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The sheer size of the Internet can be intimidating... especially for someone who wants to develop an online business, but has limited experience in knowing exactly how to do it.

What if you don't have a product or service? How can you create something that has a reasonable chance for success? And, even if you already have the product or service, how do you know it will sell as an online business?

Achieving long-term success with Internet (online) marketing is not much different than accomplishing the same thing offline. Notice I said "long-term" success.

Your offering must be believable and clearly presented.

The perceived value of your offering must be greater than your asking price.

You need to develop an ongoing relationship with your client base.

You must guarantee complete satisfaction and maintain a refund policy.

You should over deliver by providing more than is expected.

Here's a simple way you can begin to develop your own online business and potentially generate some respectable extra income.

Pick some subjects in which you have strong interest. For example, health and fitness, poker, mountain biking, computer games, etc. It doesn't make any difference as long as you really enjoy talking about and participating in the subject.

You can include your regular business activity. For example, let's say you're a stock broker. Or, you have a carpet cleaning business and really know your stuff about cleaning carpets. Or, you're a seamstress for a garment manufacturer and the quality of your work is as good as it comes.

Next, go to: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in the word or phrase to describe your strong interest category. For example, "carpet cleaning".

When this article was written the Overture Inventory data for September 2005 was used and it indicated 99,572 searches were performed during that particular month. In other words, people were searching for information online about carpet cleaning to the tune of over three thousand each day.

Now "carpet cleaning" is pretty generic and not particularly quantifiable. But look down the long list of other carpet cleaning searches. For example, dry carpet cleaning or carpet cleaning solutions or carpet cleaning chemical. And, notice the exceptional number of carpet cleaning "cities" that appear.

If you know a lot about carpet cleaning, you can create a manual (40 - 100 pages) with tons of important information about carpet cleaning. You could make subtle changes to the information and adapt titles to specifically relate to different cities.

For example, "10 Great Ideas Boston Homeowners Can Use To Get Their Carpets Immaculately Cleaned". Then, "10 Great Ideas Los Angeles Homeowners Can Use To Get Their Carpets Immaculately Cleaned".

The point is that the subject matter "carpet cleaning" appears to draw significant search engine traffic. Creating a manual (produced in e-book format) should not be difficult provided you have genuine interest and enthusiasm to do so.

Once you know your subject of interest draws traffic it's easy to begin research and compile your notes into a downloadable e-book. Then, you create a mini-website composed of your sales letter and thank you page.

The sales letter mini-site explains your offer and provides a clickable link to a third party money collector like PayPal. Once the money has been collected your reader is taken automatically to your thank you page that provides the download link to get your e-book.

There are free software tools available to help you. For instance, your e-book can be prepared in PDF format, which is the best for the largest audience.

To help your product look more professional free software is available to create an attractive cover. Even though your e-book isn't going to be "hard" printed, nevertheless, you want to make it look like it could be a hardcover.

You don't need to have your own merchant account to process credit cards. PayPal can handle this for a small transaction fee.

There are numerous aspects to making your online business successful not the least of which is getting your mini-site in front of as many people as possible.

But the first step is to get you off dead center. So, perhaps you now understand it isn't difficult to take your favorite subject or hobby and turn it into a profit center.

About the author:

Discover the 4 most important steps to long term online business success. Learn more from Don Adams at: http://ebizmadesimple.com.