Nowadays lots of people want to build an online business. These businesses are very easy and cheap to set up compared to a business in the real world. A beginner can get started online for just the cost of a domain name and a cheap hosting account. If you are thinking about building an online business then read this article to discover what you need to get started.A lot of people confuse the terms online business and website. An online business and a website are not necessarily the same thing. You may build a website for yourself and try to sell things to people from it and you may say that you have an online business. While this is true to some extent it is not strictly speaking a business. A business is not a business without customers. So how do you get customers?In the online business world a business needs customers just as a real-world business does. You get these customers by getting traffic to your website. This can be a real stumbling block to a lot of people when they first try to start making money online. So how do you go about getting traffic to your website?Getting traffic to your website can be done in a lot of different ways. There are basically two types of traffic, paid and free. Paying for traffic can be expensive especially for a beginner, so a lot of people try to get free traffic to their website, especially to begin with. You can get free traffic to your website from the search engines, from directories, from article marketing, from social book marking and social sites and a lot of other places. Whole books have been written about the subject of traffic generation.In conclusion building an business online is not difficult. It is cheap to build an online business and you can get started for a very small cost. Once you have built your website you need to generate traffic to it in order for it to get customers. Once you have got customers to your website there really is no limit to how successful your online business can be. If you are really lucky your business that cost only a few dollars to get started could turn out to be the next Google or MySpace.