those damn ebooks

are they all about marketing ebooks?

[rfung]

I happened to stumble upon one of those affiliate directories, and while clicking around I ran into Yanik's secrets yadda yadda ebook, that teach you how to make thousands in a day. There's enough ebooks out there that I don't doubt one can make that kind of money online.

What gets me thinking - I suppose I could buy the book/video (since they come with an honorable return policy), but without any research but casual surfing around, are these ebooks (and the strategies that come with it) 99% related to creating ebooks, sending out to mailing lists, so on and so forth, or are there some valuable info regarding regular PPC and actual physical products or services?

Just curious - anyone out there who's actually bought these marketing ebooks and care to comment? if someone would care to share the type of 'secrets' these books reveal, I'd love to hear about it. Are they groundbreaking, or just common sense stuff?

[eyeinthesky]

There is a very popular internet marketing forum that has raving reviews of "Traffic Secrets". This course sells for $997 (I think).

I've bought some marketing ebooks & courses before (not the above one, way too expensive). Some are good, others are not.

You do learn things from these gurus but most of the stuffs you can find in forums like this. Just that it is time consuming to go look yourself.

All of them have money back guarantees, so if it is no good, return them :)

[ccDan]

I've purchased a number of different eBooks, mostly in the sub-$50 range.

Most of them talk about creating eBooks, and how easy it is to create and sell them. And, not how to create eBooks about selling eBooks, but on doing eBooks on other topics. And, one particularly useful one did cover marketing online, and not just eBooks.

I believe I've learned something from every one of them. A lot of it is common sense stuff, and you do frequently wade through a bunch of stuff you already know. But, in each one, I've found some useful gem I hadn't known about, whether it was a useful resource, or a certain technique.

Years ago, I did buy one of those expensive courses, and it came as actual printed pages in a binder, which is so much easier to deal with than an eBook. That one did cover everything, from affiliate marketing to selling your own information products or real merchandise. I didn't make tens of thousands of dollars a year with the information I learned, but it was useful.

Of course, a lot of that information you can find online now, either free or far less expensive. But, at the time, it was the only place I knew of to get that information. And, it did have a useful resource list as well. I don't have any current versions of that course, so I don't know whether it's stayed ahead of the curve, or if it's just selling stuff you can find out here for free.

[jstar]

Back in the early 90's, I attended a free seminar of Tom Vu, the poor Vietnamese boy who supposedly made a fortune in real estate and rubbed that fact in everyone's faces by parading around with bikini clad girls on his infomercials and telling everyone how stupid and lazy they were. While he talked a good talk, I realized that while there may be a couple of people who made some money through what they learned in his thousand dollar materials or his ten thousand dollar seminar, the only ones who really got rich were the ones who were selling this glop of common sense info mixed with "gee whiz" stuff that sounds great but never works in the real world.

I'm guessing that the marketing ebooks are a lot like this. Does anybody's experience prove me wrong?

[web_india]

>> and it came as actual printed pages in a binder, which is so much easier to deal with than an eBook. That one did cover everything, from affiliate marketing to selling your own information products or real merchandise.

While I myself didn't bought any but one of my client did buy sort of the one ccDan mentions. It wasn't useful for him as he didn't know anything about making websites and it wasn't good for me since I already knew 99%of the things mentioned in it. but yes, one thing that the book did was that it did convince my client that what all things I've mentioning to him regarding online promotion were true :-)

However, the information in it was of the type which could've been useful for someone just starting on with online marketing not someone who is keeping himself updated with all the latest in the industry.

However, to find the true value of these ebooks is that they "compile" all the information available on the web at different places and reformat them into a single ebook which comes handy for a person. Now, it would vary from person to person whether they want to pay to someone else regarding the "compilation" or themselves devote the time to find out the latest trends

[contentsiteguy]

With all products sold since the beginning of time, some are excellent and some are not. I wouldn't just blindly stereotype all ebooks. But to answer your question, no the definitely are not all about marketing ebooks. The ones that don't give any specific examples or testimonials from people selling actual products are the ones to stay away from.

[raywood]

rfung, you've been around on this board for a long time. You already know the internet and technical angles.

Many of the get rich online ebooks are for complete novices. That's why they usually offer a "system" to follow. There are lots of different "systems". Most of them involve selling get rich online books. They concentrate on email, and recently, RSS, to accumulate a list of customers for follow up marketing.

I have never paid for an ebook, but I bet I've got 100 that I got as free "gifts" for providing my email address. A few of them have little tidbits of useful info. Two of them are very good.

Now I'm on about 50 lists and get the follow-up messages. Not too big of a problem.

There are some few people making money on ebooks not related to get rich "systems". I was looking through the Clickbank list last nigh and ran across some books by Yank Silver on subjects totally unrelated to internet marketing. They had really hyped up sales letters, which is one of the things Yanik apparently teaches. If you don't know how to write that kind of stuff Yaniks, material might be good for you.

[raywood]

BTW, to answer one of your questions, I don't think any of this stiff is "groundbreaking". As far as I'm concerned it's all pretty much common sense. I find it amusing that they claim to reveal "closely guarded secrets" or "little known methods" when there are so many of them out there and they are selling to anybody they can.

To learn how to write sales hype, you could just study a whole bunch of the sales letters for those ebooks and courses.