What's the Life Expectancy of Some of These eBooks/Guides Floating Around the Web?

I don't believe there is any single answer to that question. There are hard copy marketing books written 60-80 years ago that contain gems of wisdom that are still true today. Many of the principles of copywriting and direct mail marketing can easily be translated to modern internet usage. IM trends abound, different things seem to go in and out of fashion, one year it's adsense, then it's youtube, bum marketing, CPA, etc etc but you'll always find people making good money in any one of them. The reason is, there IS money to be made in all of them -- if that's where your style and your passion lies, and you apply sound marketing principles.

If a book was crap in 2002, you can rely on it to still be crap now. But if it's well written and the author knows their stuff it should hold water for a good many years. Software recommendations may go a bit stale, it may have a few dead links, or still lamely recommend the overture keyword tool -- doesn't mean it was never any good!!

If you get it free, I would be much more wary of it, because it is likely to be that dubious creature known as the viral ebook. There is nothing wrong with the concept as such, but if an ebook is written and distributed for the sole purpose of spreading affiliate links and/or advertising the author's 'real' products, I find so often it is little more than a bunch of crap articles strung together disguised as 'chapters', & of little or no value.

No disrespect intended to those many of you who have written viral ebooks of inestimably high quality!!!

that's my two pence worth
says Kenneth of London

Hello,
all of the ebooks in the exe format are dead,many people are afraid to download
a file in fear of getting a virus.
It is a shame because there are many gems out there that need to be translated to pdf
format.