Someone asked if it is possible to earn online through advertising by simply creating a website and then not really doing anything after that.

Don’t we all want that — to earn on autopilot without doing anything at all?

One of the first mistakes is thinking that you can create a website, leave it and not do anything yet continue to earn from advertising. I know of sites “abandoned” by their owners that continue to earn good advertising income, but these are sites where some great work was done early on (i.e. get optimized for the search engines and links developed).

I think it is possible if you have a page or a few pages of REALLY COMPELLING content that have legs — meaning without any work in terms of adding new content or promoting the page, you can still get constant stream of traffic and people are responding to the ads. This is possible if you have a viral website that attracts visitors like magnet who then share it to others. But that is not easy to pull off.

With millions of websites out there, your first work is to make people find your site. You cannot assume that you simply create a website, forget about it and people will find it — that’s not how the Web works. Without traffic, you won’t have visitors to view or click on the ads — which means no income

When you create a site, you need to think of two major things:

• content creation
• traffic generation

If you don’t want work in terms of content (meaning you don’t write the articles or you don’t hire writers), then do something like MySpace or Digg or Craigslist where it is the users who actually generate the content. But even then, there’s a lot of work involved in terms of cleaning up the content and keeping the community in check and ensuring that the right technology can support the activities of the site.

If you want to earn online income, then you need to work on it. Maybe not “working hard” but more by “working smart.”