Hey everybody. Mark here. Court asked me to to jump into this 5 day course with some insight where your focus should be as you start your business online.

Every day you’ll have to decide how to spend your precious time as an internet marketer. You’ll have to balance the creation of content, deciding what to sell, and how to sell it (even if what you’re “selling” is Google ads you want people to click). You’ll constantly ask yourself “What should I be doing right now?”

The temptation will be to do spend your time on things that matter a little, but not a lot. Things like the design of your site. We’ve had students who spent weeks and weeks fine-tuning the color scheme of their site…not how I’d advise spending your limited time. So what should you be doing?

Here’s the answer: traffic matters most. If you have traffic you can do anything. Spend your time building traffic, and everything else will follow.

Let me share a quick story from my early days of trying to make money online. It turns my stomach a little to tell it, but it really illustrates the point well:

Without traffic, you have nothing.

A few years ago I was about 18 months into my new found mission to earn a full time living online. I had made some great money with Adsense arbitrage (buying traffic for cheap here and selling it over there for more). I’ll tell you, it was a beautiful thing while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. Like most loopholes, it closed quickly.

So I had a little money and a lot of (unjustified) confidence and I set out to find the NBD (next big deal) that was going to take me to millions of dollars online. Within a couple of months, a relatively wealthy and well-respected friend of mine told me I needed to get in on a “For Sale By Owner” website he was making a pretty big investment in. He said he could get me 2% of the company for $20,000.

The big hook for this site was how sophisticated their “back end” was, which meant they’d used  some really fancy programming to handle the organization and display of the millions of homes that were (supposedly) going to be listed on the site. It was revolutionary, and it was going to take the real estate world by storm. I remember the “CEO” of the business telling me how one of his main concerns was that we’d be sued by Realtors because this website was such a threat to their business. “This thing makes them absolutely obsolete.”

By the way, the company had zero revenue and no real prospects of making money in the near future. They were also getting basically no visitors to the site, so it didn’t matter how sophisticated their “backend” was, nobody was ever going to use it.

I will now reveal the sum total of my due diligence before diving into this so-called “investment.” You may want to take a few notes:

“Hey, there are millions of homes in the United States. A For Sale By Owner site is a brilliant idea, and these guys have done some amazing programming to make this the most user friendly FSBO  site on the web. Everyone is going to want to sell their house on this site! We’re going to be RICH!”

And with that, I drove to the bank and sent the clowns running the company a cashier’s check for $10,000 (The plan was for me to put in the other ten thousand a few weeks later).

Long story short – the whole thing fell apart literally within a couple weeks of my $10,000 deposit. My money and my “impressive” 2% stake in the company disappeared. I have never felt so naive and ridiculous in my life. I thought my wife was going to run me over  with the car. I can’t say I didn’t have it coming.

You know the most embarrassing part? I can’t believe I’m going to admit this…

In the few days leading up to my “investment” I had been telling my wife how owning 2% of this website was amazing because when it sold  for $500 Million or so my cut would be $10,000,000. I was absolutely  convinced my 2% share of a website with not a single penny of  revenue was going to be our ticket to freedom. Talk about a savvy  entrepreneur…

So what’s my point? What great lesson did I receive in exchange for my $10,000 tuition? I learned a thousand lessons – but the one that’s most applicable to you is this:

There are a million ugly sites out there with terrible content and no fancy “back end” making money every day, week, and month. The  people running them aren’t smarter than you or more capable than you, but they do have one thing on you. Traffic.

If you have traffic, you have an income stream. And if your traffic is from the search engines (especially Google) then you have a mostly passive income stream.

So as you think about starting a business online, don’t go chasing shiny objects with no value (like I did). Make the decision to build  a website that’s a veritable vacuum of search engine traffic.

This is your mantra:

If I can get search engine traffic, I can make money.

My story does have a happy ending. A few months after the FSBO site crumbled I settled into a simple habit of effective keyword research,  and within a few weeks I discovered something called “trailer hitch  covers.”

Maybe you already know what a trailer hitch cover is; maybe you even  own one. I had never heard the term, and I had no clue that a trailer hitch cover was a decorative ornament you plug into your trailer hitch when you’re not towing something.

In spite of having no idea what a trailer hitch cover was, the search numbers were there and the top websites in the niche weren’t too strong, so I decided I would build a website to rank for that  keyword, and I would make a profitable business of it. I knew if I could get the traffic, I would make money.

And I did. A little over a year later I was ranking in the top 3 on Google for “trailer hitch covers” and also “trailer hitches.” The site is on pace to do gross sales between $75,000 and $100,000 this year.

If you can get traffic, you can make money.

If you can get MORE traffic, you can make MORE money. It’s not easy, but it is that simple. The whole focus of the Keyword Crash Course members’ area is to give you step-by-step tutorials (no matter how inexperienced you are) on how you can create a steady stream of free traffic to your portfolio of niche sites. Give us a chance to prove to you that you can make this method work for yourself by clicking here and getting started!

Happy hunting!

~ Mark

PS – Court’s a pretty cool guy now, but he’ll tell you that when he was in  school he was one of the geekiest kids around. In tomorrow’s lesson he’ll explain what high school and Google have in common, and how you can make sure you end up one of the popular kids. The lesson is called:

High School Taught Me How to Rank in Google.

If you don’t have time to read it now, you’ll get the link in your inbox soon (unless you’ve been rushing through these lessons like a crazy person, in which case you’ll have to wait a few days for the email reminder – I guess you might as well keep reading huh?)

Have a great one.