It is so easy to turn a newbie into an Internet junkie by telling tales of "gurus" making money with their website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

They go on vacation for a week or two and site just keeps on paying bills.

Doesn't get any easier than this....

I still have my first website that I created when I first became addicted to Net. I haven't touched it in over a year now, other than to change an updated URL here and there.

Everything that you can do wrong with your Internet business, has been done to mine.

Mostly because I lost interest. My wife says that I'm bad about that. Many of my hobbies have fallen to wayside for this same reason.

The site made me a little over $6,000 last year, and about same year before. This year is off to an even better start for some reason.

Whenever I talk to people about this, their eyes glaze over as they imagine throwing up their own site and watching checks roll in.

Money for nothing?

Well, if you look only at this past year it pretty much looks like it was free money. I didn't really do anything and still pulled in a decent chunk of change.

Many of "gurus" on Internet have a similar story of how they have a website or two that are on auto-pilot like this one.

This is part of problem with our industry today. Too many stories of easy money float around just like ones above, and unsuspecting quickly fall prey.

Now let me shed some light on my story...

For past year I haven't done very much, that's truth. But what I failed to tell you is how much time, and for how long it took me to get that particular site to point it was one year ago.

From moment that I first discovered Internet, I was hooked.

Me and my AOL account were inseparable. For that first year my website must have gone through a complete redesign every two months.

I would spend hours and hours asking other webmasters to link to my site, monitoring my search engine positioning, and trying to find ways to make money from it.

When I was away from my computer all I could think about was getting back to it to check and see how many visitors came through, and how much money I made.

There were many letdowns and many frustrations in getting it off ground.

At some point many of these award winners realize that, hey, they could also give an award themselves! Sometimes they want to give awards out of a desire for more traffic (an awards program does generate more than a few hits), and sometimes they want to reward other sites for their achievements. More often, a webmaster cannot explain why he wants to give awards - he just wants to.

One note of caution: if your goal is traffic and traffic only, then awards are a fine way to get people to your site. However, by far most people who sign up for awards simply go straight to your award application form without looking at anything else. So while it is a way to get people to your site, it really isn't a great way to get qualified visitors who are actually interested in what you have to offer.

A good awards program is a lot of work. Spend time and you will have some great and perhaps unexpected rewards of your own. Please don't just slap together a silly little awards program and expect to get very much from it. And don't go out and get a script to automate whole process. That's not what awards are about.

All right, first thing you should do (before you do anything else) is sit down in a comfortable chair with your comfy slippers and a glass of your favorite beverage. Make sure it is quiet and you have some time set aside. Now, think about what you are trying to accomplish.

What is your purpose in creating an awards program? Are you: