Business

On the 27th of March, 2010, I received an email from a guy named Billy Murphy, who basically just wanted to say that he really liked ViperChill and the content I was posting. Three days later I was at a friends house and he got to talking about some of the membership sites he uses for training. Since he’s a professional poker player the site in question was indeed a poker site, named BlueFirePoker. The name sounded very familiar, and after a quick check on my phone, I realised it was the site Billy owned.

Fast-forward to two weeks ago, and Billy let me in on some of the sites details, and also let me know about a new site he’s starting up. I jumped at the chance to ask him some questions, but with his claim of making $100,000 in one week, I was slightly worried the interview wouldn’t be good enough to post. After all, I assumed a huge amount of money must have been spent in order for that to happen, and it’s not exactly something all ViperChill readers can replicate. How wrong I was.

As many of you will know, last week I stuck to my promise of launching a Podcast in the new year and released the first episode, ‘How I Would Make Money Online If I Was Starting from Scratch‘. I had hoped that a lot of people would get some value from the recording and be able to start 2012 in style, but I didn’t anticipate what happened next. Within 24 hours the podcast made it to #1 in Marketing and #2 in Business on iTunes which totally blew me away – sandwiched in between 9 podcasts by the BBC and the Financial Times.

In just 6 days (I don’t have stats for the last 24 hours yet) the first show has been downloaded over 18,000 times. Keep in mind that I didn’t even write a blog post about the launch, so the majority of my audience are only hearing about the episodes now. Episodes was not a typo. I’m adding another recording in the next 24 hours.

Today I’m going to share with you an in-depth case study of two moms who are killing it online. Unlike case studies you’ll find elsewhere, this article contains not only their personal stories, but the exact strategies they use and actual income proof. I recently revealed on my Project Warehouse article that I was going to begin an “income case study” series, and this is the first entry.

The moms in question, Justine Grey and Heather Allard, both actually reached out to me after my last blog post. They both make thousands of dollars per month online, and interestingly have a number of similarities in their approach, so I thought they would make an excellent joint 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.

For some reason, I clicked on a link in a spam email today. As with about 20 other emails I receive each day, the offer promised to guarantee me thousands of backlinks and top rankings in Google. When the site opened, I saw a video and recognised a familiar face. Clicking play revealed a woman giving a glowing review on the services the website offered. The site suddenly seemed far more legitimate.

Her face was familiar, because I had just paid her $5 to say the exact words “Only the coolest people use ViperChill.com” on video. In fact, I got about 10 other women to do the same thing. $5 was also enough to convince a 20-something male in the States to tell the world that his name was Barbara Streisand and that Glen Allsopp is the coolest guy in the world. Welcome to the world of Fiverr.

I feel bad that I haven’t updated you all on my million dollar case study. For those of you who missed the project, I’m aiming to build an affiliate site which makes $30,000 per month, that could theoretically be sold for $1M. Though this goal is difficult enough, I also challenged myself to do it in just 12 months. You can view the earlier posts on my case study here, here, and here.

My project relied heavily on an exact-match domain for my targetted keyphrase, which set me back $550. This reliance was my downfall, but it’s not the only hurdle I’ve faced along the way. As a quick update: The site is currently on page 2 of Google for a keyphrase which gets 100,000+ exact searches per month.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a product launch expert. I’ve read a lot on the topic, but action – which breeds experience – is far more important than knowledge. Since I make most of my income with affiliate marketing and promoting other peoples products, launches aren’t something that I’ve dedicated a lot of time to.

At the end of 2010, that all changed. I spent months working on Cloud Living HQ, which I released for only 72 hours (it’s available again as of today), and managed to make a five-figure sum in a single day. In my state of shock, I convinced myself “You might not think you know about product launches, but you must be doing something right.”