Lately there seems to be more and more people understanding that AIS allows the opportunity to become free in terms of thinking about projects, putting the foudations and building blocks in place and then earning good cash from them. This is super as there is more than enough pie for all of us!

To be able to benefit from AIS, first of all you need to understand that not all AIS are equal. There are many facets to AIS, it might have been an idea to not lump all these together as one word => this would solve a lot of problems with understanding what AIS means…

• 1 person might run a number of "scraper" sites with adsense ads on them.
• Another might build useful content sites.
• Another might only promote clickbank or other affiliated products.
• Another might only sell their own created products.
• Another might run AIS with no website at all! (more to follow on this another day)
• Another might do all these.

The possibilities are endless…as is the amount of money that can be earned using these systems.  The whole point is that the opportunity to do well is up to how you want to play the game…
However, I've started to come across people who would rather moan and groan about how awful and rubbish AIS is, based on what they see in discussions on blogs and forums. Rather than say "hey, I am going to give this a go", they say "what you are doing cannot make money" or "what you are doing isn't automated" and so on. I'm going to try to explain what AIS means to us AISers
Automated
In terms of AIS, the word "Automated" refers to the ability for a site to run itself 95% of the time. For example, a site selling eBooks would be automated by being able to accept the payment (perhaps via paypal), then allowing the purchaser to download the eBook without any input from the site owner…

visitor -> buy button -> paypal -> download -> thank you email to the buyer

All this is automated - there is no need for the site owner to do anything at all.

Income
The I in AIS stands for Income. I think everyone understands that the point of this game is to raise an income.

Streams
How to Monetize the site. An AIS site may have multiple streams of income. Example would be a site which sells a "home made" eBook and has adsense on the site as well. It may have other streams such as clickbank products or amazon. It might sell links (if the site has good PageRank for example).

To sum up
Automated = after the initial set up phase, sites are left to run themselves as much as possible.
Income = money coming in.
Streams = ways of monetising the site.

Problem with Marketers
The main problem is that a couple of marketers latched onto AIS and blogged about it without digging into the why's, what's and how's. Their "followers" then got that incorrect information into their head.

A well known marketer called the system "automatic income sites". This is an unfortunate term, as we all know that these sites are not automatic. Automatic brings up connotations of "they build themselves and are automatically a success" - but they are not "automatic" at all…

Of course the words automatic and automated are very close, but have a massive difference in what they actually mean.

Is your mind closed?
I've been trying to show someone that there is a difference between the two, but his mind is so closed to the whole concept that there is no way he'll understand that AIS sites are not automatically a success or failure.

What this guy sees is a site which when set-up will automatically be a success and make him $5000 a month (this would be Utopia wouldn't it?) - I have been trying to show that AIS sites do take work, they are slow burners and that there is only the odd occasion when an AIS site will make big money from day 1. This type of AIS site needs luck, skill, experience and being in the right place at the right time.

AIS is not difficult unless you make it difficult. Keep an open mind, try out new ideas and suggestions. If they do not work, then what have you lost? At least you cannot turn around and say "what if…".