Unless they are scamming people really hard and selling info to boiler rooms nonstop to run serious scams, you probably don't.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of desperate people out there who will buy a $99 PDF with vague promises of "CEO income from home" and all that nonsense, but you still have to buy people. Yes, you can engineer a pyramid scheme into the program, but that only goes so far.
There are a few career people who do this professionally, but they are few and far between and they've spent decades figuring out what scams work and what scams don't. Most of the people on Hacker News want to start real businesses, that sell real products, that do real things. There are other forums out there for career snakeoil salesmen.
I have never seen an "info product" in my life that was honest, or actually added value to society. Ever. I've expensed a number of them for research throughout the years, mostly to try and get a better understanding of the dynamics behind the quasi-viral spread of these things. I've never seen a legitimate one, even successful ones by pro-scam artists, that really struck me as a worth while business venture compared to all other alternatives out there. It's only when you get into straight up fraud that it really starts to "make sense" from a profits standpoint.
What I have seen a lot of is people who look like they are doing well because their cashflow has gotten so massive. $20k, $30k, $40k+/mo is not unreasonable. But the expenses grow as well, and eventually you have to pay out or the scheme collapses. So you have the cash-flow and credit to buy a fancy car or rent a fancy house, but you can't actually ever own anything unless you cross the line and start defrauding people.
Those are the exact sort of scams I'm talking about. Lead gen to get a free PDF that then strings you along and tries to get you to buy "products" that are just fake empowerment nonesense. If you don't buy into it, they sell your info to boiler rooms. Every one of these sites look the same. Same layout, same language. It's all the same. Show me something different.
If any of these so-called products had any value, you'd be able to find them on torrent sites. That's the true test of value for a digital good at the end of the day. If it has value, people will try to steal it and share it. People look to pirate a $0.99 song, but no one looks to pirate an "info product", because the value is literally zero. Or negative.
This exact product cost about 200$ when it came out and a friend of mine and me bought. I left it alone for some time. Then, I went through the program, which was very simple, but gave specific steps to do things I applied. It made me 3000$ so far.
There you go. That isn't tons of money, but it is fun.
And no one pirates info products? Seriously? Let us just say that this statement alone demonstrates you have no idea what you are talking about. Not only are info products pirated like crazy, there are even invite only societies that tend to throw money in pools to buy and then rip this kind of stuff. Don't believe me? Research it for yourself.
Haha. Good stuff, good stuff. People pooling money to get their hands on a document. A PDF so amazing that it isn't a PDF, it's a product. Knowledge so secret, and so powerful that it's worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.
If you really made a 15x return from reading a couple pages, why are you here? Why don't you do it again and again? When are you buying your private jet?
Now, it's possible you did make $3,000. It's not hard to make $3,000 off of Adsense, or even as an Amazon affiliate. But you probably put in hundreds of hours of time for that 15x return. Because if you could really make $3,000 in a few hours from following some easy steps in a PDF, you'd do it over and over again.
I see plenty of people trying to participate in this stuff and fail to realize that even when they do actually turn a profit, they are making minimum wage when they factor in their own labor costs. Usually they choose not to, because it's just depressing. It's pretty easy to lie to others, but the easiest person to lie to is yourself.
Often these things (salary negotiation, negotiating debt/fees or automatic investing) aren't replicable (instantly). There are some kind of limiting factors.
It's just not a system that scales infinitely.
That said if you are time starved (+ "cash rich") and don't want to go through all the available, cheaper resources yourself there can be a lot of value in a condensed course/infoproduct that solve your exact problem. Look at patio11's email course.
But most of these products are still absolute BS to make a quick buck.
You are absolutely right that a lot of the time ppl aren't honest about how much they actually invest into their "passive" business. (and should track it honestly).
And outsourcing to freelance writers get "high quality" content is almost always nonsense.
Just as with health issues people want a magic pill to solve their money problems. Which a lot of scammers are quick to cater to.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of advice out there, that I and a lot of other people are very happy to pay for. (for example I just bought http://saveyourself.ca/tutorials/tutorials.php (I'm working in health care).
I made (more) money with exactly that advice. It's not easy and "passive income" though.
It's just condensed knowledge to improve your freelancing after all. No magic. I do doubt that # seeds/replies correlates highly with actual value. Just have a look at the top ones.
