heyamberrae:

About a year and a half ago, right after I moved to New York, Derek Sivers invited me over to his Union Square apartment for tea. Enthralled and inspired by his philosophies around business and life, I blogged about his ideas incessantly. He apparently took notice and reached out to say hello.

…

In the years right after college, back in the early 2000′s, I lived with my best friend from high school. One day I came home from the gym to see him opening a package filled with giant yellow rubber boots, Buddy Holly-style glasses (sans lenses), vinyl records, and a golf club.

“Uh, what is all this stuff?”, I asked.

“Stuff I ordered on Ebay the other week,” he said. “I really need to stay off that site,” he continued, all while taking a few swings in his new hip-waders.

“Uh, yeah, probably.”

Back then, Ebay was the site where people went to buy stuff they didn’t need.

These days, it’s Amazon.com.

I’ve lost count of how many times I went for one book and left with an order for four others.

And the great thing about Amazon (if you’re an Amazon associate/affiliate), is that people go for books, and leave with all kinds of stuff – and you get a commission on everything they buy.

I found this out back in December when I recommended Tim Ferriss’ latest book to my health and fitness readers. I used an affiliate link, but I didn’t expect to make more than a few hundred books (as I understood I’d earn about a buck a book). However…

Six weeks after promoting Tim’s book, I received a surprisingly large affiliate commission check (relative to what I was expecting) from Amazon.

Because of that, I went into my account and expected to see that I sold 5x’s more books than originally thought, but instead I found commissions for rubber boots, toasters, Ipods, and more. Everything but a kitchen sink. Although no Buddy Holly-style glasses, either.

Thanks to this experience, I’m now working on a plan with Rick Porter to sell some of my fitness e-books on Amazon. It’s not going to be a lot of work for me to repackage some of my workouts, give them “keyword specific” titles, and then have Rick promote these Amazon listings online with an Amazon affiliate link.

Here’s Rick’s explanation of why this should be simple way to make some nice side cash, especially in 6 months when everyone’s buying all their Christmas gifts online.

Rick said: “I think Amazon is a great place for products because the trust factor is so high.

I have done only a little bit of Amazon affiliate marketing and it amazes me at the conversion ratio on click throughs – for about every 20-30 clicks I’m making some kind of sale – last month I had 2,273 clicks with a 3.56% conversion rate.

The funny thing about Amazon is you get someone to click through for some dog food and they also buy a pair of shoes and some DVD’s.

Having some great products to promote there creates an incredible gateway where you sell even more stuff (I’ve sold three “3dtv’s” in the last 3 months and when someone buys one they also buy cables and a few pairs of $80 3dtv glasses, a blue ray player and a couple blue ray movies).

The SEO is actually much easier – I have pushed Amazon listings up really high in the past using nothing more than a bunch of low quality backlinks. It’s just as easy to get an Amazon link ranked high in Google as it is with Youtube videos.

So I expect that if I put more effort into it and use high quality links to these Amazon listings, we could crush it for just about any search term we choose.

But we need to put the keyword as the title of the e-book we’re selling on Amazon so it will outrank any other posts.

If you could bang out tons of books for Amazon we could make a lot of money because people go in for 1 thing and come out with more. Get a bunch of products up before Christmas because sales rise really high as people piggy back their Christmas shopping on top of buying stuff for themselves.”

Rick Porter
RickPorter.org
***************************************************

So there you go.

I just gave you an awesome strategy for nothing…one that could make just about anyone – from a high-school kid to a retired senior – a few hundred extra bucks at next Christmas time alone.

As you can see, I’m holding nothing back here…each day I’m showing you exactly what I’m doing to build my income – it’s as if you’re a partner in my business.

Most “internet gurus” would have charged you $1000 or something for this info.

But that’s not what I’m after.

Remember – my goal is to help 1000 people from all over the world to create their financial independence in 2011 through a website business. So keep on sending in your success stories. You’re making me proud.

To your Internet Independence,

Craig Ballantyne
Comment on the blog => http://www.InternetIndependence.com

“The highest reward for your work is not what you get, but what you become.” – Alexander Green

Hello Folks, I’m new to the forum (kind of) I’ve been coming here and reading everything for a while now and I wanted to say THANKS! to all of the people on this board that are trying to help.

I started online about a year ago, and although I picked up the tech stuff right away; I just couldn’t make any money. I was at a swap meet one day with some buddies and it occured to me that this was a room full of guys that ritualistcaly come together to spend money.
There had to be a way to tap into this.
This is what I did:

1. Got online and looked for upcoming shows and found a woodworking show.
2. Went to CB and found a wood working plans package with decent gravity.
3. Regisered a domain and set a redirect to my hoplink.
4. Used graphics from the sales page (with permision from the vendor!) and created a 2 sided 8-1/2 X 11 color flier following the layout of the sales page closely.
5. Printed 300 copies, 2 sided, in color at my day job at the time.
6. With no further research and fliers in hand I drove over to the show on the Saturday morning
7. Walked in and found a Mom, Pop, Son vendor booth and made a deal. I would buy them all lunch for both days if I could put my flier on their counter.

The Results:
I set the stack of 300 fliers on their counter at 9:10AM, they called me at noon and said that they were gone. I did no research, total attendance at this show wound up being about 9200 for the weekend. I ran to Kinko’s, paid way to much and printed 1500 more. Got them back down to the show at 3PM Sat. They called me Sunday at about 3PM and said they were out again.
Of the 1800 fliers that were handed out I got 1154 clicks or hops I should say. From those 1154 hops I did almost $3000 on CB over the next three weeks!

I called the peolple that gave out my fliers and told them how happy I was and gave them $500-they were thrilled! They then told me that there was 22 shows in this calander and that there was 17 left, and that they would gladly distribute my offer if they could make an extra $500 per show just for doing that.

That’s when the light bulb came on! Talk about recurring easy income!

I have since applied this approach to an RV Show, a wedding fair, and a golf expo, all with great results. With this one tactic I have gone to full time affiliate marketer in the last 4 months.

Tips I have learned for implementing this strategy:

• Do the research-find the estimated attendence and vendors list while finding shows online.
• Use an 8.5X11 piece of plain paper printed color both sides. I have tested tri-fold brochures and two sizes of glossy XL postcards and the cheap solution wins.
• Contact the promoter of the show and check on his advertising packages. As it turns out I can have the wood show promoter put my flier in the plastic bag they give to everyone when they enter for $75/show (I’m doing that too but the family that hands them out does way better cause they actually sell for me.)
• Assign each vendor a unique tracking link at CB and send them a screen shot once a week to keep them motivated. If they pre-sell a little-this kills!

I have developed about 10 of these non traditional strategies that are all working for me. I have been shooting some video and was thinking about packaging it all up into a product. What do you guys think? Should I do it?

Thanks for everything.
Dave