This site promotes horrible spammy paractices such as "article spinning" (automated word substitution) and cross-posting the same (spun) article to numerous sites to with links to the niche site to enhance google-rank. Every link here is an affiliate link for another marketing site in the dense web of self-referential marketing guru sites. Not HN-ey is one way to put it!
Sadly yes some of this does work, but you have to buy the tools and resources promoted by these sorts of sites, most of which would only seem to have experience using them to market SEO tools to other wannabee web marketers. The search engines are getting smarter though as you say, and depending on these sorts of techniques is asking for trouble.
Same with buying links from private blog networks and similar, Google is cracking down on this but people are still using links from vast blog networks and ranking well today.
Sure. Check out SEOmoz.com. These guys provide great tools for SEO intelligence, and are not afraid to advocate doing things "the hard way", which will pay real dividends in the long term. If the tools are too pricey for the stage you're at, the blog is still invaluable.
I like that site overall, but some of the practices are spammy and unnecessary. I make a few thousand dollars a year from a video game site I created years ago as a hobby. As an experiment to see if I could do it again, I created another site and also made money. So with enough time, it's possible to scale.
There is no guarantee of success by being an infopreneur, and it can take a long time before you start seeing real money from it. I have a friend who made $10,000 in her first year with two sites, and I think her success is far above average. She now makes $50,000 with three sites.
It's harder nowadays than ever before though, because there's more competition and there's only one #1 spot on Google. And there's no guarantee of money. Some people could spend hundreds of hours and only make a few dollars.
For a wife who may not know anything about technology and wants to get started as an infopreneur, SiteBuildIt.com is a good service. They look terribly outdated but their information is solid. I checked them out for a month and saw their information is all the same stuff I learned from experience.
Writing useful content on a web site is what matters for a real business. Not spammy link practices.