One question that I hear more then any other in the internet marketing world is "What is the quickest way I can start generating a profit"?

My biggest piece of advice... FOCUS!!

There are a TON of different ways to make money online but whatever you decide to pursue you've got to focus all your energy on it.

There's an Internet Marketing (IM) trap and it goes like this...

1) You start signing up for everyone's email list to "learn for free"

2) You start seeing what everyone is doing and you think to yourself... "I should do that"

3) You finally get the courage to start pursuing something but you actually start pursuing everything. You go in all different directions and only make a half assed effort one way or the other.

4) Because you didn't experience "ultimate success" the first go around, you start buying products and information on IM.

5) Well unfortunately that takes you in 50 different directions because although the advice from most of the big named gurus is good, they all have a different approach.

6) Then you spend some more money following another strategy that you heard about or you buy some resell/private label/public domain materials hoping that just through the nature of putting it up on the web, sales will start coming in.

7) Because sales aren't pouring in, you decide to buy some traffic from Google Adwords.

After your Google Adwords account gets run up and you've blown a whack of cash AND still don't have that many sales you start to get a bitter taste in your mouth about IM.

9) Then it hits you... I'm all over the place and don't have a plan at all.

How do I know this?

This was my exact story.

I'll never forget the moment when a well known internet marketer shared with me an ENORMOUS tip that this year has helped put thousands of dollars in my bank account.

I was eagerly showing him my big elaborate mind map of another "million dollar idea" when he did something that confused me at first, but then made total sense.

He closed my mind mapping software on my computer and said focus.

So...

1) Figure out "how" you want to make money online. Do you want to create and sell your own products? Do you want to make money with Adsense? Do you want to do affiliate marketing? Do you want to buy and sell on eBay?

2) Think through the process of what you want to do. What's the first thing that needs to happen? The second? The third?

Create a flow chart to help you understand clearly the "steps" in the process. Then focus on each step and either master them yourself or find reliable outsourcing partners who can take care of certain "steps" for you.

3) Start taking consistent action!!

This is where most people drop the ball. They jump in too quick, loose some money and get out. It takes consistent action of doing the same things over and over. Build momentum over time.

My last tip would be to focus on who you like learning from.

In the beginning, when you narrow down who you learn from the process becomes clear a lot more quickly. I zeroed in on two people first and then slowly (very slowly) branched off once I had a grip on where I was heading and had implemented what I had learned.

Hopefully that helps because if I had followed this earlier, my life would have been a heck of a lot easier!

Here's to your "early days" being more lucrative than mine were!