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Blogs and websites seem to split about evenly on this issue. Half want to sell you a program by which you can earn a living beyond your wildest dreams while working just an hour a day, usually from the deck of a cruise ship or your own hilltop mansion. Just sent $79.95 now—most major credit cards and Paypal accepted; instant transfers from bank accounts accepted if you don’t have a credit card. The other half exhort you to wake up. If you want to get rich blogging, you have to work your backside off, and probably a few other body parts, too. There’s money to be made on the Internet, sure, but you have to make the same kind of investment you would in any other money-making venture if you expect to get anywhere. I’m not so concerned, though, with whether or not you can make a fortune by setting up an RSS feed from a bunch of other blogs, slapping up some ads and sitting back to collect your check. I’m much more interested in why you think you should be able to, and even a little bit in why you want to. There’s been some comparison between the hoards of people flocking to the Internet in hopes of striking it rich and the Gold Rush mentality, but I think the analogy is flawed. It’s true that during the Gold Rush many people optimistically (read: foolishly) believed that they could change their lives simply by hopping on a bandwagon that was already a ways down the road. But there were some important differences. People hoping to cash in on the Gold Rush sold their possessions; some made long hard treks across the country. And when they arrived, they didn’t walk down to the creek bed, glance around, and expect lumps of gold to jump into their pockets. They put in long hours knee-deep in cold water, panning and sifting and working at finding the payoff. That’s right. I said “working”. Bad word, I know—but since when? And why? Once upon a time, there was a rather simple system. If you wanted to make money, you provided something that was of value to other people or businesses. The beauty of it was that so many different things were of value to people and businesses that the field was wide open: You could entertain, create beauty, make someone else’s job easier, perform a necessary service, produce a good that someone else needed, move a good that someone else needed from the person who produced it to a retail location or directly to the consumer…and so on, and so on, and so on. An option for everyone. Everyone, that is, who was willing to work for a living. This whole “money for nothing” thing raises some problems, though. Or rather, it raises one fairly serious problem: who, exactly, do we expect to keep coughing up money without receiving anything of value in return? And again, why do we think that SHOULD be possible, let alone that it IS? I’m no economist, but it seems to me that a system in which people get paid without actually producing anything of value or performing any service is a system that’s bound to crash.
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  written by the Grey Path, August 04, 2008
You just have to be the person selling the advice.
 written by mikey777, August 15, 2008
It's been my experience that there's no such thing as a free lunch. And you're right. Why should there be? There's no way to become rich without working for it. I'll admit that there are the lucky few who had to do 'minimal' work, but work nonetheless. Or they invested large amounts of money, which they probably had to work for to begin with.
However, getting something for nothing seems to be a very powerful advertising tool. But if it could really be done, why isn't everyone doing it? Better yet, why would this person/people share their secret with us, creating competition for them? Simply put, they wouldn't. There are very few humanitarians in the business world.
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