In my previous sales career with Amana I had a boss named Mike Coleman who used to like to say let’s blow the smoke off of it.

What he was really meant was let’s tell it like it is.

So I want to blow the smoke off of making money on the internet and tell it like it is.

Relying strictly on free or nearly free marketing methods for 100% of your marketing efforts is just not enough for most Internet marketers. If you sell high ticket item you can probably find ways to market yourself utilizing article marketing and social networking can get by without doing paid advertising.

But if you are going to make your income selling low priced products, cost per action programs, or pay per click affiliate programs, you are going to have to step up to the pump and purchase advertising. That possibly will mean setting up a ppc marketing campaign with either Yahoo, Google or Bing.

Significant traffic is the only way you are going to accomplish your financial goals. It is very difficult to get enough traffic to any website or blog relying strictly on free marketing.

If you are an article writing machine you might be able to create enough articles to give you search engine optimized traffic and long-term traffic but it’s not likely.

The sooner an ordinary person realizes they must pay for marketing them sooner they will figure out how to take that happen. That might mean going out and getting a part-time job to give your Internet business working capital.

This may not be what you want to hear but this is the facts of life on the subject of Internet marketing today. There are billions of websites all contending for attention.

Writing an article in submitting it to ezinearticles.com is a way to get one back link and some good traffic. However logically think about what that one article means to your business. It is just one article on one web page. There are still billions of other webpages on the Internet that you must compete with.

The other thing is building an email marketing list for future follow-up is an absolute must. This is especially true if you are going to do paid marketing.

You are buying traffic anyway now so why not capture names and email addresses so you can follow up for free. This would seem to be common sense yet it is amazing how many websites are not utilizing this basic Internet marketing strategy.

Develop relationships with your subscribers and you can really benefit in terms of future sales down the road.

These are a few tips on making money on the internet. If you are not building your list, or doing paid marketing, hopefully I have blown the smoke off of it enough for you to understand you need to get started doing these things.