make money online

Many affiliate marketers are facing headwinds in 2011. Strategies that once worked in prior years, especially the hard sale, are not working as well anymore. However, I’m here to say that affiliate marketing works, perhaps better than ever. Case in point: I earned nearly five grand on EPN in 3 months in my limited spare time above and beyond the income from my demanding full time job. Since I wrote that post, my overall EPN and affiliate marketing earnings in general continue to thrive and grow.

I’m not the only one. There’s a new class of affiliates and today I want to share an affiliate marketing strategy that works in 2011, via case study. In particular, I’m going to highlight a personal experience I had with my friend Eric’s blog, My 4 Hour Workweek. After reading this post, I encourage you to sign up for a leading affiliate network such as EWA Private Network (they’re accepting 10 new affiliates right now) and then get out there and employ this strategy!

So What’s This Affiliate Strategy?

The strategy is quite simple in theory, but difficult in execution. It’s all about establishing an honest voice with your readers, making it very clear that you earn an affiliate commission when they purchase via one of your links, but offing such an overwhelming amount of value that users make a conscious effort to buy via your link. How do you do this? Very, very hard work and an amazing level of transparency with your readers. You can’t leave an ounce of doubt in anyone’s mind. You need to exclusively recommend products you personally use and prove over and over why the product is working for you. You need to go well above and beyond to provide tremendous free value. You need to avoid mistakes (such as the hard sale) at all costs. Once you’ve done that, your readers will feel an emotional tie to purchase via your link. They’ll owe it to you!

Let’s take an example. My friend Eric from My 4 Hour Workweek promotes this awesome peer to peer lending network called Lending Club. Each month, Eric publishes an income report that highlights his sources of online income and passive income, including Lending Club (check out his August report for an example). I’m honestly addicted to Eric’s blog because of his level of transparency, honesty, and value. My favorite posts are his income updates. As a reader, Eric has established a personal connection with me.

So, I had been meaning to sign up for Lending Club for quite some time. Not only because of Eric’s blog, but also because my former boss is the CMO there and I’ve read an amazing amount of good stuff about the network as a source of diversification and passive income. I’m a busy guy (it’s hard to find even a half hour to sign up for something like this) and I’m all about efficiency. As such, when I finally had some free time to sign up for Lending Club, I could have just gone directly to their site. Or, I could have searched the Internet for special offers and coupon codes in an attempt to get some kind of freebie. However, none of this even crossed my mind. I quickly remembered how much value Eric’s blog provides and my decision was simple: Sign up via Eric’s affiliate link! I even went as far as commentating on Eric’s blog to let him know I used his affiliate link. Now, that’s an affiliate marketing strategy that works. If you’re trying to make money online in 2011, I highly recommend a similar approach. It truly works and it’s also how I make money online.

Image In This Post © My4HrWorkweek.com

Today, it’s my absolute pleasure to review John Chow’s new book about blogging for money, Make Money Online. In the image below, you can see my very own autographed copy of Make Money Online. (Want your own? You can order your autographed copy of John Chow’s book directly from his blog for only $23.99. Of course, you can also purchase a non-autographed copy from all the normal venues.) At the end of this review, you can see an image of me proudly displaying John’s book. In short, I’m thrilled with this book and highly recommend you purchase a copy. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about blogging and I’m looking forward to sharing a few of my personal takeaways. First, however, I’ll start with a little background.

Who is John Chow?

John Chow Make Money Online Book

If you’ve been following PPC Ian for a while, you may know that I’m a huge fan of John Chow. Not only do I link to JohnChow.com in my blogroll, but I also enjoy commenting on his blog. Also of interest, PPC Ian was recently reviewed on John Chow dot com. The review was very positive and ended up driving a substantial amount of traffic to PPC Ian! More than anything, it was a milestone and honor in my career.

John Chow is one of the most celebrated Internet marketers around. In the circle of making money online, there are few bloggers that stand out as much as John, and I personally find quite a bit of inspiration in his blog. For that reason, I’m excited share with you some of my favorite takeaways from John’s new book! The following four takeaways are just a very small sample of the great knowledge I took away from John’s book.

Takeaway 1: A Non-Updated Blog Is A Dead Blog

I’m new to blogging. While I own a portfolio of domains and websites optimized toward affiliate cash generation, PPCIan.com is my very first blog! I launched PPC Ian back in October, 2009 and have been enthusiastically learning each and every day.

One of the trends I have observed with PPC Ian is a dramatic influx of traffic whenever I do a new post. As such, I always look forward to posting new, quality content. At the same time, it really hit home when John Chow pointed out (several times) that a non-updated blog is a dead blog. As someone with a very exciting and important PPC career, I find it essentially impossible to update my blog more than once a week. In terms of my blog’s growth, I know this is not ideal. As John also points out, it’s important to have a consistent schedule and to never compromise on quality – I’m definitely doing those two things right. However, I really do wish I could update at least twice per week.

In terms of solutions, I don’t see one just yet, but I must say this simple yet very powerful advice really struck home and got me thinking about how I can take my blog to the next level! After all, there will come a point when I hope to generate income from PPC Ian. I’m not at that point yet, but I do believe a faster-paced schedule will be critical in reaching my goal.

Takeaway 2: FeedBurner Is Essential

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you may also remember when I was interviewed by super affiliate Jonathan Volk. This was quite the honor! In my interview, Jonathan pointed out that I should install FeedBurner on my blog. Similarly, John Chow devoted several pages of his book to this very topic (RSS feeds and their power).

I’m personally not a huge RSS consumer myself. Because I’m a big commenter on the blogs I frequent, I go the old school route and visit blogs directly. However, I should not assume everyone is like this. In terms of taking PPC Ian to the next level, I have officially decided to make FeedBurner a priority thanks to John and Jonathan’s advice. Please keep an eye out for this in the coming weeks. I hope to make it as easy as possible for you to read PPC Ian in the format that’s most convenient for you! John points out that number of RSS readers is an incredibly important statistic.

Takeaway 3: John Chow Will Save You Time!

As mentioned earlier, I’m newer to blogging. I have learned a tremendous amount over the past year. Most of my lessons have come the hard way for sure. I don’t mind it at all, this is how the best lessons are learned. At the same time, I sure do wish I had John’s book when I started. John Chow describes in detail solutions to many common blogging dilemmas such as duplicate content (and htaccess), WordPress SEO (where some of my hard lessons were learned), content generation, essential WordPress plug-ins, and so much more!

Regardless of where you stand in the online marketing game, John’s book is the perfect combination of high level theory and lower level tactical tips. It will save you a tremendous amount of time.

Takeaway 4: I’m On The Right Path!

As my last takeaway, I felt really good reading John’s book. While I certainly jotted down dozens of notes on how to improve PPC Ian (just a few of which I share above), I also realized that I’m doing quite a bit right and am very consistent with the strategies John describes. I started blogging in October, 2009 knowing a lot about PPC, but very little about blogging. In less than a year, I have been able to accomplish a lot with PPC Ian. I owe my success to very hard work, passion for PPC, trial and error, and much more than anything all of you – my loyal PPC Ian readers! I sincerely thank you for your support, it means the world to me! I recommend John Chow’s book and hope it helps drive success in your personal online marketing career.

Affiliate Marketing That Works