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