People seeking ways to make money online, often give up because it seems that success with an online business requires a big cash investment. It is true that an online business needs to be advertised, otherwise nobody will visit your website and you won't earn any money.

Free and paid for methods are available to promote an online business. Both types of promotion work. Free advertising methods usually need an investment of more time and results often take longer. The process of setting up paid methods is quicker and the fastest results are very often obtained from the most expensive forms of advertising. The logical conclusion to draw from this is that a person with a large advertising budget will inevitably succeed faster at making money online than a person with a budget of absolute zero. However, when you are talking about starting an Internet based home business, logic does not always apply.

If you read articles about starting a home based business online, you will come across advice about what is essential to online business success. The most often quoted qualities are patience and persistence but you will probably never read an article that says the sure way to achieve success with a home based business is by starting out with a massive budget. Let me illustrate why this is the case with a true story.

Two people, who both already had full time jobs, joined the same online home business opportunity and received exactly the same training and support. Briefly, what they each needed to do was either build a website from scratch, or customize a website using a free template, and then promote their website to earn money from various affiliate programs.

One of those people was an intelligent young man in his twenties (we'll call him Steve) who had a well-paid and rewarding career but was drawn to Internet marketing by things he had heard about the possibility of earning large amounts of money online. Steve had a strong ambitious streak and wanted to get rich in as short a time as possible.

The other person (we'll call her Mary) was in her fifties and working for not much above minimum wage (because when you are aged over fifty you are lucky to get that much). Mary had to go back to work full-time after her husband was disabled by a stroke and they still had mortgage payments to meet. Mary just wanted to find a way of making a little extra money online so that she could work part time and spend more time at home with her husband.

As I said, Steve had a good job, and he had quite a bit of cash saved up. This enabled him to pay a freelance designer to build a website for him and then get off to a fast start using paid advertising methods.

The loss of her husband's income and the expense of putting kids through college had eaten up Mary's saving. So she learned about html coding and used a free template to build her own website. Then she started advertising her website using free promotional resources. She then managed to raise a small amount of cash by selling some stuff she no longer needed via a garage sale and this cash was used for some paid advertising. Mary ploughed her profits back into her home business each month and persisted in her efforts with free advertising. By the end of her eight month running an Internet business, she was earning enough to meet her mortgage payments each month and the day she would cut her job down to part time hours was getting closer all the time. Giving up her job altogether to earn a full-time income working at home is no longer a dream, it has become a realistic target.

Sadly, Steve was not around to witness Mary's triumph. He had relied totally on his money working for him and this was a big mistake. He did not spend wisely and failed to calculate what level of return he would need to make a profit. One big error Steve made was that he did not monitor his pay per click advertising campaigns closely. Just that one error brought a loss of over $3000 within about two weeks. At that point he gave up trying to make money with an online business. His reasoning was that, if a professionally built website and an investment of over a thousand dollars a week couldn't bring success in his attempt to make money online, nothing would.

If this was a work of fiction, I would now reveal that I am, in fact, "Mary". However, this is a true story and I am neither Mary nor Steve and it took more than eight months for me to get to the stage Mary has achieved. My story is quite close to Mary's but I didn't have the inspiration of having a garage sale!

The moral of this story (insofar as there is one) is that cash is no substitute for patience and persistence when you decide to start a home business online.