The only people getting rich from PDF farming, are the ones you’re paying to explain it to you.
Lately I’ve been seeing ads for “PDF Farming” all over my social media feeds. It’s being billed as a “work from home” or “biz opps” (business opportunities) course that promises to get you up and running with your very own “PDF Farm” in under 24 hours.
With no effort, no technical skill, and no cash outlay (other than the $27 to get past the first layer of the marketing funnel) – you will soon be up and running with your own passive income streams as the world beats a path to your door to buy PDF documents you auto-generated with low quality information and zero differentiation.
The landing page has the standard issue “as seen in” media tombstones, although if you actually search for the phrase “PDF farming” in any of these websites, there is absolutely no mention of it.
I figure the typical AxisOfEasy reader doesn’t need to be told this, but sometimes I do get surprised at what people in my network of contacts have fallen for. It’s really all about pressing the right button and dangling the perfect promise at an opportune moment to get past your defenses.
Hopefully anybody contemplating this will search it up first and see this page.
To show demonstrate exactly how marginal “PDF farming” is, here’s a PDF on PDF farming I generated using chatGPT in under 10 seconds.
Now I’m supposed to be able to sell countless copies of it on Ebay, Etsy and myriad other ecomm platforms.
How much would you pay for a PDF that took me seconds to generate?
The correct answer is zero, because even though it may be helpful, it is not unique and there is no barrier to acquiring the information it imparts. A google search or a session with ChatGPT will tell you this.
To truly “earn income from PDFs” you have to understand you aren’t in the PDF business. You’re in the information publishing business – and to succeed there you require:
- Specialized knowledge – you need to have an edge over everybody else in your niche.
- The ability to communicate – don’t be boring. Search engines are boring. ChatGPT has no authenticity. You have to create a connection to your readers and you aren’t going to do that running a copy-pasta PDF content farm.
- Distribution / audience – you can’t rely on external platforms or marketplaces. You must build your own channel, from scratch.
If you don’t have those three things, than buying a “PDF Farming” course isn’t going to provide that.
It is possible succeed in the information publishing business but to develop the three pre-requisites outlined above takes time, perseverance and at the end of the day, the “PDF” part of it is just the delivery mechanism.