...ut your site in the way of, the nextstep in planning your online business will be to choose yourincome ingredients. When it comes down to it there are three basic ways that you canearn money with your own website. 1. You could create your own product that you sell to visitors.This might be an e-book, a video or audio course or maybe somekind of a membership service. Or maybe it’s a hard product, bythat I mean something that you can touch and that you have tophysically ship to...

... your customers. 2. You could sell other people's products either by buyingresale rights to a product or by joining affiliate programs andpromoting other people's products for commission. 3. You could sell advertising on your site and earn revenue thisway. This may be by selling space on your site but more likelywould be by showing Adsense or similar ads. Probably you will want to do all of the above. The third step will be to determine how you will get traffic.You have a few choices in this regard and below I have detailedsix sources of traffic that you can use for your site. As withthe income ingredients above, top marketers use all of them. 1. Search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the art of gettingfree traffic by being listed highly in search engines. if youcan get on the first page at Google for a popular search termthen you'll get traffic and plenty of it. The process can beslow but is certainly worthwhile. 2. Paid advertising. Most popularly this would be pay per clickadvertising through Adwords or Overture or one of the many otherpay per click search engines. But it could be pay for inclusion,banner advertising or sponsor ads in E-zines. 3. Free advertising. The best way to get free advertising otherthan your search engine listings is to write articles. Articleslike this one your reading will be added to other people'swebsites and can be submitted to article directories. Everywhereyour article is placed there will also be a link to your site. 4. Affiliates. If you have a product then you should operateyour own affiliate programme. That way others can promote yourproduct in return for a commission and in order to do that theywill have to send their visitors to your site. 5. Joint ventures. A joint venture is like a customisedaffiliate arrangement whereby another site owner promotes yourproduct to their list or on their site in return for commission.A joint venture differs from an affiliate offer in that it willbe a custom or personalised arrangement negotiated between theparties. 6. Repeat visits. The two main ways of getting repeat visits toyour site are to have interesting content or to invite people toreturn via a newsletter or other email that you send to previousvisitors. You will of course need to have a reason for thesevisitors to return. Which brings us back to fresh content, butit could be a special offer or bonus. Obviously in order to sendan e-mail you need to collect the visitors email address thefirst time that they visit your site. These then are your basic ingredients. What you need is theright recipe that mixes them all up into the perfect businessfor you.