Hey spmarketer, nice plan, not too shabby.

I'm no expert but I'm getting by in the world of IM.

Personally, I started with a website (after finding a niche of course). A website is comprised of lots of articles (and/or videos) with lots of good, valuable content. If you're looking for a product to help you with this, the best one I would recommend is Affiloblueprint by Mark Ling (no affiliation, I promise!), who also has a very beautiful-sounding accomplice if I remember correctly.

Your website should have anywhere from 10 to hundreds, thousands+ pages, each page bearing an article (and/or video). Bigger websites tend to fair better SEO-wise these days.

As you build your website, start doing SEO, which includes onsite and offsite optimization. Read about it. Onsite is easy, offsite takes LOTS of time and dedication. Go check out Matt Cutt's blog to see the kind of backlinking recommended by Google. These methods will last in the long term but take more effort. You could also use various software (Sick Submitter, Scrapebox) to build links for you automatically, but these methods are becoming less valuable over time.

Once you've got some regular traffic coming to your site, set up an autoresponder sequence. This is a series of emails that you will send out to people that opt in and choose to receive them. Prepare around 10 emails to begin with.

Sign up with Aweber, or Imnica Mail (or some other autoresponder service). Load the 10 emails you wrote on the autoresponder service (instructions will be given on how to do this when you sign up with a service). Now you must get people to willingly GIVE you their emails. For this you need a 'Squeeze Page'. That's where you have a page with some info on it about what kind of emails they will receive when they sign up - it could be a full-blown salesletter if you wish. At the bottom, have a little box that says 'enter your email here!' - that's the squeeze page.

The thank-you page is the page the comes immediately after your visitor puts their email on the squeeze page and hits submit. This is a page you set up on the same site, and your autoresponder service will tell you all about how to set it up. On the thank-you page you can simply say 'thanks for signing up, be sure to check your inbox for your first email'. OR you can have an affiliate offer. Personally, I would recommend that you do NOT have an affiliate offer here, as it is important to build a relationship with the people on your list FIRST, before you start selling them stuff. Sell them something after the 3rd, 4th, 5th or even 6th email. Provide excellent value on each email.

If you are using email marketing, then I suggest you do all of your selling via email. The purpose of the website should be only to get your customer to give you his/her email address, and give you permission to send them emails. That way, you can sell as many products as you like to them, as long as the products are related to the same niche, and helpful to your customers.

You have a lot of questions there, and much to learn. Don't try to tackle it all at once - take it one step at a time and you'll get there eventually. Niche research is the most important step - make sure you pick a niche that is profitable, and that you can write about. You have to either enjoy learning and writing about the niche, OR already know a lot about it. Otherwise you won't get very far.

8. After building the websites and monetizing them the next step would be to build backlinks to help drive targeted search engine traffic to them

One thing I am starting to do and teach is do both.

Create a review site for each individual product and one review site with ALL of the products, by putting a backlink on the smaller review sites - leading up to the major one, it will help boost your ranking and PR.

When doing this, I typically have one seperate page/site dedicated to strictly collecting emails. I will also include a web form on the site somewhere, usually in the sidebar widget section.

NO, you shouldn't have ANY external links on your squeeze page. The only option they should have is opt-in or close the tab/browser.

The thank you page is another story, feel free to put affiliate links on them.

You would have to check FB TOS for this to be sure, but I THINK that posting your affiliate links are perfectly fine. What I would suggest doing though is creating a review post and posting that link into facebook to your blog.

As for the SEO portion. Invest in "Easy WP SEO". It's a plugin for sale here on the WF. Combine that with All In One SEO and you have the perfect SEO set up for on page optimization. Easy WP SEO will help you set up your blog post/pages and optimizing them correctly.

When it comes to backlinks, start out slow and work your way up. Don't blast hundreds/thousands of links at it from the start. What I like to do is create Web 2.0 sites and blast links at them, sort of a buffer for your review sites.

If you're able to find .edu and .gov links, those are the best type of backlinks.

I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean "where to start". Are you talking about for your backlinking campaigns?

Thanks everyone for the tips and input. I really appreciate it. I will read your response over and over again while going through the process to make sure I am on track. Any tips on what niche/product is good to promote for newbies? I see a lot of people promoting HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE.... Is this a good thing and everybody just seem to picking this niche or what?

Looks like for a newbie you've got a lot figured out. Just get a plan together and put a schedule down.

Work at creating a list and make sure that you send good value added content to that list and don't just blast buy... buy ... buy. If you give good things for people to read, that are interesting and useful to them, then they will buy from you when you have something to offer.

Thanks everyone! I'll start on the site this weekend (hopefully) and will keep posting my status and questions on here... This forum has been really helpful and with lots of informatiion.