Quick And Easy Blogging Riches, The Golden Turd

This question comes in from Kay Rennie, from Ozlantis.com. The question is:

You’ve probably been asked this question before, or at least addressed it, but after reading your latest post on what it takes to get traffic – hard work – do you believe there is such a thing as ‘Set It And Forget It’?  It’s a term I see used a lot by marketing merchants, but I’m skeptical. And more so after reading your post. I take it to mean that once a blog is set up and all the necessary bits and pieces put in place – email autoresponders, affiliate links etc – the blogger can just go away and wait for the money to roll in. Are there particular types of blogging operations that can do this successfully? What are your thoughts?

My thoughts are that the idea of “set it and forget it” is the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or, as I like to call it, the golden turd. It looks like gold and everybody is trying to get it. But, when you get up close, you realize it is nothing but a smelly pile.

Look, making money on the Internet is a BUSINESS. It is work. It isn’t a free ride.

I guess it is a result of dishonest marketers, but it seems the Internet is the de facto destination for people who are looking to make it big and not lift a finger doing it. It is this attitude which leads to so many failures in this business. There are a LOT of false starts. People shoot off in some direction, buy some big “make money online” course. Then, when it comes down to actual work being done, they quickly give up and look for another magic bullet.

The truth is that this business is work.

That being said, there are most definitely ways to generate money on automatic in this business. However, it takes work to set those systems up. It takes work to build the list up to a point where you can do that. It takes work to set up the marketing to get it off the ground to begin with. So, even with the fairly automatic money generation strategies, real WORK went into it to set that up and get it to that point.

The most “set it and forget it” type of blog out there is the Adsense blog. Essentially, some yahoo will set up a blog and populate it using content from other people’s RSS feeds. They litter it with Adsense and depend on search engine traffic to drive them Adsense dollars. I’m sure it has worked for some, but Google has caught on and they are actively battling sites like this.

These sites, though, are golden turds. If they work, they won’t work for long. So, it is a high maintenance business and doesn’t even compare to building a REAL online business that can generate profits for you well into the future.

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