If you’ve read some million dollar biographies, these elite group of people belong to those who deal in either real estate investing, having their own business (which is what we are all about), stocks and foreign exchange trading to name a few. There are million dollar fairy tales as well namely those who strike it rich by getting their numbers right in the lottery or even getting a lucky spin on reality TV.

So do these people start out with a lot of money to reach their goal? Perhaps a few among them inherited their wealth but just how do the rest achieve their first million?

Hear are 5 basic steps to become a millionaire and if you keep at it, you too can reach your dream.

Millionaire Step #1 - Start Making Money

Of course the easiest step to make money is to earn it from a job. No, that’s not a dreaded word afterall as everyone starts by having an income from working. With it, you can start controlling how you spend with what you earn and there are always opportunities to increase your income if you work hard.

Millionaire Step #2 - Spend Wisely

So you may earn a fat paycheck each month but what good does it do if most of what you earn goes towards paying unnecessary liabilities. What do I mean by unnecessary liabilities? Well, if you don’t need a big house or a big car, don’t start collecting those big debts. Flashy lifestyles should be cast aside as well. Why make yourself feel like a millionaire when you are not?

Remember, what you spend on now will determine if you’ll ever reach your 1st million dollars.

Millionaire Step #3 - Pay Yourself 1st

When I first heard this phrase, I got confused myself. What it actually means is instead of paying all your bills, expenses, debts, etc; you should learn to set aside a sum of money as your savings. You really need to save money by placing a monetary amount on yourself as a form of a monthly debt. Treat your savings as if you’d be penalised if you don’t pay it each time you receive your paycheck.

This way, you’ll always be certain to save money 1st before spending it.

Millionaire Step #4 - Make Your Savings Work For You

Here comes the interesting part. Keeping all the money in the bank at all times will not make you a millionaire. Not in a million years. Try to invest a part of your savings into something which can help you gain more money.

For example, depending on your interests, you could start investing in educating yourself (help you earn more actively or passively in future), real estate, stock trading, forex, starting a part-time business etc.

Now how about making money on the internet? There are many ways to do this and we’ll get to those later.

Millionaire Step #5 - Choose A Plan And Focus

Once you decide on which method you’d like to use to help you gain more money, immerse yourself in its education and start focusing till you see results. Do not fall for get-rich-quick schemes and learn from your experience. Do not stall on your decision making as well. If you do start something and made a mistake somewhere, rectify it and improve on it. This way, you’ll really be getting in the ins-and-outs of what you do.

This list can indeed be expanded and feel free to add your comments.

Here’s a free millionaire calculator for all you millionaire wannabes out there. Tell me how you fare and keep working your way towards becoming a millionaire.

A whopping 92% of our voters have either never made money online but would love to (who wouldn’t? especially in this economic downturn); are still trying to make money online but finding it hard to find a breakthrough (this represents the largest pool); and finally a smaller number who has started making money online but wished they could earn even more.

1st of all for those who have had success making money on the internet, congratulations and keep up the hard work. Yes, to make money online, you have to work hard. Anything that smells easy money is a big NO-GO!

Alright, this goes out to the 92% of you. I’ve prepared another survey to seek your opinion on an online business which you are interested in. If you have yet to take the survey, help me help yourself by taking our Free Online Home Business Survey on the top right of the page. Your votes are confidential I promise.

Ok. Here’s the deal. I posed 4 main selections for you to choose from which includes Network Marketing / MLM, affiliate Marketing, blogging, Freelancing and of course a 5th selection which means anything else under the sun…oops web. The corresponding results will determine how I would go about helping you make money on the internet from home. I’m not asking you to quit your job if you are still at it but merely starting something which will help you make money on the side and if you work hard enough and become successful, you may decide to quit your job if you so choose to. For your info, I have quit mine.

Now, why the the 4 selections you may ask? The main reasons are that I have had my own experience with all the models listed and believe it is better helping you with what I know rather than not. I call them my multiple streams of income but you should not be doing that. You will be focusing on just one for starters and here are excerpts of each one.

Network Marketing / MLM - When this is mentioned, surely most of you shunned at the term and I do not blame you. It’s how the industry has turned out to be. If a majority of you chose this method, we will be dealing with an online network marketing / MLM company called Success University. Yes, the reason why we are going to choose Success University is because you can do this strictly online if you chose to and without even picking up a single phone to call anyone (I like that). I’ve had success with this model but I realise that most people start to go sideways and lose focus in their downline building efforts even online! Do not fret though as I will be developing a ’secret automated online prospecting system’ for you to use.

Positives - Growing passive income, Leveraging effort, Strictly Online
Negatives - Monthly expenses, Going sideways and losing focus

Affiliate Marketing - Now, this is when we start promoting stuff that belongs to others for a commission and I like this method as well. If this method is chosen by the majority, we will be dealing with becoming an affiliate for eBay. Yes, you can make money on the internet with eBay without selling anything. I’ve had success with this model using Build A Niche Store or BANS for short with my own easy-to-do method and I hope to help you do the same.

Positives - Growing passive income, No products required
Negatives - $97 tool, domain names and hosting expenses, Hard work

blogging - Well, like what I am doing now and what you have read in many blogs. Yes, you can still make money on the internet by blogging but not on the “Make Money Online” niche for starters. Earn either through Adsense or by becoming affiliates for many products in the various niches out there. You can even end up flipping your blogs for income if you decide to go that way. If this method is chosen, I will help you do just that.

Positives - Multiple streams of income, Ability to sell the blogs you create
Negatives - domain names and hosting expenses, Writing content, Techically challenging (if you are new), Hard work

Freelancing - Personally, I use this as a side model of my online home business but you can make money doing this full-time as well. I do web design, customizing Wordpress themes (this blog is having its 4th makeover if you’ve been here for a while), writing, helping people start a website etc. (Need help in any of these? Contact me). There’s literally so many things you can do by freelancing if you are the type who like to work hard for money. That’s what you are probably doing in your real job anyway and this is taking the same model albeit online with your own skills. Fancy doing a voiceover for someone if you have a great voice? Yes you can make money with this too. If this is the one chosen by the vast majority, then I will be guiding you and probably helping you get some jobs with your current skill sets as well.

Positives - Make money with your skills, Get paid after each job completion
Negatives - Only active income (work and get paid, no work no pay), Hard work

Again, if you have not taken our Free Online Home Business Survey on the top right of the page, I suggest doing it right now. It only takes less than 30 seconds.

If you are reading this page, you are in the 92% of people that I’ve mentioned and are interested to get some help, submit your name and email address to get my notification updates. Do not worry, there will be no upsell or downsell on the next page. Just confirm your email address and you are all set.

For those who have earned their way on the internet, you probably won’t need this and I suggest you subscribe to our RSS instead…

Feel free to leave your comments or questions in the comment section below.

PS: Any questions regarding income figures will not be entertained (LOL). I’d rather keep a low profile. I’m doing this full time is all I will say.

PPS: If you are unwilling to invest on stuff like domain names, hosting etc for your home business, then you are not ready either. Go back to work. (Except for Network Marketing / MLM which involves a starting fee, monthly expenses but leveraging effort for passive income). Seriously, any business will require a capital outlay but you can get started on an online home business without investing thousands of dollars. If you have nothing, I’d suggest getting a job 1st. Food on the table is more important than anything.

PPPS: If hard work sounds like a chore to you, then you will never succeed in whatever you do online as well… See you on board!

Holidays will be a rare occurrence as you spend more time in your home business and keep pushing for business growth and more money. Those who show you pictures of them enjoying the sea breeze on a beach chair and laptop in hand are lying to you.

Suddenly, it’s all work and more work. The internet lifestyle that you seek rapidly becomes a myth. There is no freedom and you rarely get to socialize with your friends. So what is wrong and what should you do?

Realize this. You are all doing work by yourself! That’s the problem. Once you make some money from your own efforts, you need to duplicate the work by getting a team under your belt. The answer? Outsourcing.

Listen up. If you have been doing work all by yourself, you will get burned out eventually and you will grow to hate your home business. This is where you need to delegate your mundane tasks to others who are willing to take up the mantle. Surely you do not want to spend your time all day on the PC or laptop.

Sometimes I myself get sick of everything that I do and need a break from it all but am just afraid that my business stops growing. I feel like throwing in the towel and leave it at that. In fact, I have done so once on this blog and probably may do so again in the future by taking a break. But what about my other businesses?

I cannot afford to give them up can I? While I don’t seek to make money much from blogging in this niche, I have to do it in all the other niches. That’s when I started finding people to work for me. Now, I have article writers, designers etc. Invest in them to keep your sanity after you have made some money from your home business.

Only then will you grow to keep loving what you do and not the other way round.

If you want to know, one of my other niches is BANS.

Am I making sense here? Again, basically you cannot have a domain name and not host it. Well you can actually but if you want to create a website then hosting must go along with it.

While most domain registrars like GoDaddy, Namecheap and Yahoo provides a hosting package together with your domain name purchase to make it easy for you, it can become a problem in future. Here are some pointers I would like to bring across on why you should never buy and host your domain at the same place.

I will not go into details about other domain name registrars as I’ve never used them and I only use GoDaddy and Namecheap. While they have cheap hosting if you buy from them, I chose to host my domain names elsewhere. I use Hostgator by the way. If you want to know why, read about Choosing Hostgator.

If you host your domain name at the same place or simply using their domain name servers, if they experience any downtime, your website will turn into a 404. This is a term used when your website cannot be found due to a HTTP Error 404. You’d most likely know them as “File Not Found”, “Not Found”, etc.

Even hosting companies like Hostgator now provides domain names as well and it is still not a good thing to purchase your domain name from them as well. If your hosting company folds, there goes your domain name. While you may retrieve your domain name, it will still be a long drawn-out hassle.

In short, don’t ever buy and host your domain at the same place. You do not want to risk losing your website and affecting your home business should the worst ever happen.

This will likely never change and you have to focus on it if you really want to succeed. It does not matter either whether you have a normal simple website, a blog, a squeeze page, a salesletter, etc. You need to follow this simple formula.

Targeted traffic + Conversions = Profits

Repeat that again. Get targeted traffic to your website and convert them into sales and that will bring you profits and see you succeed in making money online. If you ever bought something online before, think about it. How did you ever get to the website prior to purchase in the 1st place? Be it tangible or info products, something about the website made you click the purchase button and there you go. Just reverse the method letting yourself be the seller and you’ll realize this.

Why do you need targeted traffic?

Does it matter if you get 1000 visitors who browse and leave or just 5 visitors who stopped and purchased something from your website? Obviously, you’ll want the 1000 visitors to come and purchase but because they are not targeted traffic, they do not have a need for what you have to offer and hence so leave the very moment they arrive. We do not many times as a visitor ourselves.

Why do you need to convert your targeted traffic?

Imagine those 5 visitors come to your website and has a need for what you have to offer but because you offer no reason for them to take action and make a purchase, they too leave the website or bookmark it to return a while later only to forget it in the end. Again, ask yourself. How many times have you done the same?

It’s as simple as that. Get targeted traffic to your website. Convert that traffic and you will make money online. Remember to visualize this process, ask yourself if you have been through it before. I bet you did.

This is where many blogs die a slow and painful death. The euphoria of a new blog just fizzled off. To start a blog is as easy as clicking a few buttons on your hosting’s cPanel or uploading a few files to your hosting server but to commit yourself to post regularly will be a tough act to follow through.

Probably, you have other tasks you need to do or you didn’t place any priority for whatever the reason on your flagship blog or there’s no desire to continue blogging after a while. If this is you, why create a blog for the long term?

Here are 3 types of blogs that may interest you if long term blogging is not your cup of tea.

#1 – The Event blog

Let’s say you read a type of news or upcoming events like the coming Olympics in Beijing or the Fifa Euro 2008 Football Championships or perhaps the current season of American Idol. You can blog about these events and since they have an ending date, you can stop and move on after that.

#2 - The Launchpad blog

If you are launching a new product or service and want to gather feedback, showcase stories and create buzz before your launch. You can start a blog like this. It is a good way to build momentum up to your official launch and also to get readers to ask questions and provide insights on what they think about the new product or service. Again, this blog will usually not continue months after the product or service has been launched.

#3 – The Post Sales blog

After your launch, you’ll certainly want to have a blog to relate news about your current product or service and showcase updates to customers from time to time. While blogs such as this won’t die a slow painful death, it does not have to be updated as regularly as any other blog. Only when you have news to share about your product or service, do you post on the blog thus your posts will be real-time.

Is any one of you ever involved in these types of blogs?

Here’s why. You can actually lose your free blogs on any of the free hosted services at anytime. Because you are not the real owner of the blogs (yes, the hosting domain is the owner), you can be taken down just by getting complaints. Perhaps you “stole” a copyrighted article or image or product for the matter. Even people who disagree with you at any point can take steps to ensure you lose your blog.

So what can you do if you have blogged for about a year on the free hosted blog and Google or Wordpress decides to terminate it without reasoning? Wasted effort? You bet!

It’s not wrong to start with a free hosted blog at all. I started by using blogger myself. My old blogspot address is no more now. Personally, I used it back then to learn some HTML and coding skills for free. These days, I still use them but only for short blogging stints to get backlinks to my websites and to promote affiliate programs!

So, when you have the means (you should if you are serious about your business), invest in your own domain name. There are some posts I wrote about how to buy a domain name. You can get it all there. Next, you should host on a hosting account and I recommend Hostgator. Read about why I chose Hostgator and how to set up your hosting account.

As Hostgator or most other hosting accounts come with Cpanel. You can install the latest version of Wordpress using Fantastico which can be found in your Cpanel. Ok, there are other self-hosted blogging platforms such as Joomla but I believe Wordpress is one of the easiest and most flexible to use hence I recommend it.

If you are still using free blogs for your home business, just think of what happens when you don’t own your own blog. For those of you already on Wordpress (I believe many of you are), have you done your upgrade to Wordpress 2.5? For everyone else, let me know if you need help setting up your Wordpress blog, buying domains or even hosting.

That is what I found out pretty soon after a while. I’ve even removed Adsense from the blog and focused on recommending you only the tools that is needed to make money online such as BANS. This one is a no-brainer indeed.

So what do you need to do and find out before selling something to everyone else? You need to know how much a need there is for something and then focus on getting the need in front of people and you’ll make money. Guaranteed.

Here are 4 easy ways to discover niches that are profitable. Remember, do your niche research well and succeed instantly. I used these techniques to find out niches for my BANS sites.

#1 - Amazon Bestsellers

Many of you probably wonder what has Amazon got to do with niche research. Well, from the list of bestsellers on Amazon, you will know what sells well and if sells very well, you jolly well know that it will continue to sell well. These are the surefire items that people currently look for and buy.

Check out the current bestsellers on Amazon.

#2 - Explore Magazines

Yes, magazines knows what sells and shove the same to people so they can sell more. Find out the most current popular magazines in the market and see how often they publish their magazines. Magazines are only published when there are buyers and will stop if buyers dwindle. So if women’s magazines are hot right now, you’ll know to target the items for women.

*Tip – Check out Magazines.com for current popular issues.

#3 - Research Your Keywords

Personally I used free and paid software to do my keyword research. Free tools such as Free Wordtracker gives me sufficient info on what keywords are being popularly searched currently and if I wanted an in-depth research to find out about the competition and profitability, I use paid softwares. I’ve used Adwords Analyzer and Keyword Country. Between these 2 Keyword Country tops and I’ve even ditched Adwords Analyzer but it’s cheaper between the two. My next paid software will be the popular Keyword Elite and I’m learning it right now.

Do your math. If free tools such as Free Wordtracker works, you don’t have to spend money and when you’ve made some money, invest in paid tools which can accelerate the process. Ultimately they help in your niche research but don’t dwell on it. Find a niche and start making money instead.

#4 - Use Message Boards Or forums

Once you’ve targeted a niche, try to find out if people really want to get to know something or buy something in the forums. Example - if you are targeting the student niche. Go to forums and seek the questions that kept getting repeated. Now, what you do is find the answer to these problems and offer solutions to the market.

If you have not already started, get BANS. It’s the easiest way to make money online as an eBay affiliate. All you do is create stores in the niches you have researched and promoted the heck out of it. This is the truth laid bare. EBay conversions are too good to be missing out!

You need to rank for your keyword in your chosen niches. Period. Long term traffic is the goal when you go all out and build your links. Here is one effective way you can do to start building links back to your website. No. It is a must do!

Writing articles and submitting them. I’ve said before and I’m saying it again and will keep mentioning it again. If you have not started writing articles and submitting them to article directories, you are losing it big time. When you write articles, you get to leave a link back to your website in the author’s resource box. Make that 3 links. Not only that, you are also allowed to place a keyword anchored link that you wish to rank for.

Of course, don’t just write any article. Write something legible, understandable and most importantly informative. If you are stuck for ideas, read about how to get ideas for writing articles.

Thousands of article publishers also pull these quality articles from the article directories and fill them on their websites. What you get is another backlink to your website. Do not worry about all this talk about the duplicate content penalty you keep hearing about. A link is a link is a link! So how do you mass submit to many article directories all at once? Either you use an article submission service or you pay for software to help you. Personally, I have used a few and recommend Article Submitter. It’s free to download and you only upgrade if you’d go for the Gold or Platinum versions.

Now go get your links done! 1 article a day and you’ll have 365 articles in a year and what if you do 5 articles a day or even 10 or more? Think about it.

This way you are sure to gain more traffic for a long time as you began focusing on the long tail keywords that gets searched over time.

Now what exactly are long tail keywords and why should you focus on them?

Let’s say you have a blog about starting a business on eBay or greeting cards business.

A broad keyword would be:

- “eBay business” or “greeting cards business”

A long tail keyword for the respective niches would be:

- “make money online using eBay without selling” or “starting a greeting cards business stay-home moms and dads”

Of course, there are many other examples away from the make money at home niches which gets searched more often. I hope you get the picture.

The reason you should focus on original content and long tail keywords is because there are not many competition for the same keywords thus you’ll be more visible in the search engines without having to build loads of keyword anchor links and link building methods.

Once you are able to rank well for such keywords and you start to have authority on the niches, you’ll stay on the top of the search engines for a long time.