure is:- do not spend more than you earn. This is the whole point of your hard work up to this point. You do actually want to make money not spend it. There are no get rich schemes. Steady growth is the key to long term success. If you use your head to make any decisions and not your heart then you will not go wrong.

Conclusions
There are people who read this that may say "this is too slow" or "too boring". This article was written to give some idea on how to start in this business without any startup capital. Remember there is no 'free lunch' here. All successful businesses take work. Here I am simply stating that in place of start-up capital or even an advertising budget you can succeed with time and hard work. If you do have some spare cash you can (but be very careful) accelerate the process. It is far more satisfying to build the web traffic yourself, you'll probably find it fun. Posting articles and joining forums can be addictive and you will learn more than you thought possible. Surely that can only be a good thing?

Best Wishes!

Dean Cullingham
http://success-in-2009.blogspot.com