(Separating the Bull from the Bonanza)

What a great idea? But is it more bull than bonanza?

You're out there surfing on the Internet when you land on the 800 Pound Jungle Gorilla Marketing Tactics Website that is guaranteeing you can start a work from home business in less than day and achieve online income success in a matter of a few days! That is when you should remember how much money you lost to the sideshow carney every time they suckered you into one of their rigged games.

Of course it was fun. You probably had your sweetheart with you, which made paying $30.00 for that bear worth every penny for the intimacy you were banking on as a result. Sideshow carnies are everywhere on the Internet hawking their scams. You're kidding? You really want to start a legitimate online business that is going to be there 10, 20, even 30 years from now?

There are more people now than ever before drawn to the idea of starting an online business from the comfort of their own homes. This may in part be due to a general awakening of consciousness about the real benefits of being your own boss. It has been recently fueled and ignited by a great number of job losses in the worldwide recession.

As consumers become more comfortable with buying increasingly more goods and services online , they begin to research established online businesses and are attracted by the idea that they can start an Internet Business for next to nothing compared to the start up costs involved in opening an offline business.

Once the decision is made, the clash between myth and reality has to be met head on. The challenge of the individual learning curve for many who are not computer savvy (and even for some of those who are) will separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

The first major decision for all of us as "net-preneurs" is "How do I get started? Where do I start? To whom and where do I turn to for answers?

Pick one or two people in an established online business and study their website and blog, which are usually connected and designed to work together to generate traffic from search engines, back links, articles marketing and social networking.

The ultimate realization you will come to is this... You must always look to yourself, first for the answers to achieving online business success, just as those individuals did, who have struggled online, before you.

Where so many of us fail in our endeavors to achieve online business success is in 1) GIVING UP TOO SOON! And 2) never writing up a business model to follow, which more often than not may be the primary underlying cause of giving up too soon. It is easy to give up when the business model (written or unwritten) is not working the way we think it should, not producing the results or success we are expecting and consequently get "stuck" in our thinking processes.

Instead of maintaining the flexibility to "think outside the box," we trash can the whole kit and caboodle and give up or start looking for another "opportunity guru moment," whereby we silently justify jumping back into an endless cycle of "spending precious limited resources on the next great product promising instant success, rather than investing in what was probably a successful business model to begin with, which just needed some additional tweaking...continued marketing efforts and...time...

The Hype of Affiliate Programs.

Every guru will tell you the same story that generating Affiliate Income as an online business model is the easiest way to get started. While it is true that it costs nothing or very little to get started representing other people's and companies products, uncovering the "insider secrets" to achieving affiliate marketing success is more difficult and challenging than buying into some guru ebook or backroom control panel.

Push button success always lacks one or more of the essential insider secrets that may, indeed, propel you to becoming an overnight millionaire. When an online marketer tells you "All you have to worry about is generating the traffic to your affiliate link and collecting your commission checks," he is not telling you that generating traffic and building a customer list will likely be the greatest challenge you will face in achieving the realization of an online income.

Believe it when I tell you that even the simplest online business model requires extraordinary commitment, perseverance, test marketing and more test marketing, and a "do or die" willingness to maintain the flexibility of "mind awareness" to cast aside every idea and technique that doesn't work, in order to discover and put into immediate action every aspect of your evolving business model that you discover does work.

Thomas Edison is often quoted as saying "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."

The greatest personal inspiration I take, however, from the life of Thomas Edison is the fact that he had a placard over his desk, bearing the quote of Sir Joshua Reynolds: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."