The only two things you need to do to make money online are:

• Find/create an offer that sells
• Get traffic to that offer

Simple right? Well not really. Finding an offer than sells can be difficult for most of us. The fatal mistake that we make is not doing enough keyword research to find what people are searching for and buying. Luckily this can be done fairly easily online these days. But most of us give up too early. We try one to sell one product for while, when that doesn’t work we try another, never giving anything a chance to work.

Before you create your own product in a niche, or if you’re having trouble getting sales, why not try to sell someone else’s product first? This will prove whether there is a market in that niche (people are buying) and will also test your selling skills. If you’ve determined that people are spending money in your market (from amazon best/hot sellers, high ranking affiliate products, lots of Google ads in search results, etc) than most like you need to work on your pre-selling skills (teaching people about the niche and relevant products) and getting website traffic.

If you’re creating your own membership site, and you’ve seen that other similar sites exist in that market, then my advice is to get something up quickly and test it to see if you can get sales. Probably the most important skill you can develop is speed of implementation. If you’re trying to sell other people’s membership site or any other products then you can see if there are ads in that niche market showing up consistently each month in Google’s search results.

Some people recommend sending quick traffic to an affiliate product using Google adwords to see what sells. That can be quite costly as you try different products and keyword phrases are getting more expensive. Not only that, the same experts often say that only certain keywords will work for certain offers so you also need to test different keywords. A cheaper approach is to pick a product that has been shown to sell and set up a variety of pages to test the commercial viability of the product.

Getting free traffic is getting harder and harder as new websites are being added every minute and free seo software tools are being created that give certain people the leg up on the competition. Some great ways to get traffic are:

• set up a blog – hands down the best way to get started. I use Wordpress which is free – install some free search engine optimization (SEO) software as a wordpress plugin to help you get traffic.
• create videos either with your web cam, camcorder or using something like Camtasia for recording your desktop.
• use tags in your blog posts that contain the keywords for your niche
• create articles on EzineArticles.com that point to your money page
• create blogs/pages on Squidoo.com, Wordpress.com and Hubpages.com that point to your money page

At the end of the day, you need to keep trying and testing different offers until you find the winners. Then do more to get traffic to those offers. Nothing beats real data to determine what you should do (or not do) next.

Put your expertise out there and draw people to your site. Have them sign up via an email list. Then over time build trust, provide them with quality information and gently upsell them to paid memberships. Gerd Leonhard is a media futurist.

It might be a good idea for you to learn how to build and market your own membership site.