If you have launched your online business, or are thinking of doing so, your main expectation is to:
Earn enough income from your business to live on. 

Indeed to achieve this, you might want to setup a business plan, get financial support, invest in web services which will develop your business quickly.
However, not everyone is going that way. You might have not too much money to invest and want to do some DIY to limit your cost.

There will always be costs in running an online business : hosting, merchant account, marketing, tools licenses. All these costs are adding up while you are working hard on your website, products and marketing.

So lets see which steps you need to follow before fullfiling your primary goal:

You will be happy to cover your cost, lets say 400 bucks the month, even if you are not making a profit. You could do that by advertising on your website. If you think your business does not fit with having adverts on your pages, just setup a second website for that.

For example, one website explaining the services you provide, and the other selling your products. After all, it takes time to make one website successful, so why not 2 of them? You don't have to spend twice the time and money for that, and you will get the good result for 2 websites instead of one.

Three months after publication and regular inbound marketing - blogs, articles, directories, social networking, as well as Pay Per Click to boost your traffic, you will gain reputation and see some organic (free) traffic going on your web sites.

Advertising will produce some results and it will be time to lower your PPC costs. You will only need to keep the keywords that make you adverts sell.

After a year, you might get 100% profit from advertsing on your PPC cost. That will cover at least the hosting cost.

I will cover the methodology to follow in my next blog.