How to Create $1,600 per Month Niche Websites for Passive Income—a book review
[Note: The review below is of the 1st edition. Read my review of the 2nd edition here.]
How to Create $1,600 per Month Niche Websites for Passive Income
by Dave Hedley (according to the book cover) or Alex Hedley (according to the book itself)
Well, I knew this wasn’t going to be a long read at an estimated 21 pages, but I was curious to see just what amazing advice might be shared in such a short document.
Page 1 – just another picture of the book cover.
Page 2 – Mr Hedley (Alex) tells us that he’s an Internet entrepreneur and doesn’t want to bore us with his motivational story in the same way as other Internet marketers do. He’s going to teach you his SEO method without any fluff and his system isn’t taught ANYWHERE else on the Internet. We also get a little boast about how much money this system has made for him.
Physical products can also be sold using this method, and the method does not need to be tweaked much to work with them either. In fact, I have used Amazon Associates as well to earn money using this method and it has generated a good side income for me (from February 10th, 2013 to March 20th, 2013, approximately 1 month and 10 days I made $ 7,342.08 in sales and $ 470.65 in commissions).
Page 3 – He lists what we’ll need to do this—a free SEO tool, a domain and hosting, a Google account.
Page 4 – This page is a confusing jumble of (mis)information. You’re going to be using other people’s blogs where they review products to drive traffic to your own. That way you can benefit from their SEO efforts and Google’s trust and favourable view of them. He gets about 8,000 hits (sic) per day using this.
Apart from the fact that “hits” is meaningless in this context, what about the quality of traffic? My little blog (this one) was getting thousands of visitors per day and that made me suspicious. A quick investigation showed that much of this traffic was just some scum trying to do brute force attacks to hack the site. When will people realise that all traffic isn’t good? These days I probably spend as much time trying to reduce rogue traffic as I do trying to grow good traffic.
Next he tells us that Step 1 is to choose a niche:
With this specific method you are looking for medium sized niches, niches that are big enough to have communities of people discussing them and blogs being written about them as well as not being so big that you will end up competing against hundreds of other marketers all vying to promote their product on every forum on the web.
I don’t like this at all. Maybe some forums allow such self-promotion, but none that I’m involved with do. Vying to promote your product on any of these would most likely get you banned. Then he suggests some ways to find niches if you’re stuck for ideas. “Search through ClickBank…” (Pass the puke bucket.)
Page 5 – More of the same.
Page 6 – A bit more stuff how to use this free SEO tool he recommends and a lengthy explanation of what Google PR is.
Page 7 – This shows us how to do keyword research using the Google Keyword Tool. Oh dear, such bad timing! The Keyword Tool was scrapped by Google on 27 August this year, just three days after the book was published. Unlucky, perhaps? Not really. Its replacement, the Keyword Planner, had already been around for over three months by then, so it was no secret that the Keyword Tool was about to be withdrawn.
Page 8 – More burble about PR and the now obsolete Google Keyword Tool.
Page 9 – This page explains why you need to get your own domain rather than just using one of the freebies which let you set up your own site. Fair enough, I agree with that, but this is terribly elementary stuff. I wonder who the target audience is. And we still haven’t got beyond choosing a niche and finding keywords.
Page 10 – Next we get an explanation of what WordPress is.
Page 11 – Some totally crap advice about registering a domain.
When purchasing your domain name or hosting package length, you should remember that Google trusts your website more the longer the length you purchase hosting and have the domain registered for.
This is simply NOT TRUE. Some people have speculated that there’s a possibility this may be a variable which has some small effect in the Google algorithm, but no one can state as a fact that registering a domain for a longer period will create more “trust” in Google’s eyes. There is no evidence whatsoever for this point of view. A common misunderstanding is where people confuse future potential age of a domain with an aged domain. An aged domain, ie one with some history, is likely to have gained some trust, already be indexed, and have some useful in-bound links.
When the author mentioned “hits” earlier, I was already thinking this was rather amateurish. Now he’s come out with that silly myth it only reinforces my belief. It’s really naive to suggest that Google sees this as a way of deterring spammers. Does he think that if this tactic worked that spammers wouldn’t just register their domains and pay for years ahead upfront? If they can make the money in the short-term they wouldn’t care about the small registration fees in the future. Also, if they wanted to they could probably sell the domain and/or site on a marketplace which specialises in selling crap to gullible newbies.
Nevertheless, the author carefully spells out and explains all this information to his target audience, which I can only assume consists of people who discovered the Internet a nanosecond ago.
Page 12 – Next we get a brief description of how to set up a WordPress site. Then an explanation of why a site needs content. LOL! Then he starts on how to create content. You can buy PLR and spin it—this is the method he uses most. Really? I never would have guessed.
Page 13 – He suggests using content spinning software which is highly recommended by the Warrior Forum. ’Nuff said.
Page 14 – Then we get a bit about outsourcing, and sourcing photos which are legitimately free to use. Then we move on to promoting the website. Apparently you will need at least four reviews, each of at least 400 words. Maybe you could have got away with doing that in the 1990s, but surely there’s no one still on planet Earth who thinks that would work to please Google these days. Remember to delete the default “Hello World” text.
Page 15 – Still on the subject of promoting your website, next he describes how to set up Google Alerts and dump crap comments on other people’s blogs. Well, he doesn’t actually put it like that but he gives an example of a blog comment including a link to the site being promoted. Sorry, matey. Many blog owners would see that as being spam. I would.
Page 16 – You should be patient. It’ll probably take a month before you start making money with your blog. Once you do start making money, then you’ll need to outsource more. He explains a bit about hiring a virtual assistant (VA).
Page 17 – Oh! The book came to an abrupt end. I thought I had four more pages to endure. This final page tells us that a VA will be essential once you start making serious money with your blog. You can outsource the boring jobs such as blog commenting.
My conclusion
The best thing about the book was that it ended sooner than expected. I also felt that I wouldn’t need any lunch today, given that I’d already had my fill of baloney to keep me going for a while. I’m not even going to give you my affiliate link to this book because I don’t want to be responsible for parting fools from their money. And anyway if you do buy it—maybe just to see if it’s as bad as I say—then you’ll most likely ask for a refund anyway.
9 Responses to “How to Create $1,600 per Month Niche Websites for Passive Income—a book review”
I liked your little review. Just looking at the book’s cover is enough to see that it’s likely to be rubbish. Stock photos with dollar bills as the main actor stem from the same age in which those 400 words blog posts would still have worked! I’m sure you had this all figured out though and just wanted to have a laugh. 🙂
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your comment. Yeah, I enjoy a laugh sometimes even though I get a bit fed up of seeing people making money by selling rubbish. It’s a pet peeve really as publishing on Kindle was a nice way to make a bit of extra cash, but now the marketplace is flooded with people selling junk. And the decent books have to compete with it all to be found and make sales.
I’d better not say too much about his book cover as some of mine leave a lot to be desired. At least my books have better content.
Cheers, and Happy New Year!
Kay
I actually liked the book. It was brief and to the point, more than most of the books on the subject. This could be because I read the updated version (I bought it on January 3rd, and it said second edition on it), which didn’t have much of the stuff that you talk about here and is 31 pages, not 17…
Normally your reviews are accurate (John Benjamin’s book), but this isn’t the version that’s up for sale on the Kindle store, at least not when I checked it out.
Happy New Year (a bit late!)
Jen
Hi Jen,
Thanks for your comment and kind words about (most of) my book reviews. I think you’re probably right about what version I read. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the latest one.
I’ve been reading a lot of this type of book recently but have been posting brief reviews on Amazon rather than blog postings about them. There’s really an awful lot of rubbish out there. Too many newbies teaching newbies (the blind leading the blind), and too many people churning out books as fast as they can with the sole intention of trying to make money from it.
I wish Amazon would exercise some quality control – but that’s a pipe-dream. Who would decide what’s good quality and on what criteria? Impossible! (Unless they spend a lot of money to implement it.)
Anyway, a happy and prosperous 2014 to you too!
Kay
PS Are you a member of the Experienced People forum? I think I may have “seen” you there.
The cover page thing is really strange, unless they’re brothers or something. Other than that it was a pretty good book, and I finished it quite quickly.
I think most of the problems you pointed out are gone now. The book could’ve been longer, but for 99 cents it’s a pretty good deal considering the amount of content that’s included. I’d probably rate it a 4 out of 5. It’s not everything you need, but to get started, it’s a solid method and I liked his/their plan for taking action.
Hi Marty,
Thanks for your comment. It’s quite interesting to see that this book review has attracted more attention than most of my reviews.
It really looks as though I read and reviewed an earlier version of the book. There’s a lesson to all of us who write Kindle books – don’t publish before your finished product is ready.
At first I didn’t want to include “buy it now” links on this blog post, but with all these positive comments about the book now, perhaps I should think again! 🙂
Kay
Well, I’ve done it now – bought the updated version and reviewed it. It’s definitely better than the first edition, but I still wasn’t particularly impressed.
You can see my review of the 2014 edition here:
http://www.kaymcmahon.com/2259.how-to-create-1600-per-month-niche-websites-for-passive-income-2nd-edition-a-book-review/
I was searching other blogs that use the WATSON theme and found your site. I like how you’ve put it together with the sidenote photos.
Hi Jen,
Thanks for your comment. I like your blog too! Yeah, I really liked the Watson theme. We’ve not quite finished customising it yet. There’s a big slider for photos at the top which we’ve not attempted to use yet. There’s never enough time to do everything!