When you decide you want to create an online business it is an extremely scary and exciting feeling. There are many ways you can go about making money online and some will work great, but the majority will flop. The first thing you will need to do is decide what type of presence you would like to start and for those who do not know how to program web sites with HTML, XHTML, and XML the best option is starting a blog. People without any experience can actually become millionaires if their blog takes off and is enjoyed by the general public. Usually the best way to go about blogging is catering to a specific niche rather than creating a general blog, but this is by no means a rule cut in stone. One thing about blogging is people make it by finding their own path and learning what works and what makes money from experience rather than following the exact example or rules laid down by another blogger. There is no handbook telling you exactly what you have to do and the possibilities for your blog are truly limitless.

Now if you are starting a blog in the intention of perhaps someday working from home full time doing a little research will be needed. Think about everything you are truly interested in whether it be creating model cars, business, fishing, or anything else. What do you know about and what can you write about these will be key to the success of your blog. Find something which no matter how little traffic you are getting you will still be able to write about the subject. Once you have an idea on what you would like to blog about the next step will be checking the amount of traffic terms on the topic are generating monthly. You can find this out simply by going to adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and typing in a term related to your new blog idea. If you are thinking about starting a fishing blog go ahead and type in “fishing blog” and this tool will bring up the amount of monthly traffic as well as other terms and the traffic related to the term you entered.

Once you have terms picked out that have quite a bit of traffic you should start writing content with those terms frequently used. This will help Google understand that your blog should be ranked for the terms just make sure they work well within your content. It is important to also be considering how you are going to build free web traffic. Personally I recommend getting traffic from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You will need to build plenty of links from places such as general directories and article directories if you ever want to see first page on the search engines for the keywords that you chose. If you need a list of directories start by submitting your website to this free web directory then moving onto the list over at directorycritic.com. Once you are done submitting to all the free directories go ahead and search Google for “list of article directories”. Google will bring up tons of different lists which you can use to submit your articles and begin ranking higher and building traffic.