Who doesn't like the idea of 'automating income'? There isn't anyone I don't mention the phrase to who doesn't warm to the idea immediately, even if they know nothing about making money online. At the same time, the phrase has somewhat of a bad reputation. Google "automated income Ireland" and you are likely to come across a rag tag collection of affiliate schemes and multi-level marketing opportunities.

Just because there are some over-hyped claims being made does not mean that it is not possible to create some kind of automated income online. The most straightforward way to do that, as far as I can make out is to create an intellectual property product, or an e-book to you and me. After a recent Automated Income Mastermind session at the Quality Hotel in Dublin's city centre, a group of four of us sat down with the intention of creating just such a product. We were keen to identify some niche we could swoop in and start collecting buckets full of cash in. The team was made up of myself, a software engineer, Priscilla Groves, a advertising creative, Simona Rusnakova, an online marketing specialist, and Niall Kelleher, a voice over artist.

Given the mix of skills around the table, we decided to take some out of copyright free text and record it as an audio book. We were first faced with figuring out which text might be more popular. To do this we measured the amount of search volume for a set of topics. Initially we focused on self-help style books which seem to be popular online. We also did some research on Irish folk stories. The reasoning behind that was that if someone was that given Niall's accent, an Irish folk story might work best.

Simona did some research and we concluded that there was enough interest in the Irish story angle that we registered the domain. Next up was to find a few texts to use. This wasn't hard as there appears to be plenty available online. Most of them are well out of copyright and we were able to record them.

We chose the most favourite Irish fairy tales, such as Conall Yellowclaw, Guleesh, Hudden and Dudden and Donald O'Neary, King O'Toole and His Goose, The Fairy Maiden Connla, The Field of Boliauns, The Shee an Gannon and the Gruagach Gaire, The Shepherd of Myddvai, The Sprightly Tailor, The Story of Deirdre, The Wooing of Olwen etc.

The recording was the most time consuming part of the exercise and Niall spent a long time pulling an initial recording of the audio story together. In fact, it took 14 hours to put one audio segment together. We soon realized that recording 8 – 9 stories would represent a significant time commitment.

Having committed to creating the site, we decided to release the first story free as a demo of quality of work we were turning out. Actually – we cheated a little. As a means of testing our market we let people listen to the first story for free and offered an opportunity to buy all 8 stories – although they had yet to be completed. The idea was that we could test to see if anyone would part with their hard earned cash before committing to spending 40 – 60 hours on the rest of the scripts.

It had occurred to me that there is slightly dodgy practice. With that in mind, we resolved to refund anyone who bought if we didn't have product ready, and then send him or her a free copy when it was.

How did it go? You'll have to check back in a month or so.