Don't believe what all the Guru's tell you it's not easy to make money online. Via my Blog and forum I get to chat to lots of people who all have one thing in common they want to make money online. Often this is to supplement a poorly paying full time job, to bring in some extra money to help out with bills or just so that can get away from a mundane 9-5 job. Unfortunately about 95% of these people won't get to realize their dreams and be able to make a significant online income. There are 5 basic mistakes that people make when they set out on an online career. The sad thing is that most of these can be easily avoided with a bit of planning and preparation. Let's look at the mistakes and how you can avoid them.

1. Not Planning

I suspect that 99.9% of people who star out on an online career haven't created a business plan. Ask yourself if you want a hobby or a business, if the answer is a business then it's time to get serious. Include your personal strengths in your business plan and aim to focus on these initially. If you find you lack certain basic skills then use the first few months as an apprenticeship and learn the skills you need.

1. Believing the hype

An Internet marketers job is to make you think that you must have whatever product or tool they are promoting this week. I'll let you into a secret here…You don't need it! The best thing you can do when you are starting out is to learn to do things manually. This will give you a greater understanding of how things work and will pay off in the long term.

1. Lack of spending control

I've met lots of people who have spent thousands of dollars on tools and e-books and have yet to make any money. It's simple economics if you spend $1 you need to make $1 to break even. Before you invest in anything visit forums and see whats working for the members. Ask questions and test their methods yourself, if they make you a profit then consider investing the profit into tools that will help increase your income.

1. Failing to Focus

People seem intent on jumping from one method of earning money online to another without giving each method time to work. This week they'll try Adsense, next week affiliate marketing after that buying and selling domains. When I speak to people who do this they all say the same thing, Adsense doesn't work anymore, article marketing doesn't work anymore etc. It does, it's just that it doesn't work overnight and you need to spend time learning how to do things properly.

1. You know it all already

Technology and the Internet are changing at an ever increasing pace. 18 months ago Blog and Ping was the best way to get your site indexed and ranking in the search engines then almost overnight social bookmarking and RSS feeds took over. You need to keep an eye on upcoming trends and ways of marketing. I've had well known marketers email me recently telling me that Hubpages or Twitter was the next big think in marketing…sorry guys I've been using them and writing about them for the last 9 months.

If you are reading this and can confidently say that you aren't making any of these mistakes well done. You are on your way to a good online income. If you do find yourself making some of the mistakes above well now you know what you need to do to make money online.