The myth of easy wealth, Lazy Man's wealth, ?An hour a day? wealth, and so forth. This so perfectly matches our vision of what life should be, and because of this, it has the power to suck many people into its vision.

Very few marketers are capable of putting together a winning campaign based on telling you the truth - that making money on the Internet is going to take effort, knowledge, money, and time. Who would pay you to tell you how difficult it truly is? People want easy solutions, not someone telling them how likely it will be that they will fail!

Some marketers even feed on the ?back-end? of this myth... selling to people who've discovered that it's not quite as easy as they thought - with a new myth: You just haven't learned the ?simple trick? that those rich guys are hiding from you. This new myth feeds not only on the original greed, but on another powerful concept - envy.

Most people tend to lose sight of the basics of money. Money is nothing more than a convenient way to trade work.

If I'm a farmer, I don't want to trade my hard won grains or vegetables to someone who has sat on a couch all day long while he was out in the field working. He wants to trade his hard work for someone who is equally willing to work hard - perhaps to the carpenter who can fix his barn.

Society has also figured out a way for the poet to get his food, even if the farmer is illiterate. This is one of the secondary functions of money, to provide a way to gain the labor of others even if they don't directly benefit from your labor.

Now while I'm sure that there are some fancy-pants economists who are now engaged in laughter over my overly simplistic monetary concepts - it's time that someone states the simple truth - there is a meaning for money, and if you don't understand it, how do you expect to master it?

Why do people think that they can command the free labor of others? Of course, I perfectly realize the power that such an idea has - it's a very hypnotic idea... "Free" is such a powerful concept, and Internet marketers make the most of it! More power to ?em, I say - if you don't realize what you're spending your money on, then you simply don't value your own labor very highly. Nothing wrong with that - your money is yours to do with what you will...

But don't imagine that everyone feels that way. There's nothing you can purchase on the Internet that will instantly transform you into a millionaire. This is a lesson that many people learn only after spending for dream after dream. (The lottery works this way too!)

Now, are there smart ways to earn money? Certainly! One of the best concepts that can easily be applied on the Internet is the "work once, paid often" idea. Write an info product, and you'll spend time and effort doing so - but you'll sell the same "work" over and over again. Quite a bit different from getting paid to sell an automobile... after all, if you want to get paid -again-, you have to sell another automobile.

But this idea that you must have your own product, or that you must provide services (as an advertiser, for example) to someone else who holds a product, seems to get lost in the shuffle. Keep this concept in mind - if you want to earn money on the Internet - you must have labor to trade for it. Is it the labor of knowledge put into an infoproduct? Or the ability to put together a new service on the net? What- ever it may be - it's not the dreams that many marketers are selling you these days on the Internet.