Most people don't make much money online. I've talked to countless intelligent, hard-working folks who tried, but gave up after accomplishing very little. But don't give up too soon.

There are really only two things you need to make money online. Unfortunately, most of us have to try a lot of things and pay a lot of dues before figuring out just what those two things are.

Most of us find or create a business opportunity, then try to promote it using various methods. Invariably, even though we may be spending a good chunk of change in our promotion effort, we aren't promoting nearly enough. There are a LOT of people pushing businesses online. If you want to get noticed and start making sales, you simply HAVE to promote BIG.

Instead of reaching a few hundred here and a few thousand there, you need to promote to MILLIONS, even BILLIONS of people in billions of places.

Ridiculously big? Not at all. Think of major corporations like Coke or Chevy. They've got their advertising in newspapers, on TV, on race cars, on business signs, on stickers, and hundreds of other places world-wide. Now that's promoting big. To sell big, you've got to promote big.

But how does the average person even begin to marketing on a large scale without mortgaging their house and winning the lottery? These days the Internet is coming to the rescue. One count of the number of ad sites is well over one billion. If you can create software to count the sites, you can also create a way to automatically submit ads to all those sites -- and that is exactly what some have made available.

Of course, the 2nd requirement for making money online is to choose the right business. Selling the same old items in the same small ways simply won't bring you more than a trickle of income.

Pick a business that sells the online audience what they really want and need. I'm reminded of the woman who started selling small items on eBay. She did ok, but soon found she was one of millions selling the same things. So she switched to selling the packaging all those millions needed to ship their items. Soon she was selling so much packaging she had to rent a warehouse and hire 10 employees just to keep up with demand. She made a LOT of money just by selling something everybody in her crowd wanted and needed.

Keep those two simple points in mind -- pick the right business, then promote really big -- and you'll find your online profits quickly reach your expectations.