For many people the route to generating money online is paved with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

“Extra money fast” “Make cash online” “Home based business”

These are just a selection of the prime search queries that will divulge ebooks, strategies, approaches, ‘secrets’, and lengthy courses, all on ‘how to produce money online’.

In fact, there is more written about Internet Marketing than any other subject, and this speaks for the huge appetite for putting the Web to work to make money.

And this isn’t all that surprising. The UK the media recently ran with a story of high streets falling apart as consumers migrated online to buy their stuff.

To those with the inside track, the Web really is a rich source of wealth. And a swelling source at that.

Regretfully, many are under the illusion that this way of making money is out of their reach. They might think this as they are without a ‘big idea’, they have no starting cash, or they simply have no original wares to sell. But, these imagined hurdles are merely myths. The one biggest hurdle to making money online is: ‘not taking action’.

Taking action is a huge step in the right direction, and it may sound simple. For those in the know though, there is a wealth of freely available, quality information on how to make a success of Social Online Marketing.

The ‘bible’ on this is The Challenge by Ed Dale and Robert Somerville.

The Challenge comprises all the key details you need to get started. It began around 2005, and has a blow-by-blow account of how to identify your market, launch and promote it so as to attract interest, and generate income from it.

The Challenge is a direct response to the call to take action, and is highly recommended for those who have the time work through it.

And, it’s totally FREE!

But, as brilliant as The Challenge is, it do not surmount the other big hurdle to earning money online – it takes time to absorb all that information, and then act on it. And that is just for one niche online business. To truly make it big you need to scale out to 10, 100, or why not 1,000, or more, cash producing niche web sites?

It comes down to the old aphorism: Time is money.

What you will derive from all these worthy people is that the path to making money from the Internet boils down to using a systematic process. But what the seasoned professionals do not divulge is that much of this process can be automated.

So, our first big blocker is NOT TAKING ACTION. Our second is TIME, and the amount of time consumed in getting even just one business started.

Our advice is: Earn smarter and AUTOMATE.

And this means right from the beginning. It is all too easy to put off getting started and take time to go through a course or a thickish e-book. But you can always come back and backfill the details later.

There is also precious little to be gained by working hard to get the initial business up and operational, if all that will do is absorb all of your time and efforts.

The critical thing is to automate right from the get go. This will see you earning that first dollar faster, with less effort, and will enable you to start ramping up your online business empire almost immediately.

So there we have it. Tons of people want to make cash online, but they feel unable to take action either because they do not know what to do next or because they are drowning in a sea of information.

But, there is a way forward. The first task is to highlight the steps in the system and then set about automating them.

By way of illustrating the benefits to be gained by applying this approach I will finish up with some projections. These are very conservative and the numbers are on a worst case view.

Let us imagine we create a site that make us a profit of just fifty dollars a month. Maybe that does not sound so great, but at least that should be achievable.

Recall that as we are focused on applying automation, this site that is generating fifty bucks was established, and began earning money, very quickly and easily at the push of a few buttons.

This means that we can go directly on to rinse-and-repeat this a hundred times more – so now that is five thousand dollars per month. But if a hundred, how about a thousand sites? Then we are within the auspices of fifty thousand dollars per month!

So, even with a very modest earning from each of these micro-businesses, by scaling up the number of them we rake in the big profits. And automation is the key to making this manageable. This is a very different approach to the eggs-in-one-basket scenario where much effort is expended in trying to make a single site more and more profitable.

This approach plays to the strengths of the web – the Internet is very well suited to automation, and the immense number of people online means that a respectable volume of traffic can be directed towards your micro-sites and will convert to a very decent amount of sales.

This is the ideal approach for both newcomers and seasoned online marketing veterans alike. If you are just getting going, you do not need a big idea. You need only a small amount of money to get started. And you do not have to have anything to sell – other online sellers are lining up to pay you to sell their goods.

Learn more about how to earn smarter. Stop by the EarnSmarter.info site where you can find out all about the power of automation and what it can do for you.