Another one of the things that Jason Calacanis talked about during his Affiliate Summit keynote was the low-effort, high-return mindset of a lot of people who are trying to make money on the internet.

They're looking for ways to make a lot of money for little effort. Also known as the Get Rich Quick mindset, which is unfortunately what many of the so-called internet marketing "gurus" market their products to.

Jason went so far as to call these people criminals.

While I don't know that I would go that far - more like uninformed or inexperienced - I do agree with the basic idea. In the long run you're going to be happier having worked to build a high-effort, higher-return business.

What's that - you'd still like to find that magic bullet where you press a button and money shoots out of your computer?

Let's try a little exercise.

Take a look at this chart:

That is a chart of unique visitors over the course of 36 months, growing at a rate of 10% per month. It starts at 300 visitors per month - 10 per day, which I think anyone should be able to achieve.

After 36 months, that site is getting a little over 8,400 visitors a month.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. Take a look at these two charts:

The first one is the same time period at 20 percent traffic growth month over month and the second one is at 30 percent traffic growth.

After 3 years of 20% traffic growth the site is getting 177,000+ visitors a month. And at 30% growth, almost 3 million!

Now obviously maintaining that kind of growth over a 3 year period is no walk in the park. It's going to take work - a heck of a lot of it.

But this is where the high-effort, high-return mindset is going to pay off. If you're getting 3 million monthly visitors to your site, you're looking at a serious business. Not the small potatoes affiliate site that is the norm for so many people in this industry.

And look where the majority of that growth happens in all three of those charts - year 3. The first two years are growing, but the work you're doing then is laying the groundwork for when things really take off.

Want a real eye opening experience? Run these numbers on one of your websites. It might be your most successful one, or your favorite or the one that has the highest visitor value.

Plot your traffic over 36, 48 or 60 months at 10%, 20% and 30% growth and see where it would get you. Suddenly it might not seem so wise to spend your time building new sites every week, hoping to get a few dollars a day in Adsense or a couple of affiliate commissions a week.

You can read my earlier posts about the Affiliate Summit keynote in these posts:

Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Jason Calacanis Keynote

Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Calacanis Keynote Part 2