Newbies... I'll need your input on this

For me, it is knowing how to put youtube videos on the 1st page of google

I'm going to expand on Brent's clever lawn mowing suggestion; sheer brilliance and a typical display of his worthwhile contributions to the WF community. I only hope my expansion does the concept justice.

The lawn mower = an ebook.
The grass = traffic.
The collected blades of grass = subscribers.

1. Join a CPA network. PeerFly, for instance. Look at the "free to join" offers (which pay you anywhere from $.90 to $12.50 whenever someone clicks your link and takes action on a free offer) and try to determine if you can write an eBook on any of those offers that solves a problem. Since we're keeping this simple, don't worry about competition at this stage.

Example: Survey sites. PeerFly has many survey sites on the books and I believe they pay around $2.50 for each referral you send.

2. Write an eBook about how to make money from these survey sites. You'll find many such reviews and guides on the net. You can also join the survey sites to get a feel for them, too. Make the eBook around 3 pages. It's more of a report, really. Grab yourself Open Office (it's free) and export the eBook in PDF format.

3. Make a platform to give away the eBook. To keep things free, you could place it on a BlogSpot blog. My suggestion, though, would be to buy a domain (use coupon codes for Godaddy) and secure cheap virtual hosting (which you can pick up for around 2 or 3 bucks). Total spend: about 5 bucks or less. Install Wordpress. Use a static page for your front page. Now you can upload the eBook and provide the download link on that page, or (my suggestion) get yourself an aWeber or Get Response account. Both of which have $1 trials I do believe. In order to claim the eBook someone has to subscribe. You then send them the download link in the autoresponse email. This is better than a landing page because you're collecting subscribers who you can sell again to in the future.

4. Your eBook will be monetized with affiliate links. Get the Pretty Links plugin and install it into your Wordpress site and sprinkle the links in your eBook.

5. You now need traffic. In this example, where would you find people interested in an eBook on how to make money with survey sites? One idea: WAHM locations. (Work at home mom.) You can put your squeeze page link in your signature on forums, you make a page about your eBook on G+ and participate in relevant G+ communities, you can do the same thing on FB, you can create an account on Twitter and follow relevant Twitter accounts, you can setup Google Alerts for keywords like "make money with survey sites" and "survey sites" and mention your free eBook. Spend an hour on WF searching for "free traffic" and you'll find plenty of places to get traffic.

So! There you have it:

Get a lawn mower + cut grass + collect blades of grass = profit.

At $2.50 per free signup, you won't be getting rich, but this can easily be worked on and scaled up to drum up $50 to $100 a day. You just have to put the effort in.

Many thanks to Brent for this suggestion! I just expanded it, but all kudos should be directed at my friend.

Tom

I notice many threads here on WF from newbies asking what they should focus on? what business model should they try?

It is rather confusing because there are so many aspects to IM and each can be very successfull if done properly. I see many newbies asking which is best. People need direction and education in order to make good decisions and be a success.