Which one is 'ultimate'? Well, if you hear them tell it, theirs is, of course.

"Turn $5 into $50,000,000,000 in 30 days with no effort!" Did Bill Gates figure out how to condense his lifetime into 30 days? I doubt that he would say he got where he is today with no effort.

Are you listening to these guys, or do you REALLY want to make money on Internet? Becoming instantly rich on Net is about same as sitting around waiting for your lottery numbers to hit.

I like to believe that we're smarter than that. We realize that only way to truly become successful at anything requires a lot of hard work, motivation, persistence, and luck.

Now let me explain each of these points.

Hard work - This is a no-brainer. You ARE NOT going to be able to turn on your computer, walk away from it, and expect to end up with a successful business.

You have to work at it. The more productive work you put into your website and your marketing efforts, greater rewards.

Notice that I said 'productive' work.

It is easy to spend 20 hours a day on web and not do anything constructive for your business. You have to focus your efforts to make above statement true.

To put it a different way, if you spend 20 hours a day adding content to your site, refining design, promoting it, testing and retesting to learn what works and what doesn't, you WILL see results.

Many websites fail not because owner didn't work hard enough, but because he didn't work smart enough.

Motivation - How do you stay motivated to enable you to survive months and months of extremely long days and nights glued to your monitor?

Is it lure of having a successful web business someday?

The idea of eventually being able to quit that job that you hate?

Believe me you will hit low points, you will get frustrated, and probably even utter words "at this rate I'm never going to make it".

So how do you stay motivated? The above questions can help, but I think absolute most important motivator is to pick a topic that you love. When you are working on a subject that you totally enjoy low points will be far less frequent, and have far less impact on you.

Lets step out of micro view for a moment and consider macro view. This Internet revolution has been compared to impact that Edison's light bulb or Fords Model T had on world. Some have even said that Internet is bigger than invention of TV or radio. From each of these discoveries have come fantastic opportunities. Complete Industries have sprung up from them. Mammoth fortunes have been made as a result of them. But you really can't compare Internet to them. These inventions fall far short of impact that Internet (as we know it today) will have on mankind.

A closer comparison would be that of Gutenburg's printing press or Industrial revolution. You could even compare computer age and Internet (as we know it today) to transformation of early man from a hunter/gatherer to a sower/reaper. Face it, we are living in a pivotal point in human history. We are privileged few who have opportunity to capitalize on greatest technological revolution that this world has ever seen.

We can observe that historically these revolutions happened over course of decades and in some cases centuries. As we all know, Internet revolution is evolving at a dizzying pace. What we see today can be history next year or even next week. Five years from now Internet will be quite different than most of us can imagine. Where it eventually leads is probably not even clear to brightest minds of today. However, we are seeing results of this change in our lifetimes.

Certainly nobody realized that they were in midst of a dramatic historical shift when man discovered flint and steel, but change they did. We, today have advantage of all of mans previous experiences and hopefully are much better able to predict consequences of this next transition. We do understand that it is a significant change, but it may not be apparent how significant until historians have interpreted it decades or possibly centuries from now.

OK, back to our micro view again. What should we do? Wait it out and see what happens? Not very wise. When combustion engine farm machinery came along land owner who didn't have it, couldn't compete and usually lost everything. He may have owned huge tracts of land but he could no longer afford to pay workers to farm it when his neighbor used a tractor. Likewise many of todays business's (and their employees) stand to be bowled over by this digital tidal wave. We need to position ourselves as a surfer who is equipped to ride wave. We must embrace, it and like surfing enthusiast that is always looking for 'really big one', be ready to jump in water at a moments notice. As they say 'He who hesitates, waits...'