Making money online is a lot of hard work, but it is by no means impossible. Armed with the proper knowledge, tools, resources, and a solid action plan, you can be successful in a matter of weeks. It may take a lot of trial and error, a lot of learning from mistakes, and learning to stay focused, in order for you to get to the point where you will start making a living online.

So how do you succeed online? While there are many different factors at play, perhaps the most important factor is how much traffic you are able to drive to your website. Traffic is the name of the game. It is the key element to the success or failure of your online venture. Without traffic, you can’t earn any money, plain and simple. Building a fancy website with lots of graphics, hundreds of articles, and plenty of bells and whistles is great and all. But what is the use if there is nobody actually coming to your site?

Let’s take a look at a typical step-by-step action plan to start making money online, including the timelines involved that it took me to achieve success:

1. Niche research. Figuring out what people want, what they are searching for online, what items are selling online, analyzing the competition, and the keywords that people are typing into the search engines, takes me about 2 days.

2. Building the website. Registering the domain name, setting up a WordPress hosted site, choosing a template and sample images, takes me about 2 days.

3. Writing the content for the site. I will spend a few hours a day writing my own content, at least 10 articles a day at 500 words each. I usually aim for about 50 articles per website. This takes about 5 days worth of effort.

4. Promoting the website. With a solid strategy for getting my articles syndicated on other blogs, getting links back to my site from discussion forums, this process is the most time consuming and can take anywhere from 5 to 10 days to complete.

At this point, it is mostly “set and forget”. It takes time for the search engines to discover and index each back link, and for my sites to get ranked in the search engines for my desired keywords.

During this time, after about the 2 week mark, I will start to see traffic gradually starting to trickle in… anywhere from 3 to 5 hits a day, and then slowly rising thereafter. It is never a sudden burst of traffic but a steady trickle. And then the back links start building themselves, quite literally, as other people who discover my sites will start linking to them.

So when all is said and done, it can take me anywhere from 2 to 4 months to realistically start seeing the levels of traffic necessary in order to reach a steady and healthy conversion rate. On average, this translates to anywhere between 10 to 50 unique visitors per day.

My advice to anyone starting out in the business is to be persistent. Have a solid plan of action and stick to it. It takes a great deal of consistent effort, determination in order to succeed. It is by no means a get rich quick scheme. But if you follow through on your action plan, you can be assured of long term success and achieving the results that you desire.

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@JulianaPayson on Twitter has built up a number of blog sites on her own virtual private server to accomodate healthy converting levels of traffic. She is also a Los Angeles based associate at InMotion Hosting well known for their US based expertise on WordPress Hosting, Shared, VPS and Dedicated Servers.