The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business without Quitting Your Day Job [Hardcover]

I enjoyed reading this book. I purchased it from Amazon because Jim Cockrum endorsed it in his newsletter (which is how I heard of it). The book basically outlines step by step how to set up an information product business online. The first chapter explains why this business model is ideal for most people, due to low overhead and the almost bottomless demand for information products online. Chapter 2 suggests ways to build a profitable infoproduct quickly. I think they should have explained the "profitable" side of things a bit more explicitly. For example, while many people might have collections of recipes at home they think they could sell online, most people searching for recipes online are searching for FREE information, not an ebook they have to pay for. Ideally, you should create an infoproduct for a market where infoproducts are already selling well. Scanning the categories of products on Clickbank.com is a good way to get ideas for products of your own. If you aren't sure what to create, think about the products that people are already selling on Clickbank, and then come up with a complementary or supplemental product that would be a logical "upsell" to the audience for those products. This is the most important decision you will make, and determines if your product will sell, more than any other factor. Beyond that the book outlines the different content formats you can choose to make, how to set up a website, get traffic and turn your "prospects into buyers." I learned the most from chapter 6, and I think that chapter alone is worth the price of this book. While it doesn't explicitly teach you how to write a sales letter it tells you some important things to consider when setting up your sales page. I think a few sales letter examples and a simple template would have enhanced this chapter a lot, especially for beginners who are new to information marketing online. A separate chapter on outsourcing would have been helpful also. My thoughts are you should probably write rough drafts of your ebook and sales page and then outsource the rewrites to someone more experienced to "clean them up" for you. I prefer vWorker for all my outsourcing, since I have the option to pay for deliverables only, rather than for time. It seems to result in faster turnaround, and since the funds are escrowed, I don't have to release them until I am completely happy with the end product. For beginners, I also recommend using e-Junkie rather than Clickbank or 1shoppingcart. With e-junkie you get payment processing, but they also create expiring download links automatically and I believe they also host your actual product files, so you don't have to create any web pages yourself other than just the sales letter page, with the order button connecting to your e-junkie checkout. That saves time, and also eliminates some of the learning curve with having to create web pages and learning to FTP your files to a download page, as well as not having to learn to install a script to create expiring download links yourself. If you're a beginner and you don't know much about web design you should probably try out Blinkweb's hosting - you get a free domain name and a wysiwyg editor that includes simple sales page templates that are super easy to use, and are designed specifically for information marketers. All you have to do at that point is upload an image of an "add to cart" button and link it to your e-junkie account for checkout. e-Junkie does the rest. If you don't like paying $14.99 a month for hosting and you don't mind the learning curve, then google "Chris Farrell" and sign up for his free "Success Grenade" videos that walk you through web page setup step by step. You'll learn how to FTP your web site, create download and squeeze pages, upload files to your site's hosting account and more. I think Blinkweb + e-Junkie would save you more time and let you get your business up and running a lot faster, but if you don't mind a few months extra work and study, you can learn to do it the "hard way" through Chris Farrell's video series. Overall, "The Six-Figure Second Income" has a lot of good ideas and recommendations, even though I disagree with some of the recommendations in chapter 4, since they aren't very beginner-friendly, and can stymie someone for months before they can get an actual product online. Even if you start with only Blinkweb for hosting/web design, e-Junkie for shopping cart/payment processing, and the basic Aweber account for managing your customer list, it will cost under $40 a month to get going, and takes a lot of the technical stuff off your plate.

This book is one of the best practical guides on how to start your own freelance business that I have ever read. It is full of simple, easily understood, and easy-to-follow advice on how to get started with no cost and minimal effort. A lot of books about freelancing tell you how to market yourself before you are really ready to be marketed because you don't know what you are doing to start with. In fact, at first, most people don't even know how to get started. This book is different- in no-nonsense language and step-by-step directions, it takes the fear out of getting started on your own and directs you step-by-step on how to just jump in and do in, the no-frills way. The author has provided numerous links throughout the book to his website, where his links take you exactly to where he directs you in the book. I loved this book and I feel it was money well-spent.

This book does a great job of walking through the process of creating an online business. It focuses on information products because that is the fastest way to market starting from zero.

Jon deals with many of the excuses,hype, and barriers right up front. While some of the techniques and information is common with other books on this subject, I found this one puts everything together in a concise and clear manner. The information on the website analysis tools alone was worth the price.

An unexpected and pleasant surprise was I had a question about something in the book and sent an email to the address in the book and actually got a personal response back from the author in 24 hours. - A very nice touch.