If you have been considering trying to make a profit online for a little while now you will probably have now been bombarded with all the many ways people tell you how easy, easy, easy it is. You will then purchase their subscription, go off on another tangent and end up at the end of another long month with as close to zilch as it is possible to get.

This was my story until I started to wake up to the reality of what it means to make money online. Possibly I was lucky because I came across a couple of people who weren’t all about hype, but who pointed me in the right direction. The funny thing is that what I learnt from these people is that making money is actually quite easy. No it’s not easy in the sense that many gurus tell you, but it is a simple process and once you have mastered a few skills you can start to make some money and once the first few dollars roll in there really will be no looking back for you.

1. Create an Online Presence

The first step is to build an online presence from where you can promote either your own products, or more likely when you are first starting out, affiliate links.

The easiest and cheapest way to achieve this I believe initially, is to set up a niche website or blog. I have written a short report on this called 5 Steps To A Successful Niche Blog and this can be downloaded totally FREE here.

2. Drive Traffic To Your Site

There are many, many ways of driving traffic to your site, including Squidoo, Hubpages, Social Sites, Bookmarking, Forums, Bum marketing, the list really does go on and on and more importantly all of these methods are free.  So if you are starting out with very little budget, as most of us did, then you are in a no-risk situation.

3. Building Your List

The third step is to capture the traffic that arrives at your site and to start building a list. One of the phrases that you will hear over and over online is that the ‘money is in the list’ and in this case the phrase really is true.

However, it is all very well saying that you must build a list, but how do you go about that and once you have the list what the heck do you do with it to make it profitable.

All of this isn’t difficult but what you probably need is someone to just explain the steps to you in a straightforward manner.

3 Steps To Sucess

So there you have it, three simple steps to start making money online.

1. Create a Blog
2. Drive Traffic
3. Build a List

When you are starting out, disregard all the million other things and focus on these three steps. Once you start making some cash I promise you will be bitten and then you can start to expand your skillset. But as with anything in life we need to start seeing result before we get totally hooked.

After all you aren’t doing this purely for the fun of it, although believe me it is more fun than working a 9 to 5, but to see results and to start paying off some debts or to make things better for you and your family.