Not a complete newbie but still confused!

Too vague an idea...tighten it up.

What niche? What products/services will you offer?

What problems will you solve for what audience?

Are you afraid someone is going to steal your idea? It pays to be specific. Being specific shows other people you have thought it through and are serious.

Two problems always exist for generating sales:

Traffic

and

Conversion.

So you have a blog, let's say. And it has some good info on it.

But it's useless without the traffic & conversion components, see that? It's just an object in the middle.

How are you going to bring people to your reviews? Organic SEO? Paid traffic? Signature hops from industry forums? LinkedIn Groups? You have to think this stuff through.

Then conversion. Say you have these articles & reviews...so what? How are you going to convert readers to buyers?

It's not going to automatically happen. And that's what people forget.

What are you going to do to turn some visitors into buyers? And then improve on that statistic?

See, this is about learning your numbers.

You're going to start off somewhere. Get so much traffic, and that will turn into one sale.

In nearly all the funnel consultations I do, we discover the client has nowhere near enough traffic to generate a sale in a reasonable amount of time.

And they are concentrating almost entirely on conversion.

That means they're doomed to frustration before they even begin. They'll never make the money they want to make in the time they want to make it in.

Whatever asset you create, people in the target market have to learn that it exists. That's even more important than the content you put on it.

Get enough people there. Establish a baseline for traffic & conversion numbers. Then improve them.

Unqualified Leads >>> Qualified Leads >>> Sales.

I would say no, simply because there are so many easier ways to make money online, with far less effort and time required.

It's real simple James, but i can understand your frustration. Took me a while to get it right, but you should focus your time and energy getting leads, and converting them. It's an email marketing game. Constant contact and relationship building. Well, more like credibility building. I would do the authority blog. Too many niche site projects will leave your mind disoriented.

Start by looking at forums in niches you are interested in to see what kinds of problems people ask questions about the most.

This can give you some initial direction and ideas on what areas to do more research on.

Before you build any new sites or blogs make sure you start out by testing some simple landing pages to see if you get opt ins.

Jimmy,

I struggled for my first 5 years and what I learned is that free marketing is going to drive you up the wall. You should find a mentor that talks about paid ads.

Paid advertising, if done right, can get you great results.