1. Consider online marketing as a regular Brick & Mortar business. You don't make money overnight (unless you won a lottery). It takes some labor and some investment. Don’t think that by purchasing a product or a course or reading a thread you will become Guru and will make a killing in online marketing. Key is putting the effort. Try. Refine. Put more efforts.
2. Now let's talk about how to make sites that gets some traffic. I am a big follower of building huge many number of sites, promote them for some time see which are easily ranking. Then scale up these sites big time. At the same time continue increasing your arsenal of sites.
3. Pick up a proper niche around which you will make your site. Niche needs to be very specific. You should not select Home Loan as niche. Instead niche can be Low Income Home Loan. I keep three factors in mind while researching a niche. A> In Google Keyword suggestion tool there should be enough number of people searching for that niche (that number you can decide) B> Search for that keyword in google and there should not be huge competition. Also in first page there should be sites similar to what you are planning to build. That is say you pick a keyword 'Home Loan' In search results you will see all mega corporations ranking on first page. I don’t even try to compete with them. However if for my niche in top 10 an article from ezinearticle is ranking, a blog post from an unknown blog is ranking, that is a good niche. C> Most important is availability of .com or.net or.org with exact keywords. That ios if you selected niche as Low Income Home Plan, if domain name LowIncomeHomePlan.com or LowIncomeHomePlan.net or LowIncomeHomePlan.org is available only then proceed else pick a different niche. Believe me there are still thousands of good keyword domain name available. With economy meltdown many domain collectors haven't renewed their millions of domains.
4. Now build a website. Easiest is to build a wordpress site. Make sure you configure WP so that your site has SE friendly URLs.
5. Once domain is finalized, do some keyword research based on your niche. Write articles around these keywords. May be write 10-20 articles.
6. Now you got a proper researched niche, domain, site and content time is to do link building. Get some links through article marketing, social bookmarking, directory submission etc.
7. Wait and watch for a month. If it earns some money say greater than $5, it got potential. If it is less than $5 let it be dormant. If it is > $10 it is time to be bullish. Add more content and do more link building on this site. Also with few sites it may happen that they grow up to say $50 a month real quick but then after that it is impossible to grow up. You will need to know when to throw the towel on a specific site. That is why it is important to have many sites going on at the same time.
8. Keep on adding more and more site on daily basis. Rinse repeat. I personally can make at least one site like this on daily basis. Also once you are comfortable you can outsource some of the job. Dont worry if you dont make enough for a beach vacation first year. Keep your target set for long run.
9. In a year time you will have 50 sites making at least $30 a month and a few making at least $300-400 a month.
10. You can use dormant sites for linking back to your bigger money making sites. Just ensure that you are linking relevant niche sites and following all known link building principles.