Newbies today are lucky and fortunate...

What is easier for some is harder for others. I agree with Abdul. Information overload leads to a lack of focus. Not only for a Newbie, but for everyone in general if we are not careful.

I agree Steve it is harder because there are so many people trying to make money and the traffic is so much more difficult to generate .As we all know traffic is the key

WAP? That sounds pretty "retro" to me, because it's not used in these parts of the world any more. Two major operators finally axed it in 2012 after years of very low usage, but I guess it's doing fine in Asia.

About your post: you could start by selling some kind of a service. Can you perform a task that's worth $5 or more? If the answer is yes, get a Fiverr account and try to advertise in other places too. It doesn't need to be anything too fancy for that price: fix a certain thing on a website, install something, etc.

If you can build a production quality website, get yourself to one of the freelancer sites. Get a friend or a relative to proofread your offer or profile information.

Internet Marketing is very hard unless you know what you're doing - and probably even then. Those who are successful have been "paying their dues" for a long time. You can't just start from zero and expect profits. If internet marketing is something you want to try, I'd suggest that you get another job first and start IM as a hobby project. But one that you take seriously.

Newbies today have things both easier and harder than I did when I started.

> The idea of more information being available doesn't wash. People have always been people, and the way to succeed in business hasn't changed. Sell people what they want at a price they're willing to pay and at which you can make a profit. The information sources have changed, both for the good and the bad.

> It's easier because there are tools available that didn't exist back then. Take everybody's favorite whipping boy, Paypal. Back when I got started, you sold a product and then waited for the buyer to mail you a payment. You then either emailed the info or mailed back a floppy disk.

> It's easier because people are far less hesitant to enter a credit card online. Back when I started, the major media loved to paint a picture of the evil hacker, complete with burglar's mask, just lurking in wait to steal your credit card.

> It's harder because there are a lot more distractions and a lot more competition - by several orders of magnitude. It's just tougher to make your voice heard.

Bottom line, quit worrying about whether the old guard had it tougher or easier. What matters is what is, right now and coming in the future.

It's fun to debate in a forum like this, but don't let such things affect your ability to do business.

Listen, I think what you need to do is close your eyes, take a deep breath, and FORGET about everything you have done so far online (with the exception of what you know about HTML and the technical stuff, because you will need that).

That may sound harsh, but if you are looking for someone to tell you the truth, then that's what I'll do.

First of, get yourself a PayPal account. If you want to start making money online soon, that's what you need. Later on when you have some working capital you can look into your own merchant account but for now, start off using PayPal.

It seems you already know HTML and how a domain and web hosting works. Set yourself up a WordPress blog then get a free squeeze page theme for it. They are all over the net. If you don't want to mess with WordPress, set up a simple HTML static squeeze page. It will work to collect your leads just the same. I recommend WordPress because you can easily have a blog and your squeeze page all set up on the same site. Now you can blog too and review products, write helpful posts for your subscribers, etc, all on one content management system.

Make your squeeze page with your free gift (you have to have something to give away in exchange for your subscriber's email address) and then head over to Aweber and get your autoresponder account set up. It'll cost you $1 for the first month.

Now you are ready to collect leads. I recommend you start out in the Internet Marketing niche.

Now you need to send traffic to your squeeze page. If you don't have a budget to pay for advertising, you will have too use free methods like forum signatures, blog comments (relevant comments that you write - not comment spamming), Twitter, Facebook, free JV giveaway events, etc. Get on Skype too and start making contacts and see if you can get yourself into some ad swap, download page swap rooms, etc.

Once you get between 400-500 people on your list, open up an accounts at Safe Swaps for $30 a month and start doing some ad swaps. Once you get your list up to 1000 subscribers (this can be done in about a month with a few good ad swaps), you can start to promote a few products and you will make a few sales.

Take that money and invest it back into your business by buying solo ads to build your list even more. I don't recommend sending any promotional emails until your list hits 1000 or better. During this time (and after too), you should be sending them great content for free that will help them so you can build a good relationship with your list.

If you start out sending promo after promo you will burn your list and then it doesn't matter how many subcribers you have because they won't take you seriously.

After you get your list up to 5,000 you should be able to make some decent money from it. Then you need to take that money and put it back into your business. Start playing around with paid traffic like Facebook ads, Adwords, LeadImpact, etc

Here is what I'm going to stress to you: You WILL NOT make any profit for AT LEAST A YEAR. Any money you do make in that time should be put right back into building your list even more. Don't waste your money on any products that promise you will make $19,763.93 in the first 4 days or any of that crap because you WON'T. The only person who will be making money is the person who sold you the product. In fact, DON'T buy any products that entire first year!

Now, product creation and all that is great, but it has to come later. If you have a nice sized list it will be easier to recruit affiliates for your product launch. But don't even worry about any of that stuff for now. There is no "get rich quick" here. As many people in this forum will tell you, Internet Marketing is just like any other business. And most brick & mortar businesses (I've had two so I know) do not start to see profit until after a year or so. The first year is simply marketing, developing regular customers, and generally building your business.

Now, once you start to see sales your first instinct is going to be to spend the money. DON'T! You MUST invest it back into your business!

Are there many others ways to make money online other than what I described? Of course there are.

I'm just telling you how I did it.

I used the exact same business model I just laid out to you and now my list is ready to top 80,000 subscribers (and it's quite responsive)! Of course, as you go along you are going to learn about other ways to make money, and it's alright to implement those too. However, you should never take on too many projects.

After about 6 years of list building, I just recently branched out into niche blogs and Adsense, product creation, TeeSpring, Kindle, etc.

Also, this "one hour a day" stuff is BS. I worked 10-12 hours a day building my list for over 2 years before my online business could fully support me. Even now I still put in 4-5 hours every day reading, learning, building traffic & relationships, etc. Let me stress to you that the learning NEVER stops. If you don't learn something new about Internet Marketing EVERY DAY then you are not doing your due diligence.

I want to wish you the best of luck and to tell you that I'm no genius. So IF I CAN DO IT SO CAN YOU! If I can help you further or answer any questions for you then go ahead and drop me a PM.

Everyone has to start somewhere, a baby has to crawl before they can walk.
It goes the same with anything in life, it's called the learning curve. What I suggest that if you've got a friend with the same interests as you to work together and encourage and motivate each other to set goals, all you need is an old computer to start with, you don't need a fancy computer to work on the internet.
Make a list of all the suggestions in the previous posts and use it as a guide, there is some valuable advice there. Work hard for the next 12 months hopefully 2014 will be your lucky year. Good luck!

There are a lot of information on im, that can make it easier. It's just when you get that information you apply it and what you read is transparent.