It was a CNN documentary in 2002, I sat amazed in front of the television wandering how. How would I be part of it?
How could I manage to achieve it? Would I need to be in Silicon Valley for this to be possible for me? Or is it even too late?

I knew it could make the difference of me making a lot of money while I am still very young or growing up to be just another worker or even worse job seeker and even if lucky enough, make some money to be able to afford a luxury car by the time I am 40.

After watching a CNN documentary on the Dotcom boom and burst, I made up my mind to go online and make a living.
I had no idea what it takes or how to do it, but I only believed I could do it. This was the beginning of my journey.

My first idea was to make a website about my country Nigeria and share African music and festival videos with people around the world. I thought all I needed to do was to learn web design and I would make it. I never thought it could take years of research and testing Internet marketing tactics and strategies. May be I wasn’t the only person that watched the documentary that night, or even may be I wasn’t the only person that made up his mind to start chasing an online dream that night.

The truth is before me, and even before the documentary people have been struggling with making money online. May be that night, I was just the next person to join the struggle or even among a set of people that joined that night. Because since the dawn of the internet, as early as 1996, people have been trying to make money online, some have succeeded, some have given up, while some are still trying to make it.

Online, it is a bit hard to separate between the hype and the actual truth about making money, especially for the new comers. There are thousands of programs that promise you to make a million, but when you look deep, they are just unrealistic. So is there any big secret about making money online that the online marketing and making money gurus are hiding?

I guess no! I believe all you need to make money online is the understanding. By understanding the online market, what works and what doesn’t, combined with hard work and perseverance, you will automatically guarantee your success online. So how do you understand the market and know what works and what don’t work?

There are two ways you can learn this, the first you go through almost every online lesson through trial and error by yourself or the second, you learn from someone that had been in and out of the struggle so you save yourself a great deal amount of time.

My time, I chose the first option, not because I thought it was the better option, but because it was the only choice I had.

After a lot of hard work, I managed to put up a site on a free server, and that was when I began to learn some Internet marketing lessons.

I didn’t have any idea on how to get people to my site, I was completely new to the Internet and I already had a website. So I found a start page exchange program and I joined it hoping I would be able to get a lot of people to my site, make some sales and in the end realize my new found online dream.

It was never as easy as I thought. Web design became more complicated than I ever expected, getting website visitors became a very hard and time-consuming job and ultimately, making a single sale seemed impossible. Only one thing didn’t disappoint me, myself. I didn’t give up.

I kept trying, learning and getting better. Whenever I fail, I make a list of reasons why I failed and make sure I avoid them the next time I’m trying something out again.

After the failure of my first attempt, the main reason that came at the top of my “reasons why I failed list” was the fact that my site was hosted on a free server. Such sites look very unprofessional, and distract the visitor with too many ads.

When surfers want to buy something online, they tend to go to an established online company, so if your site is hosted on a free server like www.yoursite.freehost.com, people wont buy from you. They get annoyed or carried away by too much ads on the site.

So one of the first corrections I made was to invest about $20 for a web hosting account and a domain name, so that I would have my own address for visitors to remember and come back anytime and I would be able to post only what I want on the site, which gives a more established image of the web site and a focussed environment so that my prospects can focus on what I have to say and don’t get distracted by flashing banner ads.

I was still not making sales even though I now have my own hosting account and a domain name for my online business. So I knew I had to make another list of possible causes. I needed to ask myself what I thought was going wrong and how to solve it.

I was not getting much traffic to the site, just around 300 visitors and the big problem is the source of my site visitors. I had not been indexed by any search engine, so I was using a startpage exchange program for my traffic needs. I soon realized that that was part of my problems. I was not targeting any market, I was driving traffic to my site without asking myself if they want my product or not.

My site was a niche web site, but I was not targeting that niche market. The people that actually went to my site were participants of the traffic exchange program I was using. They were all website owners or affiliates they are not my perfect customers for my site being a music site. An internet marketing and website promotion site would do better in that program because most of the participants were interested in we promotion and marketing or just making money online. So I could have as well promoted a work at home business in the program and made a few sales or sign ups.

When I realized that, I knew I had to change my strategy and target only thse that I think would be more interested. So I turned to the search engines to drive more targeted traffic to my site.

After 2 months I got listed in Yahoo and immediately saw an increase of up to 200 then 400 site visitors a month, and a month later I got listed in Google and many other search engines like Alta vista, Hotbot, Askjeeves, Alltheweb, Overture and many more.

My traffic increased steadily into the thousands. And then I got listed in the ODP. I started getting hundreds of sign ups and everything got so big that I couldn’t even handle it. And that was just the beginning, because I then had to face problems like selling and selling more and ultimately making money. Look out for the next article on how I discovered the secrets of selling.

And if you need any help your online business and how to go by it, let me know and I would be glad to help.