I have to respectfully disagree with most of what Nick Flame said. I see his point and yeah, I know Howie does rehash his content. But in his post he makes alot of inferences that I think are incorrect. I've gone thru Howie's material and part of his method is to make sure that the keywords he targets are worthwhile before putting in a ton of work/time.
The main reason I disagree with him though is because I recently used Howie's methods to make about $7700 in one month from just a handfull of long tail keywords. Now, just so you know, I promoted a new product that had some buzz behind it...so alot of that was timing coupled with the fact that the keywords related to that product were new. But it was pretty much all Howie's stuff that got me my page 1 rankings..and that got me the traffic I needed.
But bottom line, Howie's stuff does work IF you put it into action. I mainly used ezinearticles.com, Squidoo, YouTube, and wordpress.com to get my rankings. I did exactly what Howies lays out and sure enough, I took over page 1. At one point I had all top ten results...then I think it dwindled down to like 6 or 7....but the biggest benefit was that I was able to push all of my competitors to page 2 by leveraging these social media sites and just linking it all together....I think I sent some links to the pages from Digg also...but it really wasnt more than 6-8 hours worth of work. I felt it was more working smart than working hard.
Bottom line: most of these higher dollar courses that are readily available for free here work. So grab ONE that peaks your interest and put it into action. Screw all the rest of the downloads...just focus on putting one course into action. Eventually the downloads section here will go away as word spreads and more and more "gurus" come here to add their stuff to the do not share list....so use what you have access to now.
Anything that you do in IM that is going to make you money WILL TAKE WORK. Even blackhat marketing takes a ton fo work to really make good money. Alot of folks think Blackhat=easy shortcut to make tons of money....I personally think blackhat marketing is harder than white hat because you constantly have to build more sites and try to outsmart Google (no easy task at all). But whitehat or blackhat, anything worth doing will require alot of work.
