Review: Dreams Not For Sale

Since there wasn't anything good to watch on TV last night, I decided to read another ebook I'd picked up recently. It's not been heavily promoted (I think I've only seen it mentioned on one of the umpteen Internet marketing lists I'm on) and is more reasonably priced ($47) than most ebooks, so it seemed worth investigation. (Uncommon AdSense is kind of in the same boat. Apparently I priced it too low to make it interesting to other affiliate marketers.) I also have some further comments on the “Duvet Dollars” ebook I mentioned a few days ago. But first, my review.

Dreams Not For Sale

Dreams Not For Sale by Tahir Shah is subtitled “The No-Hype-No-Fluff Approach To Making Money Online”. Although it starts with a big disclaimer that “the terms of use of this ebook include not sharing the information included in the ebook in any way, shape or form” there is of course nothing that legally prevents me from discussing what's in the book. The point of a review, after all, is to recommend or not recommend a book, and it's hard to do that without some discussion of the book's content.

The first part of the book covers something I've talked about before in my GeekAffiliate blog, in a posting titled “The Nike Rule of Affiliate Marketing: Just Do It“: you can't just think about doing something, you must actually go and do it to succeed. Tahir builds a nice little mantra from it:

If I only read &mdash I only learn
If I read and do — I learn and earn
I must do what I learn to earn from what I read
— Tahir Shah, Dreams Not For Sale

If mantras aren't your thing, Tahir also puts it all in plain text:

You see in order to learn the so called “secrets” to becoming rich, all you need to do is to learn in this e-book.
You'll learn them.
If you want to become rich, then you have to work at it, using the important lessons you learn in this e-book.

I must admit that these words (it's all from the first chapter) put me in a good mood, since they echo the things I've been saying about making money with AdSense ever since the publication of Make Easy Money with Google almost two years ago, even though my book's title seems to imply otherwise. (What can I say, the publisher's marketing people came up with the title.)

Anyhow, this is followed by a short chapter on the importance of setting goals and then a longer chapter on the BS that dominates Internet marketing, the whole “30 days to online riches” mentality that only works for the big-name gurus who have tens of thousands of followers. All good so far.

Then we come to the meat of the book: the “secret” that is almost guaranteed to make you money if you put time and effort into it: a mailing list.

Hmm. Is that really a secret? No, not really. As Tahir says, you've probably heard the phrase The money is in the list a hundred times over by now. You've probably discounted its importance because of that. But most money-making techniques revolve around a mailing list, which leads him to ask this question:

So if you KNOW that “The money is in the list” already… Here's a question for you… “WHY THE HELL ARE YOU TRYING TO CHASE OR FIND MONEY ELSEWHERE?”

Let's stop for a moment here and think about this. I do think there's a lot of truth to what he says. How much time do you spend reading ebooks, forums and blogs (including this one!) about making money versus actually taking concrete steps to make money?

Now, Tahir's complete focus on mailing lists as a way to make money online is not something everyone agrees with. Obviously, I think you can make good money with AdSense — and I know people who are doing just that. But it takes work, and it didn't happen overnight. I'll have more to say on this in a later posting.

But back to the mailing lists. Tahir is saying that you need to focus all your efforts on growing your list. Everything you do should revolve around that. However, he does have a different twist on what to sell to the list. In his opinion, you should only be selling products that give you 100% of the profit — in others words, either products that have resell rights (which includes products with private label rights and master resale rights) or products that you create yourself. The latter is important:

I don't know of many online marketers who are NOW earning fortunes who don't have a product of their own.

That's a powerful statement and it's something I can agree on. As someone who's primarily a Creator instead of a Seller, I of course like to hear these kinds of statements!

The rest of the book describes various strategies for getting your online business off the ground. What you should do and what you should avoid. All with a focus on building “the list”, of course. I got some pointers to some useful resources here, I must admit, and at the end you get access to his online course “The Power of Personalisation” that shows you how to use mailing lists to build personalization into your websites — nothing fancy for a techie like me, but non-techies will find it useful.

Overall, I think this book is good value for the money. There's nothing sensational about the material, just some solid advice. If you're looking to develop an online business into something that will make you rich, this may in fact be the only — and perhaps the last! — book you'll need. It's now on my recommended list of resources:

• Build A Niche Store
• Turn Words Into Traffic
• Dreams Not For Sale
• Beating AdWords
• Link Cloaking For The Mystified
• AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging
• Uncommon AdSense
• Keyword Elite

I also have a bit of a soft spot for three ebooks written by the same author: AdWords Miracle, Affiliate “Project X” and Day Job Killer, but that's as much for their entertainment value and the way they can change your worldview as anything else, I think the techniques they describe require a lot of work to be profitable and suffer now from competition due to the success of his books. In some ways, though, he kind of proves Tahir's point about making money with your own products, doesn't he?

Duvet Dollars Redux

Earlier this week I mentioned that I didn't think Duvet Dollars was worth the money, especially once the price goes up later today. When you purchase the book you're asked to supply a phone number as well as the usual name and email address. So I did, mostly out of curiosity — would they actually phone me?

They did, surprisingly enough. A gentleman who was calling on behalf of “Victoria” (does she really exist?) was looking for serious people who were willing to invest more money into becoming an online success. Hmm. If I'd been smart I would've had a way to record the phone conversation and ask him all kinds of interesting questions, but I just told him I bought the book to review it and that I wasn't interested in their “help”. That seemed to surprise him, I guess not many people give that kind of answer!

In case you're wondering what Duvet Dollars is, though, the affiliates page has the best description of it I've seen so far:

The guide is based around not only affiliate marketing, but also identifying markets in order to develop and implement an online business… (how does it work, i.e. questions and answers, case studies, copy and paste techniques etc).

Duvet Dollars is basically a newbie's guide to becoming a super affiliate, although that's not what you'd think from the sales copy. They'll even set you up with a “free” website built around their techniques. It's “free”, yes, except that you have to buy a midPhase hosting package before they'll set you up with it. And guess who gets a (healthy) commission for referring you to midPhase?

Spend your money on other things is my recommendation.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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