You sit down at your computer, ready to make today the day that you're finally going to conquer the internet, launch your online business, work from home in your slippers and have passive income the rest of your life. Awesome, let's do this...

Then, you see you have 27 emails. That eats time. You go into Wordpress and have problems, so you research. More Time. Your Google ad stopped running and you don't know why. Time. You can't login to Clickbank for some reason. Your new eZine article was denied. Your last AWeber email only had a 1% open rate and you're perplexed. Time, time, time...

The next thing you know, Firefox is about to crash because you have 14 browser windows open and somehow, it's 2pm already! You've gotten NOTHING done...Where did the day go?? "I thought today was the day I was going to start to dominate??"

Does any of this sound familiar?

Starting an online business is like any business--it takes tons of hard work, perseverance, organization, knowledge, tactical skills and strategy...to name only a few. Sure, you can get lucky and have a one-off promotion or website get some traction. But that's not a sustainable business strategy--you'll be right back at that same point I was describing earlier...you'll just have a couple bucks in your pocket.

Online business, internet marketing, working from home... all of these enticing pursuits have "implied" benefits that are hard to see past sometimes. Meaning, the future potential for "automated income" and "no boss" clouds our vision to the fact that, at the end of the day, this is still a business, and every business takes hard work (at least for a while).

If you truly want your online business to sustain itself, it takes knowledge, infrastructure, relationships, maintenance and hard work...among other things. Starting it right from the beginning, with the right goals and plan, is the key.

So, if you really want to succeed, you need a system. You need to make a detailed plan to make $1 first...that has the platform to command much more. Then, make $10,000. Then $300,000, $1M, $3M, $10M... and so on. It's all possible with discipline, planning and the right mentor. Once you have those three things, you need focus. You need to stick to it and ignore all the nonsense.

It's not easy to do all this on your own. You need guidance from true experts (who have been-there and done-that)...not self-proclaimed "gurus." Tactical advice tactical systems and tools are a dime a dozen. Don't get me wrong--you will need many tools, accounts, tricks and tactical skills. But don't get wrapped up in them--it's enticing to do so because this seems like the clever and fun part. But really, it's not.

The hard part is deciding what you really want your business to be in 1 year, 3 years, 10 years... and doing what it takes now, upfront, to get it there. Building this infrastructure right from the start will feel tedious--but I can assure you that you won't regret it later. Because the truly fun part is when the checks start rolling in, and you know there's no end to them based on the solid foundation that you've built...