It’s more like the Unconventional Guide to Wasting Time than it is an Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself. Chris Guillebeau’s guides aren’t very informative and his writing isn’t anything scholarly if you were actually looking to study and learn something. I’ve looked over the Travel Ninja guide and even reviewed Frequent Flyer guide, which was a shambles.
Just an example here, in his marketing for the UGWY he states that he will show you Ebay secrets/techniques to boost your business even if you’re already selling online. There are four pages that mention Ebay, and we can’t count the first one because there’s no information on it, so out of three pages he writes the following about making money on Ebay:
Strategy #1: Buy low and sell high
Strategy#2: Become a specialized dealer
Strategy#3: Create products and your own market
The first two tips are on the same page – then he goes on to state you can post an ad on Craigslist for free to offer to buy or pick up unwanted goods. He states, “I recently heard of a few people who are literally earning a full-time income using only this strategy.” Does he ever cite sources, or give examples about this? No, he moves on to strategy #3 without any research on the full-time income about the people he recently heard of… #3 is his recommendation to create your own information products in multimedia form and to sell them on Ebay. The he goes on to say go take a look at this other guy’s link who has a newsletter about Ebay because he really knows what he’s talking about. Chris seems to offer very little research, generally what he writes about is freely available on hundreds of blog sites, and he doesn’t offer any insight into Amazon or other marketplace sales channels, because it probably seems to him that it’s too difficult to implement or there’s no money to be made there.
When a topic gets too burdensome for him to actually develop insight backed from research he’ll just point to a link, “Almost every week Jim has lots of great ideas that will work for lots of people.” But surprisingly Chris doesn’t care to research any of it and offer it to you as a way to make money.
When you visit Jim’s site he has a post about how so many people contact him about making money online – and that they get ripped-off by zero quality or low quality information. Jim knows it is an experiment, you keep experimenting until you find a way to pull money out of people without ripping them off, but he never claims it is easy to support yourself financially doing online business activities. He doesn’t have the magic wand either.
I’m guessing the only reason you’ve come across the “unconventional guides” is from bloggers posting about it, but let’s face it, they get the guide for free, and even if they don’t receive a free guide they get 51% commission to recommend it and make a sale. I wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting his writing because it is not compelling research and not thick with value. There are so many $10 paperback or hardcover books that offer detailed research about operating a marketing campaign and serving customers online, but they don’t stretch across the working for yourself theme, which is probably what attracted you in the first place.
Conclusion: Avoid
Notes:
Reach out to us with your own examples of working for yourself, we’re looking to put a better book together that shows examples of working for yourself. Here’s one example, a person who freelances and earns $500 per day from a five-person company experimenting with making apps and writing the code to touchscreen advertising displays. The amount of money is not necessarily important, we’re more interested in the process, and the nature of the work itself so that others may benefit.
