Hi:

Internet marketers, when making a list of the things they think they need in order to successfully run an Internet business usually include the following:

1. A Web Site

2. Ads

3. Articles

4. Money For Promotion

5. A Product

6. An E-Zine

And the list goes on and on. But 95% of them forget one thing, and it’s probably the one most important thing you need to have if you’re going to succeed.

It’s called credibility.

Instead of trying to define what that is, I’m going to give you a very simple example of how not having it will shoot down any chance you have of being successful.

You’ve just signed up with this great new program. It’s the hottest thing since sliced bread. You’ve got your ads out all over the place. Finally, somebody emails you or even calls you on the phone if you’ve provided them with a number, and they ask you about this wonderful program. And you start telling them all about it. You can’t rave about it enough. And then comes the question that makes it all meaningless.

“How much money have YOU made with this program?”

Do you see where this is going?

Sure, you can lie. But trust me, that lie will come back to haunt you in more ways than you can imagine. Or, you can tell the truth.

What do you think is going to happen when you tell this person that you haven’t made a DIME?

Without credibility you are NOWHERE.

So, the $64,000 question is, how do you get credibility? How do you show people that you ARE a successful person online when you haven’t made a buck?

The answer is simple, but you’re not going to like it.

You’re going to have to go out and make a buck.

If this sounds like a catch-22, it’s not. There are ways out there to make money without having to promote a product or recruit. You just have to find them. My book has a number of ways to get that credibility so that you can show people that you HAVE made money online.

Fortunately, my Honest Income Program ebook, which you can find in my signature, WILL give you ways where you can get credibility and be able to easily promote your business with some degree of success.

The point is, there ARE ways to make money online even if you don’t get my book. Just do a search engine search for online jobs or something like that. Some jobs pay okay, some not so great. You’re not going to find anything that’s knock ‘em out of the ball park.

But, before you can go out hawking your “biz-of-the-week” you will have needed to earn at least a few hundred to a few thousand dollars before you’re going to have ANY chance to get people to believe you.

If you think I am kidding, try getting people to sign up to your program when you haven’t made a cent online. You may get lucky in one out of a thousand responses, but by the time you get your next sign up, the guy you just recruited will be gone because he too didn’t make a cent and got fed up.

I hope everyone will take the issue of credibility seriously. I had no success online at all until I got it.

Trust me, it is the number ONE thing we all need.

Actually, it will do more than that. It will totally change your whole life. If you think I am kidding, here is a real life example of what happened when a fairly successful Internet marketer went from being an affiliate of another person’s products to starting his own affiliate program for his own product. We’ll use pseudo names to protect the innocent and the rich.

John Doe started Internet marketing back in 2003. He really didn’t have a clue to what he was doing and had to learn quite a lot before he finally was able to have some success. He found a product that actually did help him make sales because of its unique form of advertising. He became an affiliate for this product and began to promote it. Because of his ad writing skills he was able to consistently make between 20 and 30 sales of this product each month. He was actually one of the top affiliates of this product on the Internet at the time. He was very proud of himself and quite content with his success, which was generating an income of about $1500 a month. Not too bad for an hours work each day.

But after a few years, John Doe started to get restless. His income wasn’t really going anywhere. He was still making his 20 to 30 sales each month but his own efforts were still only producing about $1500 of income each month. Success was great but John Doe wanted more. The question was, how could he get it?

That’s when he sat down one day and thought to himself, “I’ve learned quite a bit about Internet marketing these past 3 years. Certainly I can take what I have learned and create my own product and my own affiliate program.” So that’s what he did. He put on his thinking cap and came up with a product and created an affiliate program for it.

Naturally, the beginnings of this program were quite humble. After all, nobody heard of this product yet and at first he was on his own as far as promoting it. Well, his first month’s efforts produced all of 13 sales. Not even close to the 20 to 30 sales he was making selling somebody else’s product. But don’t forget, that was an already established product with brand recognition. His was brand new, so it was going to take time.

His second month, again, just from his own efforts, he made 53 sales. Things were really starting to pick up. He was making more sales than ever before with anything else, and all on his own.

And then, it happened.

John Doe got his first really active affiliate to promote his program. His third month he more than doubled his sales to 130. This was just from 2 active people selling the product. This was equal to about 5 months of his sales for the affiliate program that he was simply a member of. He had never seen numbers like this in his life and was in total shock.

But it didn’t end there.

With a couple more affiliates added to his roster of sales people, he made over 200 sales his fourth month. But it didn’t stop there. The sales kept increasing month after month with the increasing number of people selling his product for him.

He was able to quit his original affiliate program that he had been a member of for 3 long years after just a few months of selling his own product through his own affiliate program.

I think this real life example is going to make you see, better than anything else, how powerful creating your own affiliate program can be. The difference will be night and day in comparison to selling somebody else’s product.

The key is spending the time required to design a good product that has value and then promoting it in a way that will bring results. The rest will happen in time.

Explode your traffic, your income, your life.

Internet marketing, running a home based business, making money online, whatever you want to call it, it can be a VERY scary experience and downright expensive.

How expensive?

You can lose your shirt, drive your wife and kids into the arms of the nearest hotel and make your best friend your worst enemy.

In other words, proceed at your own risk.

And what makes the whole process that much harder is that there is so much misinformation on the Internet that people are easily taken in and parted from their money. Hopefully, this article will dispel some of the myths so that you’ll at least have a fighting chance should you decide to try to make a living online.

The biggest lie when it comes to Internet sales is the one that says, “Build a site and they will come.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Just having a web site on the Internet is no guarantee that people are going to find it. With all the web sites out there, what makes you think that anybody is going to stumble onto yours without some serious advertising, search engine optimization, and hard work? They won’t. So let’s dispel this myth right off the bat.

Another big lie, that scares people off, is the one that says, “Starting a business on the Internet is expensive.” It doesn’t have to be. Yes, it can be, depending on what it is you want to do. If you’re thinking of becoming the next Amazon.com then you better have some serious bucks at your disposal. But the truth is, to start a modest Internet business doesn’t have to take a fortune. Yes, you will have to spend some money to get started, such as web hosting costs, domain costs and web design costs if you’re not good with HTML, but in comparison to the real world where businesses need thousands of dollars to get off the ground, your costs are a drop in the bucket in comparison.

A lie that you will hear so much is the one that says, “You don’t have to know how to sell to make good money on the Internet.” Think about the total illogic of this. You’re starting a business to sell a product or service to somebody. So how are you going to be able to do that without knowing how to sell? People who tell you this are just after your money.

But one of the best myths is the one that goes like this, “You don’t have to build a mailing list.” This is just laughable. How do you think companies like Sears and Macys make their money? Those catalogues that they send out every month or so are not for show. They’re to let you know what sales there are and to get you into their store to buy. If this method of advertising wasn’t effective then why would the biggest companies do it? This is not to say you can’t make money without a list, but you’re not going to really make big money until you have an in house list of people who trust you to buy from you.

There are of course more myths online but these should give you a pretty good start in the right direction.