Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0 Review

Well... a pre-review. I paid $12 to get access to Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0 video course for 10 days. At this point I can access and review only a part of the material.

Steve recommended Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0 in his Passive Income Series article Passive Income Systems. Vic Johnson, the creator of the course, pulled the right strings for me by announcing that the video linked above will not be available forever. In the video he says that to ensure proper access to all, he will close the entry after 500 participants. As I already missed Amy's course, I did not want to miss this one too. So I bought the trial even though I was not too impressed by Vic's pushy marketing tactics.

After I paid, I was taken through several long and annoying popup windows. Vic tried to make me pay the whole course right away, then sell me some ready eBook content to publish myself and something else too. To be honest, the pop ups were full of crap and when I was done with them, I was left hanging. There was no registration link at the end, nothing, just ads. I was pissed. I was like, "OMG, this must be a scam, how stupid can I be! How can Steve recommend this nonsense?"

I felt I had just wasted a good deal of my precious time. The registration link, of course, was in my mailbox, but after the popup show I was highly skeptical that I would get anything worth the money. The course costs the initial $12 and after that $97 per month for 4 months. So a total of $400. What would I get for that?

After the login I was taken to a WordPress page that has placeholders for the training modules, resources, bonuses and advanced training (whatever that is). The menus are there, but only part of the content is accessible during the trial. The training modules contain 8 webinar videos, 2 of which are available for the initial payment. The resources contain link lists, templates and other stuff that might get handy. The resources that are available during the trial are ok, but I felt they did not contain much new information for me. Only unlocked bonus is Affirmations Audio. Advanced stuff is all unavailable and getting to know Vic, I would not be surprised if that would cost something more...

Ok, so I was not impressed. I started watching the first webinar. The videos are not of a good quality and Vic spends a lot of time messing up with the Q&A. The first 2 videos were both 1:40 of length, but Vic takes a lot of time in the beginning for motivational talk that did not really give me much. But the gem part is when Vic rolls his sleeves and gets to work! He goes through free tools (that maybe 1/2 I knew already) and shows how he is using them to find ideas and in the second video he again uses a bunch of free tools to analyse the market potential for his ideas. When I looked at the list of the tools in the Resources section, I was not impressed by them. The value in this course is that Vic shows HOW he is using them and what to look for in the results that he gets.

I must say that without this information I would not have known how to pick the best idea. For example, when I have been messing around in Google Keyword Tool, I have been looking for keywords that have the most searches and not much competition. But Vic taught me otherwise.

If I split the $400 to the 8 videos, that is $50 per video. So I have now watched $100 worth of videos, and maybe one hour of it was really good stuff. So would I pay $100 for an expert like Vic to sit with me and tell me how to use the tools to find ideas and how to evaluate the potential of my ideas. YES, yes I would. And I would not even blink.

So at this point I have decided not to cut my subscription after the trial period. Maybe I will learn to like Vic's style more when the course proceeds, but even that doesn't really matter to me. What matters is the content, and this far I have gotten enough for my money. I will be giving you updates as the course proceeds.

Did you join this course? How do you like it?

Comment at 5th of June - I decided to cancel my trial after reading a comment telling me that this "one-time offer" has been online for over a year now. That is a marketing tactic that I don't really like and do not wish to learn myself. I do wish that I will find a good course that will go through the whole process, because I sure need that! I'm going to try SBI next and I hope it will be better. Thank you to everybody who commented on this.


Comment at 6th of June - How to cancel Getting Rich With eBooks trial? You need to go to Vic's company's helpdesk page and create a new support request using support category "Getting Rich With eBooks"->"Cancellation". They answered withing a day and confirmed the cancellation.


Comment at 7th of June - I reactivated my account. Read more in my post Self-Sabotage by Proxy



*UPDATE on 1st of August 2012*


I'm now midway this course and I have changed my mind a bit. Read my full second review of Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0 for more information.

How Much Will It Cost?

I just bought a nice domain name for $14. I was doing keyword searches with Google Keyword Tool and stumbled into something that had nice amount of searches, but the domain matching the search was still free. There was not much competition either. I am not at the point in my passive income project where I should be buying domains, but I just could not resist.

That made me think how much it costs to create a passive income stream. I have planned a rough budget of 1000€ (about 1250 US Dollars) for this project. I will put up a counter so you'll be able to see how much of that I end up spending and where it went. I surely hope I don't have to invest the whole 1000€, but that is what I am prepared to spend if necessary. To me it looks like that creating a passive income stream does not HAVE to cost much, but the temptation to spend is there. Having to confess my budget slips here hopefully helps with that!


How Will I Invest My Money?

To get a trustworthy looking site one has to have an own domain. I bought mine from GoDaddy, but lots of people seem to prefer BlueHost. I have been using GoDaddy for couple of years now and I've been happy with them, but I am buying just domains and hosting my stuff elsewhere.

I think I probably need virtual machines from a cloud service to run my future applications. So I have allocated some money for that in my budget. Most of you don't need that, but then you might have some other needs that I don't have.

Some money is earmarked for photos and graphics. The picture in my profile is several years old and I might need some simple graphics for my products too.

I have also allocated money for skill building, that is - books and courses. I estimate those will probably eat up most of my budget.

I'm planning to buy some books on technical subjects for learning purposes. But there is a possibility that I end up trying affiliate marketing and in that case I want to buy the products I'm marketing.

There is only one course I have earmarked money this far and it is SBI! (Site-Build-It). I might take other courses too if I find good ones. But this far the only courses that I have considered for real are SBI! and Amy's 30x500 (which is unavailable now). I will take the SBI! after my summer vacation so I really have time for it and of course I'll report to you how it works for me.

I ended up considering SBI! since Steve and several other people living on passive income highly praise it and SBI! site has plenty of real life success stories. They even show you the sites they are doing money with. But I got the final push yesterday, when I added EndersAdventures to my link list of people who are taking part in Steve Pavlina's Passive Income Series. Ender's passive income goal is $2,800+ per month by Nov 1st, 2012. That is highest I have seen this far. I was interested in how he is planning to do that so I browsed his site a bit. And guess what? Yes, he is already using SBI!.

When I first browsed SBI! site couple of months ago I was a bit turned back by the blocky look of the web pages that were generated with their web site builder tool. But I went through a several success story sites and my final thoughts were that SBI! is something else than just a web site builder. I mean, I looked at all those blocky web sites and rolled around the thought that all those pages are collecting the bucks home. I came into conclusion that they must be effectively search engine optimized and that SBI! must teach some really effective ways to drive massive traffic to one's sites. Also, I've seen SBI reports used to find out which ideas are worth investing. And those things are just what I need to learn now.

EDIT: When I went to their site today I noticed that SBI! has a new site builder. So no more clumsy web pages. Also, all their pages seem to have this brand new look. That makes me wonder if Steve is going to make purchasing SBI! a suggested part of his passive income series....

I'd love to hear your ideas on the subject! What are you planning to invest and why? Did I miss something obvious in my budget planning?