One of the phrases that searches use to find this website is “Lazy Online Business”.  I assume that these people are trying to find ideas to get rich quick online.  With that in mind, I thought I would take a minute to think about whether there are any real “Lazy Online Businesses”.

What is a Lazy Business?

First off, I think  should clarify what I consider to be a Lazy Business. 

A business is an entity that sells products or services. 

That’s pretty simple.  An entity could be a single person or (more likely) a group of people.  As far as selling products or services, even if you’re a content publisher, you’re still selling advertising space as a service to customers.

A Lazy Business is a business that is not reliant on the owner/founder to operate.  So while a writer could make a lot of money through their writing, , they aren’t running a Lazy Business because their efforts are required to bring in the money.  If they don’t work, they don’t get paid. 

What a successful Lazy Business Owner does differently is they create a product or systems and processes that others can follow and use to operate the business.  The business could continue to make money if they were hit by a car tomorrow.  A business reliant on the founder would cease to exist if the founder was gone.

Is Passive Income Lazy Income?

A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs might just be looking for a way to generate passive income, and they would consider that to be a successful Lazy Business. 

While that business could make money hand over first for a while, it will not be successful in the long term.  The inefficiencies that the owner originally created will soon be exploited by others and the passive income will cease.  Therefore, the business will fail if the owner is hit by a car.

Online Sources of Income

One of the reasons that the Internet really draws those with the “get rich quick” mentality is that sources of income are so easy to establish.  You can have an Adsense account set up in no time and be getting checks for traffic you have generated. 

Here are just a few examples of ways to make money online that can generate decent income but could not be converted into Lazy Online Businesses:

• Writing - If you write for a website but don’t have a group of writers to provide the content, you are trading your time for the money and won’t be able to grow the business successfully.
• Arbitrage - By paying less for traffic and converting that into higher paying traffic, many people can make a nice little bit of money.  However, this is just an inefficiency that will be closed very quickly.
• Services - If you provide any types of consulting services, your business is definitely not a Lazy Business.  Again, you are just trading your time for money.
• Affiliates - By building traffic and the referring visitors to paying sites, you can make some good money.  Unfortunately, this is not a scalable enterprise and you won’t be able to build a long term business.

Are there Any Lazy Online Businesses?

The answer is yes - there are multiple examples of successful online entrepreneurs.  Ironically though, it takes a lot of work to build one of these successful online businesses.  These companies often (although not always) have employees and multiple clients.  For example, one of the most successful forms of online businesses is advertising networks.  There are numerous stories of entrepreneurs creating advertising networks by themselves or with 1 partner and successfully growing and selling these businesses.

I’m sure a lot of people have examples of people they know who have gotten incredibly rich online and should be considered successful Lazy Business Owners.  And I could probably give you 1/2 dozen names off the top of my head as well.  But the problem is that these people have created short-term success or they have spent a lot of time generating this passive income.  Once they create a system based business that is not totally dependent on themselves and has a business model that succeeds just as well in 5 years, then they will be a Lazy Online Business Owner.