As always happens with a new project in internet marketing, there are lots of questions along the lines of “what should I do about XYZ” and people stall, deer in headlights mode, until they’re answered.

I’m often guilty as charged on that one as well.

But you need to get over it!

Let’s look at a few show-stoppers and what to do about them:

WordPress theme: any theme will do, The only people seeing your new website will be you and maybe a handful of other people if you’re really promoting it like crazy. And the people who do find you at that early stage will probably care more about the content of the site than the look and feel. If Google finds you, it’s robots won’t visually look at your site so they definitely won’t care what theme you’re using.

WordPress Plugins: probably the only essential one is WordFence to stop hackers doing their thing. And maybe Yoast’s WordPress SEO to give you a fighting chance of getting found in the search results over time. Anything else – membership plugins, lead page generators, fancy whatevers really don’t matter in the early stages, if at all.

Niche: no-one is an expert at everything. Pick a topic you’re interested in (you’re going to be spending a lot of time on it over the next few months) and start to learn it. Slightly faster than your customers. At school, we had a new Geography teacher who was just one chapter ahead of us in the text book, which worked fine until a member of class read two chapters ahead and started asking questions about the subjects the teacher hadn’t read about yet. But in a website, that can’t happen because you don’t know the precise syllabus yet. So you can use those kind of questions to your advantage to decide what to create the next piece of content about.

Time available: Different people suggest different amounts of time. Personally, I’d suggest at least an hour a day. That’s achievable by almost anyone. Make time: get up earlier, use some of your lunch/tea breaks; stop watching the news; go cold turkey on Facebook except for business. And if you really can’t spare an hour, make it half an hour and take a bit longer to get up to speed. And if you can’t even spend 30 minutes, ask yourself if you’re serious about this project.

Not knowing the complete picture: we never will, We’ll get most of the way there, hopefully. But by the time we know the full picture, the landscape will have changed. That happens. The internet moves at an incredible pace and what seemed like the complete picture yesterday isn’t necessarily that today. The web is littered with ideas that didn’t take off or that only worked once. In the early days, people thought that recreating shopping malls on the web – with lots of different “shops” linked from the page would work. That didn’t really take off but instead we’ve got shopping comparison sites as well as sites like eBay and Amazon. So almost the same thing but not quite.

What it all boils down to is if you haven’t started yet, start!

And if you want a reasonably reliable way to start, affiliate marketing is as good a place as any. It cuts out a lot of the show stoppers because other people are handling them.