Don’t believe what all the Guru’s tell you it’s not easy to make money online. Via my Blog and forum I get to chat to lots of people who all have one thing in common they want to make money online. Often this is to supplement a poorly paying full time job, to bring in some extra money to help out with bills or just so that can get away from a mundane 9-5 job. Unfortunately about 95% of these people won’t get to realise their dreams and be able to make a significant online income.

There are 5 basic mistakes that people make when they set out on an online career. The sad thing is that most of these can be easily avoided with a bit of planning and preparation. Let’s look at the mistakes and how you can avoid them.

1. Failing to Plan.

Working online is like any business you need a business plan. You also need to know your strengths and weaknesses. If you don’t feel you can write articles and you don’t have the funds to pay for a writer then you should avoid anything that needs a steady flow of unique content or articles. Find a source of income that will allow you to use your abilities. Don’t be afraid to treat the first 6 months of your online career as an apprenticeship and learn new skills which will help in the long term.

2. Believing the hype

Successful internet marketers make their money by persuading you that you need their products to be successful. You don’t. You just need to be prepared to work and often work hard. When I first started it took me less than 5 months to get my online earnings up to over $4000 per month. To earn that I spent less than $100. But I worked a lot of hours to get there.

3. You don’t control your spending

I lost count of the number of people I know who have spent thousands of dollars on tools and e-books and still have not made more than $100 online. If you spend $100 on tools then you need to make $101 before you make a profit. Start out by joining a forum and see what people are doing to make money. Test their methods and if they work and you make a profit then buy tools that will help speed up the process.

4. Lack of Focus

People seem intent on jumping from one method of earning money online to another without giving each method time to work. This week they’ll try adsense, next week affiliate marketing after that buying and selling domains. When I speak to people who do this they all say the same thing, Adsense doesn’t work anymore, article marketing doesn’t work anymore etc. It does, it‘s just that it doesn’t work overnight and you need to spend time learning how to do things properl.

5. You think you know all you need to know.

Technology and the internet are changing at an ever increasing pace. 18 months ago Blog and Ping was the best way to get your site indexed and ranking in the search engines then almost overnight social bookmarking and RSS feeds took over. You need to keep an eye on upcoming trends and ways of marketing. I’ve had well known marketers email me recently telling me that Hubpages or Twitter was the next big think in marketing…sorry guys I’ve been using them and writing about them for the last 9 months.

If you feel that you are making a few of these mistakes then take time out to look at what you are doing wrong and what you can do to change things. A few hours spend on analysing your plans or you current business now can result in a much larger income later on.