Do not allow others to tell you that your dreams are silly or foolish if you know inside your gut they aren’t. Even well meaning loved ones may try to convince you that it could be time to give up hope. However, only you hold the power to end the pursuit of your dreams.

I fell victim to this exact scenario many years ago when an online guru I trusted told me that my idea would never work. Long story short, he turned out to be a fraud and tried to steal my idea. This was a mistake I would never make again. This is how I found out the hard way that “Internet marketing gurus” don’t really exist.

In reality, there are only marketers who have more experience than others, much like a veteran ball player. While there are many honest and experienced marketers online who try to help people, not every one of these marketers is always so ethical. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust anyone who is considered a marketing guru, however. I don’t know of any successful marketer who didn’t get some form of help from a mentor or other similar expert. My point is that you should never take anyone’s word as gospel.

When you start to consider other marketers as gurus, you sub-consciously put them on a pedestal. In many cases, people never question their word and assume there can be no other way. This is why you must use common sense and trust in your self. Keep an open mind, but be objective. Use the advice of the marketing experts to help steer you in the right direction, but don’t be a follower. If something sends up a red flag in your mind, go with your instincts.

So never be afraid to be an individual and question things. No one has all of the answers, but every single successful person I know believes in themselves. Without that trust, you simply won’t be able to find success.

This very thing happens to countless new Internet marketers every single day. The main reason is because of “information overload”. Far too many people have trouble organizing the vast amounts of information available online, and creating goals to focus on. When you have information overload, you tend to become paralyzed and you never take action.

Trying to learn about Internet marketing can be overwhelming for even the most resilient and intelligent of individuals. The problem is that the “Net is so filled with various strategies and how to guides, that most people simply don’t know where to begin. This of course is why many online marketers give up after only a few short months, if that.

This is why you must set goals, no matter how small, then not allow yourself to get distracted. This can be as simple as jotting them down on a piece of paper so you can visualize them. If you don’t have goals, then there is nothing for you to work towards. Goals give you structure. Structure leads to success.

Once you have set your goals, the best way to gain experience is to actually be thrown into the fire. You can watch from the sidelines, but until you are in the action, you will never be able to really learn from your mistakes. This is why I tell all new online marketers to pick a niche and start to market to it as quickly as possible.

Of course, once a niche has been chosen, most new marketers struggle with the countless promotional strategies they can use. Remember, keep things simple at first. Don’t try to master every marketing strategy under the sun at once. Pick one and stick with it until you have it mastered. Then move on to the next strategy and master that. Avoid the temptation to try the flavor of the month marketing fads. Once you lose your focus, you will simply be running around in circles.

While it may seem simplistic, the formula for online success is to combine hard work, focus and the courage to take action. Once you apply this formula to your online business, then and only then will you start to see results.

Now a decade later, there are three tools that have literally changed the way I do business, and made my online marketing business much easier to run on a daily basis. With that in mind, these are my top 3 Internet marketing innovations:

PayPal

Before PayPal, if you wanted to accept payments online, you needed to apply for a costly merchant account. Then you had to hope to be approved. This made it extremely difficult to get any online business off the ground.

Now from Ebay to simple websites, marketers are making millions of dollars in profits that they otherwise never would have without PayPal.

Autoresponders

The lifeblood of any online business is email marketing. The ability to collect the email addresses of your target market and follow-up with new product updates, current sales and promotions, and keep your business fresh in the mind of your hottest prospects is extremely powerful. So powerful in fact, that the innovation of autoresponders is responsible for millions of dollars in online sales every single year.

Blogs

Before blogs, it was extremely difficult to keep your site updated and fresh. With the creation of blog software such as WordPress, you can now post your content to your website with the press of a button. You don’t even need to know HTML or how to even write code. If that wasn’t enough, the search engines love blogs and index their pages much faster and more efficiently than your standard static website.

Today, many people are profiting handsomely after creating popular blogs in niches such as politics, sports and celebrity lifestyles. In fact, an article on CNN just broke the news about several famous blogs run by stay at home moms being sponsored by none other than Wal-Mart.

That alone speaks to the far reaching power of blogging and the culture surrounding it.

While this list may be different for everyone, there is no doubt about the impact these three innovations have had on all Internet marketers.

Remember, people like to be entertained, especially when they are being educated. It has been proven in study after study, that in order to gain the trust of your audience, you must capture their attention. If you fail to fascinate and dazzle them, why would they care what you have to say?

If you have a good sense of humor, don’t be afraid to make people laugh. If you are a good storyteller, use stories to entertain and educate your audience. Everyone has a special talent that is a potential asset when relating to your target market. Any marketer who doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity to excite their audience is leaving an unknown amount of lost profits on the table. Killing your audience with boredom is never a good recipe for success.

Now as I said before, you must still use a little common sense. For instance, if you think you have a special gift for making fun of fat people, I would suggest you keep this special talent to yourself. You want to entertain, not offend. There is a big difference.

Don’t be yet another dull online marketer spewing out the same, tired BS. Cook up your online personality by adding a little common sense and a big dash of your personality. It will make things fun for both you and your audience!

A famous Internet marketer I once knew put this theory to the ultimate test by first giving away an ebook for several months, then he turned around and sold it for $37 a pop. Amazingly, he sold thousands of copies and without a doubt proved his point; perceived value is an extremely critical psychological tool.

What really floored me was the amount of positive comments he received from his customers after they purchased the ebook. He had hundreds of emails praising how wonderful the content was, but while he was giving the ebook away for free, he got less than a dozen such comments.

It was comical, but true. This is a perfect example of people perceiving something to be more valuable when they have to pay for it.

This is why you should never be afraid to raise the price of your products, especially if one of them isn’t selling well. This not only can boost sales, but also increases your profit margins substantially. I have done this many times and it works like a charm, even though it isn’t always successful. If you find sales are dropping off significantly after the price increase, then nothing is stopping you from lowering the price again. If sales remain the same, you will have increased your profit margins. Do you see how powerful this concept can be?

One day after speaking to him, I was so miserable the rest of the day, that I finally realized no amount of money was worth dealing with him. He just sucked the life right out of me. Anytime you must deal with someone like this, they relentlessly drain all of your positive energy. You are left with nothing but a massive headache and an ill feeling throughout your entire body.

Does this sound like a person you would want to be friends with? How about vice versa? Do you think anyone would want to associate with you, if you had a negative attitude?

If you develop a negative attitude, you will find it very difficult to network with your Internet marketing peers. You will miss out on potentially lucrative partnerships, secret money making strategies and other insider knowledge. Since it is quite difficult to build your online business without help from others, I would suggest that having a positive attitude will get you much further than a negative one.

Therefore, it goes without saying you can draw more marketers into your network with a positive attitude, than a negative one. When you have a positive attitude, people are attracted to you. You come off as self-confident and other people naturally want a piece of what you have. If you make people feel good when they speak to you, they will keep coming back for more.

This strategy is no longer effective, however. Google has now claimed that when an expired domain changes hands, all backlinks are reset and the domain’s PR is set back to zero. While some marketers claim this strategy still works, I can tell you from my personal experience it does not.

The good news is, that as one door closes, a new one opens up. Now many savvy marketers are buying “aged” domains before they actually expire. Many established domain names can be bought at reasonable prices and while it can be more expensive, this strategy can be very profitable. Most important of all, Google is said to not frown on this practice. This means of course that the domain you purchase will retain its backlinks and PR rank. You will then benefit from the traffic and established page rank for this domain.

Buying these domains can be a very effective way to get a big head start in any niche. Some people may think that paying, $500 to $1000 or more for an established domain is ridiculous, but when you consider the time and money it takes to build notable traffic and search engine ranks, many of these domains can be downright bargains.

Of course, each domain you consider should be taken on a case-by-case basis. There are many established domains for sale that can be gold in the right hands. Just be sure to do the proper research before hand. Be sure to take into consideration the site’s SEO and traffic value and if it is in line with the asking price.

To help encourage you to get started, here are four reasons you should start an online home business today:

An Endless Amount Of Choices

Starting a home business on the Internet gives you a huge variety of choices in the kind of business you own. Now this can actually be a problem for many would-be Internet entrepreneurs because picking one business opportunity can be tough, but too many options is always better than none. Just use a little common sense.

Help Is Always Available

If you are a marketing newbie or a seasoned veteran, there is always help available. There are many online forums and email newsletters devoted to home businesses. Having help so readily available from your peers is a huge advantage for every kind of marketer.

Minimal Start-Up Costs

Starting an online business only requires a bare minimum of monetary investment in the beginning. This makes it much easier to go in another direction if things don’t work out as planned. You also will eliminate expenses such as lease payments, extra utility bills and hiring employees

Now compare this to the cost of starting a franchise business, which can run into tens of thousands of dollars or more. This investment will only buy you the “rights” to the business, usually. You are then responsible for all overhead and operating costs which if not managed properly, can quickly put you into bankruptcy.

Inexpensive Marketing

Another appealing aspect of choosing an Internet based home business is lower marketing costs. Again, just as with start-up costs, you’ll spend a mere fraction to advertise your online business compared to a traditional bricks-and-mortar business. In fact, many successful Internet businesses are run entirely from home with ZERO marketing costs. How? Because the owners have mastered search engine optimization and are getting most of their customers from free search engine traffic. You just can’t do better than free!

These are four powerful reasons why you should start your home business today. There will be mistakes made along the way, but that is all part of the learning experience we all must go through. Challenge yourself to get started now, and you will be shocked where you are within a year!

While this term sounds intimidating, it really is just the process the search engines use to pick the best url for your Website. Here are just a few examples of the links you can have pointing back to your website’s main page:

yoursite.com
www.yoursite.com
yoursite.com/index.html

Now the problem is, the search engines view each of these links as a separate url, which can hurt your SEO rankings.

Having too many backlinks pointing to different URLS, that all lead to the same page, is basically like splitting the votes for that page in the search engines eyes. You want all of those backlinks to point to one page, which will boost your search engine ranks.

If you are guilty of improper url linking, you aren’t alone. A majority of marketers are making this crucial mistake every day simply because they aren’t aware of it. However, this is easily correctible.

Since you need every edge you can get on the competition, it is important that you tell the search engines which url you prefer. Therefore, you never want to put the fate of your site in the hands of the spider or robot that is indexing your page.

To “tell” the search engines what url you prefer, you should always be consistent when creating any link to your site. Choose one format such as www.yoursite.com and use that link format exclusively for both internal and external links. As an example:

www.yoursite.com/page1.html
www.yoursite.com/page2.html

Domain canonicalization is yet another small battle in the search engine war. While it may not seem like much, practicing this method will give your site a big boost in the search engines over time.

The most popular hosting plans used by most marketers are shared and reseller packages. Now some people require dedicated hosting, but unless you have an extremely busy site, it really isn’t an option you need to worry about. As an example, the owner of a busy social site that receives 300,000 visitors a day would need a dedicated server to handle the massive bandwidth of that much daily traffic. Very few online marketers are in this situation (but would love to be!).

Therefore, shared and reseller packages are the most common choices among online marketers. Each of these plans come with various options that can suit the needs of almost any small to medium online business. The big question is, which hosting package is right for your online business?

If you are just starting out and only have one or two websites with minimal traffic, then a shared hosting plan is more than adequate enough. Since reseller hosting starts at around $20 a month and quality shared hosting starts around $3.95, we can use simple math to discover that a reseller-hosting plan isn’t right for your business.

However, if you own multiple websites and plan on adding even more in the future, then it may be time to switch to a reseller plan. With a standard reseller plan you will have around 25 gb of disk space and 275 gb of bandwidth every month. To put this all into perspective, most average Websites use less than 2gb of bandwidth and 70 mb of disk space every month.

By using some quick math, it is easy to see you can have at least 50 or more medium sized websites hosted under a reseller plan. As an example, this would be the perfect solution for any niche marketer who creates dozens of Websites each month.

Now that you have a better understanding of reseller hosting, you can make an informed decision of what’s best for your online business. The savings alone could mean hundreds of extra dollars in your pocket each year. This is why knowledge is power!