Passive Incomes Are Never Passive. Taking a Look Inside CB Passive Income.

When you first start off in the world of internet marketing, you are likely to be unsure of what niche to get involved in and what products to promote. More often than not, more experienced marketers will either push you towards, or at least recommend ClickBank.

ClickBank is a product marketplace, mainly dealing in digital products like software and eBooks, where you can choose from a large number of products to promote.

As these are digital products the overheads are generally quite small, which means that they makers of these products can offer up a much larger slice of the pie when it comes to the affiliate commissions, on average around 20-50% of the sale price.

Though recently ClickBank has improved, it has had a history of allowing poor products on its list, though that mantle seems to have been taken over now by the likes of ClickSure.

The product I am reviewing today makes use of ClickBank. It is called CB Passive Income and it is a lead generation system that offers a way for you to generate cash from ClickBank products.

Another Push Button System?

The system is specifically targeted at internet marketing newbies and that worries me, because I do not believe that this system will actually teach you anything. Let’s take a sample of his sales pitch:

Imagine if…

•  You didn’t need to write or produce any content
•  You didn’t need to create any membership program
•  You didn’t need to create any products to sell
•  You didn’t need to come up with your own free offer
•  You didn’t need to write any sales letters
•  You didn’t need to pay for hosting or an auto-responder
•  You didn’t need to send emails at all
•  You didn’t need to provide any customer service or follow up
•  You didn’t need to research for what products or affiliate programs to promote
•  You didn’t even need to learn internet marketing!

Heck, with this program, you don’t need to do anything except for one simple task!

This is selling a pipe-dream. It is basically saying you can earn money for doing virtually nothing, and that just isn’t true.

The premise of the system is a simple and well known marketing ploy: create an email harvesting website that offers something for free in return for an email address; send that person emails with information and product promotions; earn commissions.

That is a tried and tested way of earning money online, I have no doubt about that. My concerns for this system come from the fact that the newbie will not be taught or learn about the ins and outs of how a mailing list works and they won’t have to face the learning and growing experience of trying and failing. Patric Chan, the creator of CB Passive Income will do it all for you.

This will lead to one major downfall: your income is in someone else’s hands!

• You have no control over what the website looks like, what it sells, or what the emails contain.
• You will also have no exact statistics on what emails did well, how many products sold etc etc.
• You will also be at the mercy of Mr. Chan. What if he decides that today is the day, unplugs his computer and goes to live in Peru?

Push button systems sound glorious, and speak to our inner laziness (they do to mine all the time!), but in reality you don’t learn from them and you certainly won’t make a sustainable business from them.

A Simple Task

Of course if you did decide to purchase the product, there is “one simple task” you need to do, which is to promote the link to the website to get people to hand over their email address in the first place.

Lead generation, as this is technically called, is no easy task, especially for a beginner. In fact, I would say it is probably the largest stumbling block for any online entrepreneur.

Therefore, while it is great that the only thing you need to do in this system is generate traffic, it is often the hardest thing to do, especially when there is little reward for the user. Would you just give away your email address easily?

Perhaps I’m cynical nowadays, but I tend to want to trust the website first before doing so, which means I need content and lots of it, to prove to me this person knows what they are talking about.

Upsells

Due to the fact that most newbies will be lost at sea when it comes to finding traffic (after they have tapped out the family and friends resources), it is of course obvious that Patric has added some convenient upsells to his product. As you can see below this isn’t the “free” system that he insinuates in his sales letter

This is actually a clever way of getting you through his proverbial door, as most newbies will need that training to even start generating cash so will more likely sign up to his membership system which has a monthly fee of $47 bucks.

The Pro Version

You can pay Patric some more money and get access to the leads generated by the system. In other words, you can start to take control away from Patric and into your own hands.

The Membership Area

The training is provided by videos, and there are a lot of those to be fair. Content wise they are not too bad.

It didn’t rock my world, especially with the monthly price tag attached to it, but it is a reasonable selection of training resources suitable for newbie all in one place.

The Flip Side

I am by nature a little bit wary and conservative about the next big thing from the Gurus. I have been burnt too many times not to be.

That being said, I can see some usefulness in this product from a newbie standpoint. Internet marketing is a multi-skill endeavor; you need to learn various different things to different levels in order to succeed, such as copywriting, website creation, etc.

CB Passive Income does take most of that away from you, allowing you to focus on simply learning how to generate traffic. If used as a starting point it may actually be beneficial for some people. Others who like to be in the thick of it and have full control probably won’t like it though.

The Bottom Line: Is CB Passive Income a Scam?

It’s definitely different than most other money generation systems out there. I have my concerns about having that control taken from you, and how much you will learn about internet marketing in general. All of those “no experience required!” claims do not do the program any favors. I wouldn’t label it a scam, but I wouldn’t sing its praises from the roof tops either.