What is the secret to making money online?

I have been studying ways to make money online for about 10 years now.  I remember working at Dell and making a decent living but I was still wanting to own my own business.  I wanted to make money with this relatively new communication method called the internet.I have taken courses, paid for courses about ways to market online. I have seen and taken courses that teach you how to create information products and sell them.  Some sell other peoples products, some sell stuff on Ebay.  They all make sense.  They always have, the problem is direction.  What do I want to do?   How do I want to succeed?  All I know for sure is that I would like to own an online business that can replace the income that I had when I had my last job.

Some say that search engine optimization (SEO) is the best thing to do. This is picking some keywords that people are actually looking for, and writing pages that discuss those words.  For example for an Austin Asian food restaraunt I would find search pharses that would fit the market that the place has.  I would optimize a page, probably the entire site, for the phrases that people search similar to “Austin Asian Food”, “Asian Food Austin”, and of course “Austin Texas Asian Restaraunt”.  I would build pages so that if anybody who want to eat Asian food in Austin would find this site.

I am working through a tutorial now that is based on taking out advertisements and just directing people to another website with my affiliate information.  I worked through the course on Monday, but I waited to set up the advertiesment until Tuesday, but when I submitted the domain name and the advertisement to the advertising network, it was no longer a valid way to set up an advertisement campaign.  The information that I had paid for was already out of date.  Talk about a moving target.

There are a lot of really good tutorials at a lot of these sites, and I know that there are a lot of good ethical ways to make money in my own business.  I am going to find something that will help me know what I am doing.  The only problem, or should I say “opportunity” is that now the government has stepped in to make sure that nobody is taken advantage of.  While that is a good thing, once again the people who are looking for the something for nothing concept scream foul, when then they should be screaming “Maybe I should have to work for this.”