Read the 20 Most Popular Books about Making Money

I am always inter­ested in learn­ing about how peo­ple are using the Inter­net in new ways to earn money.  It is often frus­trat­ing to try to find out unbi­ased infor­ma­tion about this sub­ject.  Search­ing the Inter­net can give some lim­ited insights, but much of what is out there is often over-hyped, too self-promotional or even worse, a scam.

For­tu­nately, books can be more reli­able and thor­ough than infor­ma­tion on the web.  Recently, I had the idea that instead of rely­ing on ran­domly stum­bling upon a tome, I would use Google’s approach to find­ing a good book about the subject.

As you prob­a­bly know, Google’s uses a pro­pri­etary search algo­rithm that relies on the pop­u­lar­ity of a web site – how many incom­ing links a web­site has – to deter­mine the rel­e­vancy of a search.  My idea was to apply that approach to find­ing books more rel­e­vant to what I was look­ing for.

I did a search for books on Amazon.com that have to do with mak­ing money, mak­ing money online, gen­er­at­ing pas­sive income, affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, and blog­ging and sorted the results by the aver­age cus­tomer review.  The books I chose had to have at least 40 reviews and a 3 star rat­ing.  Why?   For these reasons:

• To make sure that the book has been read by a suf­fi­cient num­ber of peo­ple (indi­cates popularity)
• To ensure that the raters really liked the book (also indi­cates popularity)
• To make it less likely that book’s rat­ings have been inflated by the author’s friends (to elim­i­nate false pos­i­tives for popularity)

So with­out fur­ther ado, here is the top 20 books that sat­is­fied the criteria:

1. Con­ver­sa­tions with Mil­lion­aires: What Mil­lion­aires Do to Get Rich, That You Never Learned About in School!
2. The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Mak­ing Money with AdSense
3. ProBlog­ger: Secrets for Blog­ging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
4. Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Any­where While Doing What You Love.  Please see my review.
5. Career Rene­gade: How to Make a Great Liv­ing Doing What You Love
6. Life’s Miss­ing Instruc­tion Man­ual : The Guide­book You Should Have Been Given at Birth
7. The E-Code: 34 Inter­net Super­stars Reveal 44 Ways to Make Money Online Almost Instantly—Using Only Email
8. The Self-Publishing Man­ual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book, 14th Edition
9. Plug Your Book! Online Book Mar­ket­ing for Authors, Book Pub­lic­ity through Social Networking
10. Think and Grow Rich!: The Orig­i­nal Ver­sion, Restored and Revised
11. Twit­ter Power: How to Dom­i­nate Your Mar­ket One Tweet at a Time
12. From Entre­pre­neur to Info­pre­neur: Make Money with books, E-Books and Infor­ma­tion Products
13. AdWords For Dum­mies (For Dum­mies (Computer/Tech))
14. Ulti­mate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100 Mil­lion Peo­ple in 10 Minutes
15. The Irre­sistible Offer: How to Sell Your Prod­uct or Ser­vice in 3 Sec­onds or Less
16. Word­Press For Dum­mies (For Dum­mies (Computer/Tech))
17. The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living
18. The Face­book Era: Tap­ping Online Social Net­works to Build Bet­ter Prod­ucts, Reach New Audi­ences, and Sell More Stuff
19. Let­ting Go of the Words: Writ­ing Web Con­tent that Works (Inter­ac­tive Technologies)
20. Red Hot Inter­net Pub­lic­ity: An Insider’s Guide to Pro­mot­ing Your Book on the Internet!

I think it will be worth your while to look into these books.  I plan to peruse them as well dur­ing the com­ing weeks.

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