One of the main themes in all Internet market ads is “Easy Money” or “Everything Done For You.” For instance, The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris is a huge hit, and has been on various best-seller lists ever since he released it.
I read the original version of The 4-Hour Work Week when it first came out, and I liked it a lot. It’s well-written, engaging, entertaining, and even informative.
But the title is completely bogus. The book is really about how to work 100-hour-plus weeks for a year or two and then outsource most of the tedium (which in itself requires a lot of up-front work in order to be successful), so that you can sit back and enjoy the mostly-passive income from the business for which you busted your ass. At least for a while. Provided you built a real “evergreen” business.
If you built that business on some Google “loophole” you are likely to find that you will have to build it all over again after a surprisingly short time. For instance, the SEO value of the title of this site has been pretty good, but I don’t expect that to last.
If you follow Mr. Ferris for a while, you will also discover that he “works” a lot more than 4 hours a week. I know enough about producing video to know that putting together some of his (really good) videos takes a lot more than four hours for just one video, even if you outsource most of the production. I put “works” in scare-quotes because I think he really enjoys what he does, which for some people, puts it into a category other than “work.” But that’s a topic for another article.
If he had called it “How to Work Your Ass Off For Two Years to Build a Mostly-Passive Income For a While After That” it probably would have sold a few hundred copies at most.
“Easy” sells. Hard work doesn’t.
If you want to make money blogging, you had better be prepared to work hard. That will be the main theme of this blog — and as a result, I don’t expect to make a lot of money from this blog. If I wanted to make a lot of money with this blog, I’d be selling “easy.”
Nor do I plan to work really hard on it, at least not at present. As mentioned before, I have other pursuits that make money, and this blog is an experimental hobby for me.
