Any of us who are interested in making money online are bombarded daily with information relative to achieving this objective. Along with this it seems that everyday there is a new technique and if you do not apply it you could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table.

Many of these opportunities involve creating your own website. This way you can earn revenue using multiple techniques. And of course on the business opportunity sales pages they often say that this can be done within weeks of implementing their strategies.

While in some cases this may be true it is often more the exception rather than the rule. I do not want to burst anyone's bubble. I have been marketing online for almost four years and honestly it takes grit and determination to build a successful business on the internet.

The truth is it can be done but many factors have to be brought into consideration before you begin. The first being how many hours per day are you willing to spend to build your online business.

By the way do not be fooled into thinking that an online business does not have to be taken as seriously as an offline business. If you do not take it seriously then you will not achieve serious results.

The step to take is to outline on a piece of paper what your interests are. Then you will need to research the market online to see which way you can enter the market and make money.

In terms of building a website you need to gather all this information first. Once you find what you are looking for and have determined that you are going to build a site relative to that subject you can then look for a site builder that will help you achieve the results you desire to achieve.

The best site builders are the ones that have proven results. Secondly if you are not technically minded you want it to take care of all those details. Remember if you are busy building a site then you will not be marketing your website hence you will not be making money.

To conclude apply due diligence. Research your market thoroughly and you will achieve results.

Depending on where you want to take your business, a multiple niche website can be an excellent platform with which to expand your business and cover a larger market. It could also be a good choice for you if your interests and expertise vary greatly. However, you also have a choice to just focus all your energies on building one site and staking your reputation on it. So will a multiple niche website be a good choice or will one big authority site increase your chances of success? Let's take a look at the benefits and limitations of each option:

Multiple Niche Websites:

A multiple niche website offers you an opportunity to reach several different segments of the market all at once, allowing you to cover as much ground as you can using just one or a few sites.

Advantages

A multiple niche website lets you communicate to multiple groups of potential customers and possibly close a business transaction from there. It also helps maximize your initial website building efforts, particularly because you only need to build each site around a single design concept.

Multiple niche websites can also showcase your flexibility and comprehensiveness of services that you offer. It's like having a multi-specialty site that attracts clients and customers from several different market segments and then doing business with them. Once your site has been around for sometime, it could easily pick up a minimum of 1,000 to 3,000 hits per day - even more when you've gained enough reputation and recognizability in the business.

Disadvantages

The disadvantage of a multiple niche website rests mainly on its design. Since you will be promoting different products and/or services from a single site, imagine how it would look like to a visitor. One site = hundreds of related links. And we're not just talking about internal links either.

A multiple niche website is essentially your store from which you'll be running your business. Once you're actively participating in the industry, it shouldn't be long until you find external links that you might want to refer to your visitors. Now imagine the chaos - dozens of links, banners, buttons, ads, graphics, pages upon pages, all coming from just one direction, each one crying out for attention.

If you can't manage it well, a multiple niche website can grow to be a multi-headed monster, each one heading for a different direction and demanding a different type of approach. In the end, there is a danger that you could be competing with no one else but yourself.

Build multiple niche websites if...

- You have the expertise and the experience in the specific niches you want to focus on.

- You have the skills, time or manpower to devote for the development of each niche.

- You have the resources to spend for the demands that a multiple niche site will require.

- You have established an organized and well-designed business processing system to handle transactions such as sales, discounting, customer service, subscription, etc.

- You have the patience of a saint and the eye for detail of an IRS auditor.

Single Authority Site

The single authority site is just that - one site offering excellent products or services pertaining to a single niche or industry.

Advantages

One big authority site is perfect for people who want to build their expertise in only one field or niche. If there's one thing you can do well and you want to make it your business, take this route. It's easy to set up, doesn't require a lot of resources and is relatively cheaper to run. You could also concentrate all your efforts here and become a respected guru in a specific field instead of being the internet marketer who juggles with multiple industries and never quite achieving expert status.

Disadvantages

If you made a mistake in your choice of niche, a single authority site can fizzle out like a short matchstick. When it goes, it goes and there's nowhere else you can turn to or fall back on, unlike a multiple niche website where there are other things going on for you.

You could also miss the opportunity of providing products and services for a wider market segment, thus limiting your income potential. If the niche you chose has a limited market, your site's traffic counter will reflect that in the number of hits it receives.

Build one big authority site if...

- Your expertise is limited to only one area and you are confident you can comfortably grow in it.

- You want to become a known authority in that niche.

- You have limited knowledge or training.

- You want to focus all your time, effort and money developing one big authority site versus a multiple niche website.

Here's an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? I might as well "go hard" or "go home", as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

- Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?

- Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?

- Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?

- Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?

- Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?

- Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?

- Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?

- Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?

- Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?

- Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?

- Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?

- Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines?

- Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?

- Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?

- Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?

- Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?

- Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?

- Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?

- Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?

- Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!