I got laughed at the other day by another Internet Marketer.

It’s not someone I’d call a friend (certainly not now I know the guy’s a prat) but someone I’d skpe-chatted with now and again. He asked me about a certain part of my business – it was article marketing actually – and asked me what I thought of the process.

I told him that I’m much more a fan of viral marketing – writing a small 5 page report, setting it loose on the internet and having it bring me an up front profit AND drive traffic to my sites for free. (The full process is documented in www.viralsneakiness.com)

But I also do some article marketing, despite not liking the process very much, because it works for some niches.

So he laughed at me, and REALLY took the michael because I still did the process myself – I don’t often outsource the article marketing process or use software.

He proudly told me how he’d just spent thousands on software and membership sites for a process that would almost totally automate the article writing AND submission process and told me in no uncertain terms what a fool I was for doing it myself. He didn’t actually word it much nicer either.

So I asked how much money he made from traffic driven from his articles before he’d automated the process. Turns out not very much at all. I then visited a couple of article submission sites and read some of his articles. They were awful. Really crappy.

So the next time we chat I’m going to ask him why on Earth he’s automating a process that DOESN’T WORK?

If the process was bringing in a good profit and driving vast amounts of traffic then sure – automate away and reap the rewards but if you have a dead cat, putting it on a skateboard isn’t going to make it a pet.

You know what I mean?

There are loads – hundreds maybe thousands of Internet Marketers who are obsessed with ‘automating the process’ and spend a fortune on software and outsourcing expecting it to reap rewards. But if the process doesn’t work in the first place, automating it won’t make the slightest bit of difference.

You’ll just end up with an AUTOMATED system that doesn’t work!

Better to tweak the way you do things and suss out why they’re not working in the first place, get ’em working then automate.

Crazy.

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