If you have a desire to make good money online, we need to expand your sphere of knowledge. On the surface, it may appear that, all you need is a splashy website and a link to your Paypal account. I wish it were actually that simple, besides your sales page you will need to understand the dynamics of a Hosting account, plus some web pages combining everything into a seamless smooth flowing experience for your customer… bottom line you need Business Automation, a powerful business engine that will drive your site efficiently, creating your Virtual ATM Machine.

Your website is your virtual sales force, in essence, your store, it is where your prospective customers can come in and look around hoping to find that product or service they desire to buy.

So how do we achieve business automation and build this virtual ATM?

To achieve this goal we must combine a lot more technology, adding expensive software applications to manage and run our website, develop our sales pages and to add video and audio to display our products in a true virtual commercial state. We need software to track and monitor our advertising performance, and our sales, to collect and process credit cards, shipping data and the total administrative functions necessary to manage any business.

This is discouraging, and the reason over 90% of all online ventures fail within their first year.

Therefore, what do you need to do to ensure success and build this virtual ATM Machine…? You have two choices:

1. You can hire a very expensive webmaster to identify, incorporate and manage all the technical issues, purchasing and implementing them for you, or.

2. Spend the 12 – 18 months learning the technology and doing it yourself.

If you decide to pursue this task on your own you will need to make sure you have the following items at a minimum to hope for success:

1. A quality Hosting account.

2. High quality web-builder software.

3. A substantial knowledge of HTML.

4. A good autoresponder.

5. Traffic tracking software application.

6. Split Testing software application.

7. Your all important Merchant Account.

8. A web business centered statistical package to monitor your revenue and statistics.

This is your minimum requirements to implement a successful online business; you can easily add many more bells and whistles, but hold on to your wallet the price tags rolls up quickly.

If you do decide to venture out on your own, be prepared to spend a good 12 – 18 months learning the required technology, and software applications. Remember that this time spent is time taken away from your ultimate goal… making money.

This is a critical point – your goal from the outset should be spending no more than 10% of your time on technology and 90% on driving traffic, and converting customers into buyers… in order to succeed.

Alex Mandossian, a legend in online marketing said it best:

“There's no money to be made in learning technologies… unless you want to be a webmaster.”

So my advice… mentor success and do not fall into the technology trap, find one of the hosted programs that provides all the money making services and technologies you will require to have your business up and operational in days instead of months.

Not only will this save you an incredible amount of time and money, but also the savings in shear aggravation will offset any out of pocket expense incurred. Typically these companies's charge about 1/10th the physical cost of purchasing and integrating the technology separately to build your web machine.

As Alex said, your key to success is having someone else handle the technology requirements, so hire a webmaster, or get one of the integrated website programs available so you can focus on your primary goal; driving traffic, converting customers, and making money.

Copyright (c) 2007 Chris Sullivan