Making money online requires four major elements.
1) A product or service that people are willing to pay for.
2) The technology infrastructure to enable prospects to find and interact with your business online.
3) Traffic bringing prospects to your site.
4) Converting those prospects into customers and collecting their money.
While all four elements need to be in place and working together in order to make money, the technology infrastructure is the most critical element because it supports the other three and creates the leverage that enables individuals to make five, six and even seven figure imports from their home based businesses.
The biggest misconception about the technology needed to make money is that having a website is enough. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A website is simply the first, albeit the most important, element required to make money. Typically a website consists of a hosting account (where one leases space on a web server), a URL or web address, and a few pages of information or sales copy about the product or service being offered.
However, to turn a website into a real online business requires the addition of a number of software applications to manage the various business functions required including: autoresponders for building a list, multimedia to improve sales and conversions, split-testing to measure and improve conversions , traffic tracking to optimize advertising and traffic strategies, credit card processing, and monitoring and reporting of critical business metrics.
Generally these are purchased as stand alone applications and added to a basic website in order to create a real online business. The total cost of all the additional technologies required is in the range of $ 2,000 to $ 4,000.
The major drawback to this approach is the time it takes to operate the online business, as it takes a great deal of time to jump from application to application to gather the operating data required to make operating decisions.
The solution to this problem is to retain a software engineer to connect, integrate and develop displays for the most important operating information. This can easily cost an additional $ 20,000 to $ 30,000.
The objective being to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with the technologies so more of your limited time can be invested in driving traffic and learning the important conversions skills required to convert prospects into customers.
Alex Mandossian, the uber successful Internet marketer said it best.
"The secret to making money online is Simple.
Do not spend any more than 10% of your time dealing with the technologies so you can spend 90% on traffic and conversion because that's where the money is made online. "
Then he finished with most important point.
"There's no money in learning and managing the technologies, unless you want to be a webmaster."
This means that you either need to hire a professional webmaster to set up and manage the technologies required to operate your online business (so you can focus on getting traffic and converting it into customers) ... OR you need to get one of the integrated applications that provide all the technologies ready to go.
Not only do these applications combine all the technologies into one easy to use application that let's you focus on traffic and conversion, but they cost 80% to 90% less than purchasing all the technologies separately.
Bottom line, the best way to turn your website into a money machine is to purchase one off the shelf. It's far faster, much cheaper and will make you a lot more money.
Please visit www.YourFirst50K.com [http://www.yourfirst50k.com] for more information & to receive your FREE copy of my ebook titled "How to Make Your First $ 50,000 Online"