Unfortunately despite what you may have been told, there is no such thing as a ‘get rich quick business’ or a magic bullet for your success. You can only build your business one step at a time and if you take your time through this phase you will save a lot of time and heartache coming back to change or fix things. You also need to be very willing to learn and implement new things into your business. This will be challenging at first, especially if you have not done this before you will soon come to realise that the more you do and the more you move forward, the easier it becomes.

The key is to write out a plan and stick to it! So the first thing you need to focus on is what to put into your plan?

Following is a list of the first few steps that you can take to get your business started and up and running in the shortest amount of time, but without taking any shortcuts.

This list assumes that you have chosen the niche, the business opportunity and the system that you will be working with. I will focus on the steps you follow after you have made all of these decisions.

Step 1: Buy 2 Domain Names.

I recommend godaddy.com for cheap pricing, a great system and excellent support. You also get a free hosting account with your purchase.

The first domain will be focused on the business name or the niche that your business relates to eg. golfingtips.com or cookingrecipes.com

The second domain will be your own personal website and blog that you use to brand yourself as an expert in your field as well as bonding and developing a relationship with your followers. Eg. Yourname.com or your-name.com

I always recommend .com (dot com) as it looks more professional and is most recognised by the search engines.

Step 2: Set up an Auto-Responder.

I recommend Aweber.com

This is the email system that you use to communicate and bond with your list of followers. Aweber is the best value for money and their emails do not get treated as spam as much as many of the other auto responder companies.

Step 3: Find something that you can give away for free.

This step will take some time and research. You may need to get some PLR or create it yourself. Ideally you want a free PDF report or a free training video that you can offer for free, the most important thing being that it is of real substance and value and that it comes from you.

This will brand you as an expert in your field.

Step 4: Design and build your lead capture page

This advertises and offers your incentive in exchange for the visitors’ name and email address (tell them that you will email them the report or the link).

Step 5: Create your thank you page.

Thank the visitor for their details and put a link on this page to the free gift you have offered them. Also tell them that you have emailed it to them (which your autoresponder does for you).

If you have a business opportunity you are trying to promote or a product you are selling then this is where you put the details.

Step 6: Write your auto-responder messages.

The first email needs to deliver what you promised on your page. It is a good idean then to include a link to your personal page (yourname.com) telling them that your full contact details are on the page. Then make sure your personal page includes more information about your product or service.

What ever you're marketing should be the focus of your first week of messages. It is a good idea to start with small, cheaper products first and build your way into the higher ticket items. Even better, you can give away more free products and quality info about your product or services over the first few weeks before you start trying to get them to buy it and before your start adding other products. Do not try to hide the fact that you are selling to them, but do not bombard them either. Ideally you need to be bonding with them and the products you are offering must be top rate otherwise you will lose subscribers.

This will give you a starting point and remember you can change and adapt this plan to suit yourself. The most important thing is that you put the steps into action.

From here the next step is to drive traffic to your offer on your lead capture page, I will cover this in another article.

Above all else, put your plan into action and you will see results.