Affiliates, Blogging

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.

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.

June was the first time in the history of this site where the blog gained over 1,000 subscribers in a month. To be specific, the final increase count was just over 1,300. Even though I’m posting as infrequently as I ever have, traffic levels are at their highest, and the blog is converting visitors into subscribers better than ever before.

I’m not saying this to brag, but to show that the changes I’ve slowly been implementing are having a big effect here, and I want to share them with you all today. If you haven’t been getting the results from blogging that you were hoping for, or you just want to fine-tune things a little, then this post is for you.

Utilising the power of the keyphrases that people use online has enabled me to make a full-time income since February 2009. I’ve spent the last two and a half years of my life doing nothing but using my own tactics, coupled with powerful resources, to analyse industries in order to get more website traffic. And, in-turn, make more money. This is known by many as Keyword Research.

It is this keyword research that has allowed me to get 981,000 unique organic search visitors to a 3 month old website, grow blogs faster than I ever thought was possible and – more than anything – allowed me to be free from a boss and the 9-5 grind.

Thanks to one of my favourite tactics for increasing the number of leads I generate with my sites, it’s very possible to double the amount of visitors you convert into subscribers – with just 10 minutes of work – today. The process also makes the challenge of attracting new customers far easier to conquer.

It’s one of the most effective tactics used to grow internet empires yet there’s a good chance you’re not even using it. People who have been in the internet marketing world for a while now will know what I’m referring to, but for everyone else, allow me to introduce you to Split-Testing. The basis for another in-depth tutorial and exclusive ViperChill case study.

Let me begin this post by saying that for the first time ever, ViperChill has crept under the 10,000 Alexa mark (!). The number doesn’t really mean that much, but it is nice for a site owner to see. What’s even more surprising is that I didn’t write a blog post for weeks. I guess my Cloud Blogging strategy has merit *wink*.

Today I’m going to reveal exactly what I’ve discovered about making money with blogs over the last four years. Your fellow blogger does not want you to see this because these simple tactics are guaranteed to help you make more money from blogging, and (possibly) reduce the potential income they can make themselves.

Update: According to Alexa, this post is the 14th most popular page on the entire internet at the moment! This graph is starting to look impressive. Thank you all for sharing and commenting!

This guide is going to reveal the concept of Email Blogging, a strategy which I personally think is one of the easiest and most profitable ways to make money online. The idea behind Email Blogging actually came to me by mistake. A total accident.

It was email marketing (or, a friend of mine who uses email marketing) that led to my accidental discovery. The friend – who just gotten into internet marketing 12 months earlier – came to stay with me for a couple of weeks. He was previously self-employed, though the reason is unrelated, and wanted to get into the industry.

In the late 1800′s, Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to get rid of a number of his associates in the German government. Since many of them were old, he decided to set the age of retirement to 65 and successfully forced them out of their positions. To this day, we still use the same retirement age around the world.

If you’re wondering what the point of sharing that was then let me say this: There was no point. My headline led you to read the post introduction, and my first paragraph was good enough to get you to read the second. Since I have your attention, let me tell you one more thing: You have to keep people hooked on your content if you want to get links. People don’t share things they don’t read.