As the celebration closed on another New Year, in the quiet calm of an unseasonably warm January 1st afternoon, two online marketers spent a few minutes pondering their achievements in 2006.

The two highly motivated, eager marketers were both convinced they would be able to leave their suffocating careers behind and break through into comfortable, exciting lifestyles in the year to come...

Yet, the next 12-months would bring astoundingly different results for the two marketers. In fact, when the next New Year celebration is launched, one of the two marketers will hardly be able to believe the good fortune he will see while the other will have edged only slightly closer to his goals.

What Led To The Big Difference In Results?

Isn't it mysterious what leads one person to quickly capture significant wealth online while another can work and work but doesn't seem to be able to grow their profit?

Clearly talent, experience, or special skills don't seem to matter as many of these online millionaires are from completely different backgrounds with substantial differences in talent and skill levels.

Frankly, it just doesn't seem to matter - so what does account for astonishingly different results?

Fortunately, we can learn from the second marketer in this story how to build a substantial six or seven-figure business online, you may be shocked to know what made the biggest difference.

4 ONLINE MARKETING BIG-INCOME FACTORS

Plan For Success.

Our higest paid marketer learned the benefit of planning in his job as a technology worker from a savvy manager who worked his way up the corporate ladder over a period of 10-years. With his end-goal clearly defined, each step along the way led to focus, determination, maximum use of time and effort and seemed to attract others to his vision. Though the successful internet marketer didn't want to follow in his manager's footsteps within Corporate life, he did learn the lesson that 3-5 year plans are important, having a clear picture of where you want to end up is essential, and consistently re- visiting your plan is required to achieve great things.

Match interests and strengths.

He can't quite recall how he became interested in personal improvement teachers such as Jim Rohn, Brian Tracey, Mark Victor Hansen and others, but what he learned from these masters directly led our seven-figure internet marketer to success factor number two, understanding that you can take the lead by simply playing to your strengths. We're all better at some things than others, sometimes admitting that is tough for us to do. All great leaders and wealth creators either understood their strengths and organized their wealth creation around them or they were intuitively (without knowing) were drawn to a business and way of life that accentuated their strengths.

The floundering internet marketer constantly searched for the quick path to wealth, continually buying into someone else's system without understanding why a particular business or life choice may not work for him. Use Leverage: Our million dollar marketer had the fortunate experience of growing up the son of a self-employed consultant who continually swapped his time for money. What did the highly successful marketer learn from his father?

First, no matter how much you love what you do, being put in the place of having to chase work and give up time for money does not lead to significant wealth, and is usually a formula for unhappiness.

Second, he was saddened by the realization that his father devalued his own knowledge, experience and ability by bargaining for his time at the expense of his family, health and eventual happiness.

Third, he saw that others, less able than his father, were able to package their experiences, knowledge and ability into training programs that would sell again and again. In other words, a few weeks effort leveraged into years of wealth was the answer to long-term wealth and freedom.

It was for this reason that the million dollar online marketer focused on packaging his knowledge into information products in the form of ebooks, books, audio packages, membership sites and more.

The reluctant internet marketer failed to understand the principal of leverage and instead saw a few week's effort spent on creating infoproducts as too costly in his short-term world of chasing profits.

Role Of Community In Marketing.

Not an exceptionally social person, it is interesting to see that our million dollar marketer discovered early on that user communities were essential to major success in online marketing.

Our master internet marketer decided early on that community tools such as forums, blogs, and more recently, user generated content platforms enabling users to participate by submitting reviews, files and comments were critical to generating interest, credibility, publicity and trust leading to domination over competition.

Unfortunately, our hobby internet marketer failed to understand the importance of community in the sales process and therefore could never justify taking the hours it requires to setup and seed community tools in his business.

YOU HAVE TWO CHOICES...

As someone who wants to sit among the most successful online businesses, and do it in the next 12-months, you have two choices:

1. Put into action the four principles we learned from our million dollar internet marketer. While there is no way to guarantee the same results, the principles are sound, proven and apply across the board to online and offline millionaires and billionaires.

2. Choose to continue dreaming, chasing opportunity after opportunity, ignoring the fundamental principles taught to us by our million dollar marketer.

There are only two choices, it's not any more complicated than that.

When the next New Year's Eve rolls around, will you be looking back on a virtuoso year, a year where you need to pinch yourself to see if it was real, or will you be stuck looking up at another group of internet marketing millionaires again wondering how they did it?