How would it help your business if you could look over my shoulder and watch as I take a plain website and turn it into an email marketing and monetisation machine? Seeing exactly what I do, step-by-step, on a site that is already getting hundreds of targeted visitors every single day (but it’s only 3 pages).

That’s exactly what you have the opportunity to watch today with the public launch of Backlinks XXX. It has been out for one month now to my private email list – that’s why we have so many awesome testimonials – but there are still lots of big things coming.

Myself and Diggy would love for you to check it out (note: there’s an autoplaying video on that page).

In today’s guide I’m going to share with you every single detail about my recent behind-the-scenes product launch which also happened to be the biggest of my life, without a single affiliate on board. If you’ve got a product launch coming soon or have plans to do one in the future, this guide will give you all you need to make sure it’s a hit.

Before I start with the negatives during the launch, I want to share something really positive: The best testimonial I’ve ever received. About 6 months ago, Adam Beckett tweeted to me about how putting the tips on ViperChill into action had helped to pay for his entire wedding. Well, last month he finally tied the knot, and I asked if I could share the photo here.

It’s the perfect example of what you can do if you actually take action with the advice you find online. Congratulations, Adam and Jen!

Have you ever had that feeling when you’re making something and you’re really excited to keep going. Where you know the process is going to be as awesome as the end result? That’s how I feel about writing this post. I just want my fingers to keep moving, as there’s a lot of insights to come.

Before I do that, I want to do something I never do and that’s push a project or idea, but here we go: Sign-up to my email list at the bottom of this post or in the right sidebar here. Click through to ViperChill if you’re reading this elsewhere. The emails I have been sharing lately include information you won’t find on any other website (even here) mostly focused around unique SEO ideas. I actually have two more videos going live to the list this week.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have written a blog post about affiliate marketing. It all seemed too dirty. But that’s changing now thanks to a few animal updates from Google.

These days it’s all about trust and authority – you need your readers to see your blog as an authority and you need Google to trust your SEO strategy. That means it’s harder than ever to succeed but it also means that the people willing to work away at it for months and years are doing very well.

In this post I’m going to show you:

• My personal theory for this slow-to-grow strategy.
• Why multiple passive income streams are important to mitigate risks.
• How to choose the right affiliate program to promote.
• How to write an “ultimate article” that promotes your product.
• The content strategy that drives traffic and authority.

At the end of it all I’m going to show you an example of this being done extremely well by a very nerdy individual who really knows how to match his traffic to a non-sleazy sale.

Some of the biggest news in the blogging world over the last week was without a doubt Google’s announcement that on June 1st, they’re closing Google Reader. Paraphrasing their own words, the usage of Reader is smaller than ever, and Google want to focus on fewer products. I don’t believe the latter for a second, since new products like Google Keep are being spotted in the wild, and instead think it’s all about, well…money. Reader simply isn’t paying for itself.

Countless news articles have been written by the BBC, New York Times, the Verge and many other huge publications, all highlighting other services that people can be using instead. What people haven’t been writing about though is how this affects us as bloggers and what we can do about it (if anything). Here’s the jist of it: Reader’s closure is going to hit a lot of us very, very hard.

Way back in the day when I used to run PluginID, I took an afternoon out to make a few graphics for my blog sidebar which would feature my most popular blog posts. Though they did look attractive – and I quickly found other bloggers imitating the idea – I found myself constantly having to make new images any time I made a hit post.

With ViperChill, I was fortunate to have a plugin come with my theme called ‘Popular Posts’. It’s basically just a widget that you currently see in my sidebar (for now). When I designed Butterflyist for Andrea for the blogging case study project, we made sure she purchased a theme which had a similar plugin installed. Without them we would have been a little lost. Until now.

New York Times best-selling authors Chris Brogan and Julien Smith recently launched their latest book, The Impact Equation, and kindly mentioned me as someone who has built up a large following of passionate (and attractive) readers. They also compared me to Seth Godin, showing how people who write totally different types of content can still grow a respectable audience in the same niche.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Seth. Though his posts are usually very short, more often than not they contain ideas you can apply to your business immediately. In this post I’m going one step further by taking Seth’s short, motivating style and opening up my Evernote account for you all to see.

In other words, you’re about to hit with a wave of ideas, images and random pieces of knowledge which I’ve collected up over the last few years.

This is a really awkward blog post to write. Mostly because I now have to backtrack on a lot of the things I said recently. I’ll cut a long story short: I’m no longer writing Viral Marketing for Dummies. This was not a decision by Wiley, nor the person who approached me with the book offer. It was entirely mine, and an entirely difficult one at that.

And maybe not even the write right one to make. I’ve had to tell this story countless times to family and friends over the last few weeks, usually leading to disappointed faces and people not really understanding my decision, so hopefully I can express myself better when I carefully craft the words.