Besides the checks I get from Clickbank, it’s the only affiliate program that I’ve consistently profited from.

Best of all, it’s two-tiered. So those affiliates who signed up under my link are now beginning to generate more money for me than I’m actually making from the same site.

Now here’s the thing. I’m really and truly an AWFUL affiliate marketer.

Seriously! I am. At least in the traditional sense.

But I know how to sell an ebook like a bee knows how to make honey.

And that is how I get a big affiliate check every month.

Here’s the secret…

I built a ebook around a web site with a good affiliate program.

Okay I didn’t intentionally plan it. But now looking back at my steadily increasing payments, I see the absolute brilliance of the strategy.

You see my Get-In-Google-Now.com ebook teaches readers how to advertise on specific web sites, so that your ad gets a top 10 rank.

In the ebook I mention a handful of sites that work for this strategy. One of those sites is very, very popular with my readers because it produces the most consistent results.

So they advertise on that site. And every time they buy an ad, I get a commission. A small one. Maybe just a few dollars.

When they see that my strategy works, they keep on buying ads. Month after month after month.

So it’s not a one shot deal. I get paid from the same customers over and over again.

Like I said, I also get a kickback from those affiliates who signed up under me. That commission is relatively small. But again, it’s not a one time sale. It’s residual.

And finally, I sell the ebook for $97. So I’m profiting all the way around. Front end and back end all in one.

Did I get your wheels a turnin’?

Build your ebook around an affiliate program and grow rich,

Alexis Dawes

She’d read Desperate Buyers Only and knew how anti-typical marketing I am. Yet here I am blogging my arse off a whopping 4 days a week.

And even though I wouldn’t call myself a bonafide expert on the topic - (I’ve only been blogging on a consistent basis for the past month and some change) - I would have to say yes… blogging does affect book sales.

It’s NOT oodles and oodles of cash. Maybe 17 new sales for DBO and Get In Google Now in the month of September.

Which really ain’t a bad deal for less than 3 hours of work a week. (Technically I make more blogging than some of my 9-5 worker bee friends.)

I won’t know the true bottom-line affect of this blog until I release a new ebook. Which I’ll be doing very soon.

The new ebook?

Well I think the first one will be all about hot topics and where to find them. It seems that many readers have a difficult time finding good, salable topics.

Anyway I digress… Back in July this blog had 760 total visits. This means the same people might have been visiting over and over again.

As of today, I’ve had 1,759 visits for the month of September. 466 of those were first timers. So I get a lot of repeat visitors, which is awesome. And I’ve had 6,511 page views.

I don’t promote this blog in any blog directories or anything.

I don’t purposely use any targeted phrases in my messages to rank well. (You don’t have to be an optimzing machine all the time!) And still I get a fair share of traffic from Google and Yahoo.

Everytime I post a new message I get anywhere from 4-9 new blog feed subscribers, which I’m able to track through Feedburner.

And even though I do have an option allowing readers to subscribe and receive the blog messages via e-mail - (see the sidebar) - I only have 6 e-mail subscribers.

A lot of Internet marketers say the money is in the list.

Perhaps I’m being a winky head because I have fewer than 10 e-mail subscribers, but isn’t it better to have people willingly visit your site over and over again, than trying to compete with 500 other e-mail newsletters?

I think so. (So thank you my foxy and incredibly smart repeat visitors!)

The bottom line?

I like this blogging thing. I will definitely continue. And I would highly recommend it.

Blog and grow rich,

Alexis Dawes

Not saying that old is bad. For certain segments - like marketing and sales, for instance - the advice is timeless.

But let’s say you want something a little bit more now-ish, versus an early 1900’s vibe. Where do you go?

Lifehacker has revealed 6 public domain sources where you can find images, video, documents and music.

For example, did you know the Wikimedia Commons has over 800,000 media files that are free to use. Even for commercial usage. Cha, cha, cha!

And if you need some more assistance, Lifehacker also clued me in to quietly revealed Google feature that’ll help you find additional public domain items.

Create your ebooks from other peoples stuff and grow rich,

Alexis Dawes

Appealing ain’t it? How authors are giving away their intellectual property, and still managing to make a buck - from the same title they’re giving away?

I mean it’s one thing to give away a freebie, and then sell those freebie readers a different title.

But it’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax to give something away, and still have people buy it.

Especially if they’re paying for the same digial copy and not a print version.

As someone who’s always looking to make their business run smoother, I think this particular concept is smoking hot. It absolutely epitomizes the autopilot theory.

Anyway today here’s another bit of confirmation that this strategy is working in other markets.

Many2Many - a group weblog on social publishing - recently highlighted the efforts of science fiction authors who give away their books for free online.

According to author Cory Doctorow, “I’ve discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions.”

Read the entire blog post.

Authors DO give it away and grow rich,

Alexis Dawes

Well the authors of Take Cover have adopted this exact strategy in a high tech way.

Prospects are encouraged to download the PDF and take 7 days to read it. If they find it useful, they’re asked to pay $10. Of course because you try-before-you-buy, no refunds are accepted.

I’ve always wanted to try this strategy.

According to Robert Cialdini, author of the infamous Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, this is know as the law of reciprocation. You give something first, and people feel obligated to return a greater favor.

Plus, becuase it’s initially free, it takes a lot of the strain off the marketing. You can make great usage of your traffic.

So I e-mailed Matt to find out what this experience has been like so far.

Here’s what he told me…

Q) When did you launch the site?

A) We released Take Cover and  on August 7, at the end of a marathon session of getting the book itself typeset and polished, getting the website put together, and getting the backend sales software working. And by August 7, we don’t mean some time in the afternoon after a fine cup of joe, maybe a nice garden salad. It was only technically the 7th because midnight had long come and gone, without even an apology. That makes the book about 3 weeks old.

Q) What prompted you to choose the read-first-pay-later strategy versus the traditional pay-first-read-later model?

A) Well, several factors colluded to make us try this distribution method. During the initial phase of starting the company, we explored some of the methods used for selling digital content. One feature we desperately wished to avoid is Digital Rights Management–technology that restricts what your customers can do with your content. We are philosophically opposed to its intent, and practically opposed to its administration.

We both have technical experience–we’ve been following DRM, and have heard that DRM often makes for unhappy users. Our favorite example of this is the completely unnecessary FBI warning on DVDs that you can’t fast forward through. Almost the only folks who don’t have to suffer through that worthless message are the dreaded pirates the message tries to scare. The first thing they do when ripping a DVD is remove that warning! Yar!

Next, we started investigating eShops–online shopping cart providers. Surveying the available web hosts and the shopping cart software they offered was even one of our early ideas for a book. It got so boring that we felt guilty even expecting someone to read a book on the topic. Many of the shops were downright stinky. Not all of the carts support selling digital downloads, and those that did presented another problem: easily distributing updates to the book.

Some books are naturally living creatures who evolve and grow as the world changes and research broadens. Text book publishers love this. They get schools to buy hundreds or thousands of new copies of a slightly updated version of the same book–at $100 a copy. Well, in our view, it takes a lot of updating before a book looks sufficiently different to warrant reselling it to the same customers. When our readers buy a copy of the book, we want them to benefit from the comments and suggestions they might have contributed. Shelling out more cash just to see a book that reflects your recommendations just doesn’t seem fair.

We also wanted to avoid the complication of maintaining a shopping cart that lives independently from the rest of our website content (e.g. FAQs, excerpts and samples, weblogs, &c.). We don’t want our readers to register with a shopping cart just to pay for a book that they will be downloading, and we don’t want to lose the flexibility of providing a different webpage for each book that we write. Selling electronic books in the electronic equivalent of a tiny catalog or brochure just doesn’t make sense to us. We wanted to be able to present lots of data in an organized and flexible format, but at the same time be able to give instant gratification to our customers.

Clearly we could have worked around a lot of those limitations. But then we read an old advertising book called ‘Scientific Advertising,’ by Claude Hopkins. It spends a considerable amount of time discussing the benefits of free samples and try-before-you-buy campaigns. It was this last detail that made us think, hey, what if we let people download the book and pay for it on an honor system.

We also like the way Amazon let’s you get a peek into the contents of many of their books. Well, this is kind of the next step, assuming that overall sales are not injured. Folks like Cory Doctorow already kinda do this–you can download most of his books online from craphound.com for free. Heck, you don’t even have to read his short stories–he’ll read many of them to you if you listen to his free podcasts. He mostly makes money on the physical books. We don’t do physical books, but perhaps his lesson might still apply.

To be honest though, there was one reason that may have been more important than all the others. The honor system meant that we wouldn’t have to spend another 4 hours setting up a shopping cart before we could start selling the book at 2am. Sleepy eyes crave quick results.

Q) How are you currently advertising the site?

A) Interviews like this are the most entertaining advertising mechanism! We really enjoy sharing what we’ve learned about starting and running a business. We like the opportunity to talk about our books like Take Cover in the context of how they came to be, not just what they can do for you.

We started out expecting to use Google AdWords as our primary advertising strategy. We’ve definitely had some success generating traffic this way, but the exposure we had on iwillteachyoutoberich.com generated a monstrous spike in traffic by comparison.

Of course, we know that interview traffic isn’t coming to get our product as much as it is to check out the site. Still, we like the attention: every bit counts. An added side benefit is that we received some excellent suggestions from around the world. Targeted advertising probably gives a better kind of traffic sales wise–and we may be cranking up our ad budget in the future.

Studying the search terms and popularity has given us some good ideas on adjusting the book or adding content to the website. For example, many people researching the rent vs. buy question really want a calculator to just give them the answer. We suggest that they read Take Cover first, as calculators leave out a lot of detail. But the fact that they want a calculator tells us we’d better give them one.

John’s been putting the finishing touches on a cool javascript calculator that gives an unbelievably precise view of what owning a home can cost directly compared to an apartment or some other rental. It’ll be posted to the site shortly; those interested should definitely check it out at takecover.movingavg.com/calculate.html. Playing around with the calculator boggles even our minds–and we wrote the book. We suspect that the calculator might generate a little word of mouth. It’s fun trying to squeeze some extra money out of a house or rental by playing with the different inputs. Fun at least for personal finance sickos like us. If you know any frugality addicts, send them our way!

Having just read your Desperate Buyers Only e-book, we’re excited about trying some of your techniques. The Marketing Survival Guide is especially relevant to our efforts, so we can’t wait to see how your advice pans out.

(Alexis’ note… I love flattery!)
 
Q) Your overall results so far (saleswise)?

A) When we released Take Cover, we certainly weren’t expecting to become millionaires overnight. And we haven’t. We’ve sold less than 20 copies of the book so far, and received about as much feedback. The feedback has surprised us the most, as it’s generally thoughtful and relevant. Several readers have even suggested a move away from the honor system and to a more traditional pay-first or free-sample system.

Those nay-sayers might be right, but we aren’t willing to give up on the honor system yet. Since we’ve been tracking it, we’ve seen about 160 downloads of the Take Cover book. Clearly a lot of downloaders have not paid or written to let us know why they decided not to pay. These aren’t great results, but we think we can improve it. If not, we’ll consider a more traditional approach–even if it is a bit less satisfying to world improvers like ourselves.

We’re amateurs at advertising over the Internet. We’re learning as we go. Since this is a bit of a side job, we’re also somewhat limited on the amount of time to put into it on any given day. Our general thinking is to focus on generating traffic to the site, and then start playing with different sales approaches. Once we know that we’re reaching our target audience, we can optimize the sales mechanics.

- Matt & John
Moving Average Inc.

http://takecover.movingavg.com/  

Although Matt says they’re not making millions, my synopsis is that they’re doing pretty damn well, with an 8% conversion rate (160 downloads/20 payments).

• The $10 price tag is reasonable enough that people will buy without flinching.
• They’re getting valuable feedback, which can be used for additional e-books. Perhaps for backend sales.
• And they’re able to take full advantage of the traffic they’re receiving.

Mmmm… Matt and John might have turned us on to something really hot. I don’t know about you, but I’ve just added one more project to add to the pile!

Pioneer and get rich,

Alexis Dawes

P.S.- Please show some love for these newbie authors (who willingly gave up some great info) by purchasing a copy of their e-book. And have a good karma-filled weekend!

There’s YouTube, Google Video, OurMedia, and a growing number of video aggregators.

Most of these sites are geared towards funny/amusing/cool/stupid stuff. But there are some ways you can profit from the revolution.

1) First find out what people want. ViewDo has a Request a ViewDo forum where you’ll find topics that people want to see on video. The Guitar Tapping thread currently has 600+ views. Ideas for any guitar players???

There’s also VideoJug.com for judging idea popularity.

We’re soon going to be adding a shih tzu to our little family. So I recently found PetVideo.com.

They will tell you how many times a specific video has been viewed. This is also an easy way to see what people want.

Be sure to read the comments for each video. Very valuable feedback when creating your own.

2) Make the video. Bill Myers’ site offers great tips for inexpensively creating videos.

3) Sell the video. Promote it on your web site or on eBay as a DVD, or stream directly from the Internet.

You might also want to try LearnOutLoud.com.

You upload your video here… they sell it… and you earn a 60% commission on each sale.

I get the lazy bug from time-to-time, so I like it when someone else does the work for me, and just sends me a check!

Dust off your video camera and grow rich,

Alexis Dawes

I park my buns where there’s a demand and a few thousand credit card wielding customers.

So when I saw the following call for authors, I thought it might be of use to many of you.

The site is EscapeArtist.com.

It’s geared towards people who want to live in various parts of the world - defined as ‘expat’ or expatriates. (I’m a part-time expat, by the way.)

They have a hungry audience of 375,000 subscribers. And they’re looking for e-book authors who can write on the following topics - (amongst others):

* Relocating to a new nation 
* Opening a business in overseas
* Ways to make money overseas
* Unusual ways to make a living on the internet or by telecommuting
* International Real Estate
* Unusual lifestyles in unusual locations
* Any subject that is unique and internationally applicable

This is a great way to earn some passive income while waiting for your million dollar pay day.

Target world travelers and get rich,

Alexis Dawes