Hell, I don’t even do website or domain flipping regularly. I prefer affiliate marketing (whitehat and blackhat) and all that comes with it. This is just an opportunity I saw and decided to take.

Everyone’s crazy about website flipping right now – it’s the currently hyped up thing. Personally, I stay away from the hype.. I like to stick to things that are less saturated. When I’m taking a break though, I look at the Sitepoint Marketplace to see what’s going on because it’s interesting to see who’s selling what for more than five figures.

One of the things I AM interested in is good domains – not necessarily for flipping, but because good domains rank well at Google and it’s much easier to build a affiliate niche website if you have a solid domain with the right keywords.

Two of the forums I visit:

Domain Name Classifieds

Premium Domain Names

I’ve purchased a few good domains on there in the past for bargains – ranging from $10 to around $250. That’s for another post though.

I was looking at a few threads, just to see what was up for grabs when I came across a three letter dot com domain listed for $7,000. Due to the recession, domains too are going for less than they would earlier.

I had no interest in the domain myself, but was hit with a brainwave.

For the purpose of this post, we’ll say the three letter domain was ABC.com (it wasn’t, obviously). The domain didn’t have any vowels in it but could have been an acronym for something.

I went to Google and Googled “abc company”. There were a few results – companies in technical, accounting and other fields. These companies had websites but a lot of them were set up like abc-ltd.com or abc-co.com. I made a list of companies with web addresses – in total there were seven companies on the list.

The next thing I did was email the owner of the domain on Sitepoint asking a) what the lowest price he would sell the domain for was and b) if he’d mind me trying to sell the domain for him as a broker. What I hinted at was that I’d take 50% of any amount the domain sold for over his asking price (so if he wanted $5,000, and it sold for $7,000, I’d take a $1,000 cut).

He replied to me saying that he’d take $6,000 for the domain as long as it was sent through a safe channel and that he didn’t mind me brokering the domain for him, as long as I was honest and didn’t try and deceive anyone.

The next thing I did? Started emailing the companies I drew up a list of.

The email I sent was something like:

To the owner of ABC-Ltd.com,

My name is Casey Anderson and I run numerous businesses online. I see you have a website set up at ABC-Ltd.com

I’m offering you the chance to purchase ABC.com for a mere $10,000. As I’m sure you know, three letter domains can often go for much more than that and having a short domain will make it easier to brand yourself and easier for your customers to find your business.

The sale would be conducted through escrow, so you would only pay once you had the domain in hand.

If you’re interested or have any questions, please contact me and I’ll send you further details.

Sincerely,

Casey Anderson

That’s the email I sent out. I emailed the first company, waited a few days without seeing a reply. The first company ignored me. The second company replied, but said they weren’t interested in purchasing the domain.

The third company said they were interested. Jackpot!

After answering a few questions they had, I instructed the owner of the domain to set up a transaction through Escrow.com. The company sent the money within five days and he deposited $2,000 into my Paypal account a day after that.

I’m not used to blogging or instructing people on how to make money, but I hope you liked this post and that it will help you expand your mind and think of the possibilities. You could try out the exact same thing I did… or you could use the idea and tweak it for your own use.

A lot of people have asked what I’ve been doing – since well, I stopped a lot of the site flipping, and said I was moving onto something else. The “something else” was offline marketing, specifically starting a clothing business… but while I was doing that I thought I might as well look at other ways to bank offline.

I’d heard a lot about Alibaba (it’s basically a wholesale marketplace) from various people that were making money off it… my dad works in shipping so he’s used it quite a few times. I knew that prices there were cheaper than they would be if you bought from a store, but not much more than that.

I’d started to get more and more involved in Alibaba, just looking at various things for the clothing business – how much it’d cost to get shirts printed, how much jewelry, shades etc cost if I bought them in bulk. I plan to order a few things from various suppliers on there, but that’s for a different post.

On my browses, I also saw that you could find almost anything on there – stuff for gardening, health stuff, toys, even sex toys (hehe). I’d only been using Alibaba for a few days, but it looked a definite banker if it was used correctly.

Anyways, here’s how I made $3,000.

There are a lot of places offline – the classifieds section of your local paper, for one, and then sections in niche magazines that are more targeted… that will have a “wanted” section. People hiring for jobs, and people looking for various items.

My dad gets a few shipping newsletters, and one of those had a wanted section. Anyways, one day when I was playing games using his computer I accidentally opened one of those newsletters, and saw that a company was looking for a supplier of alcohol breathalyzers (testers)… and willing to pay $400 USD each for them.

I had no idea how much they cost, but thought that they were small things and certainly couldn’t cost as much as the company wanted to pay for them. I decided to check out my new favourite business website, Alibaba to see how much they were available for on there. This took me all of ten seconds.

You can see the search results here.

As you can see, a few have prices listed, ranging anywhere from $0.2 (twenty cents… lol) to around $80. I talked to a few suppliers, looked at shipping costs, got a few quotes and managed to find a supplier who had a minimum order criteria of 10 and was selling them for around $5 (shipping not included).

I emailed the shipping company which had placed the ad and gave them a quote of $300 per alcohol tester (which is $100 less than what they were willing to pay!). I got a reply within a day saying that they were happy to deal with me as long as they could pay after receiving the items. As they were a relatively well known organization, I had no problem with this.

I shipped them a dozen alcohol testers, they deposited $3,600 into my bank account. The shipping took around 4 days, and they were happy with what they got. Taking into account shipping charges (speed courier) and the cost of the alcohol testers themselves, I made a bit over $3,000 myself with no experience, no reputation whatsoever and… the potential is there to do it again.

This was easy money… the company was happy because they were saving, I was happy because I made bank and they said they’d come to me if they needed anymore, and this showed that the potential is certainly there. I’m going to look at magazines, read the newspaper a bit more carefully now, and do similar kinds of searches to see if I can make money off anything else.

You can do the same, of course.

Read your local classifieds paper, check out niche magazines, and email people. Sure, you may be unsuccessful a few times, but some time you WILL hit it off… and the profit margins are huge.

When using Alibaba, make sure you ask questions, if you’re going to order large quantities ask for samples first (be willing to pay, of course), look at many suppliers before deciding on which one to use. A lot of them don’t have prices displayed publicly, and they are willing to haggle… so don’t pay what’s asked straight up, see if you can get a discount. They have a chat system which is pretty cool and very easy to use if you want to talk to suppliers.

Ultimately, although online activities CAN make you a shitload of money… offline activities can send that money through the roof. By combining both, you can sometimes get the best of both worlds.

If you have any questions, post a comment and I’ll get back to you!

We’ve covered a few shady / blackhat things on here so it’s time to cover something a bit cleaner. Don’t worry, we’ll still be walking you through all kinds of ways to make money (Casey has a guide on eWhoring coming up) but we aim to stick to mostly whitehat stuff.

If you want to make money online, you’ll need to know how to create a basic website. No matter what you do related to internet marketing, having the ability to setup websites will save you a lot of time and money. Me, personally – I can only play around with Wordpress and basic HTML templates, but that’s more than enough.

Wordpress is the BEST ever creation to come out in the webmaster world – it reduces tweaking code to none if you don’t want to and there are hundreds of free, high quality themes and decent quality plugins that will make your job so much easier. If you don’t know what it is, or how to use it – we’re not going to cover that here, but Google it or check out their main site. You can also set up HTML websites if you prefer doing this – Open Source Web Design has some nice designs. If you have a bit of cash to spare, buy licenses to WooThemes and Revolution – they’re all you need.

What you will be doing here is offering businesses that don’t have a website already the chance to have one created for them (for a price, of course). It’s not as difficult as it sounds – I asked a few of my dad’s friends the first time I did this and got clients easily. First try asking friends, or people you know that are running their own businesses – you can offer your services at a discount or even for free in exchange for solid (aim for video) testimonials that will help you down the line.

You will need to approach the businesses yourself, or work with a friend – contrary to belief you do not need to have a popular website of your own to profit off this model. Obviously if you want to offer them further services (marketing, SEO etc) you should have some experience in the area but as all you’re doing is setting up a basic website all you need to know is how to outsource.

Treat business owners as friends first, and customers second, and you’ll make much more money.

Ask them what they want to achieve with their website.

Tell them the benefits of having one.

Show them successful businesses in their niche that are benefiting from having a website (for example if you approached a local restaurant you could point them at your local McDonalds website).

Tell them what exactly they’ll get from you if they hire your services. Make the package so appealing that there’s no way in hell they’ll turn you down.

I like to offer the domain, the website set up, hosting, maintenance and content updates. I’ve charged anywhere between $500 to upwards of $1,000 for a simple 5-10 page website and the thing is… businesses are ecstatic with what they receive.

If you look offline, you’ll notice that local services can often charge tens of thousands of dollars for websites that look like shit, like they were designed in five minutes using Dreamweaver. If you can offer them a better solution at a fraction of the price, who’s going to turn you down?

Make sure you take care of anything ‘techie’ – ask the business owner what they want on their website, how they want it to look and you can take care of the rest. Of course, keep them updated via email or phone and you could even run other ideas (like sticking up an opt in form, personalized emails or videos depending on the niche). Don’t rip them off but conversely don’t sell yourself short.

The reason I don’t recommend this as a long term thing (and the reason I stopped doing it) is that although it can be easy money, especially if you outsource it… it becomes too much like a normal job as you have to keep looking for clients. Exactly the same reason I stopped freelancing. The whole point of IM is passive income streams, or (at least for me) using your creativity to destroy and make yourself huge amounts of income… for me, this model can become repetitive fast.

Of course, it’s not a bad way to get together your first four, five figures capital to invest in your online projects.

Now… as for actually setting up the website.

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I love outsourcing. Partly because I’m lazy, partly because I don’t have the skills to do the stuff myself (or it would take me too long to do it).

The best place to find cheap people to outsource to is job boards like Elance, GetAFreelancer, RentACoder etc (need to pay to list). You can also try forums like Digital Point. Make sure you get each freelancer you work with on some sort of email / instant messenger so you can keep on using them (even when you stop with the offline thing).

You shouldn’t aim to pay more than $50 – $100 for a fully setup, customized (custom logo if need or customized colours) website. When you’re charging $500… you can see, the rest is profit.

You may want to do the work yourself even, if you’re capable.

Keep in touch with business owners, give them a call every so often to see how things are going – you’ll often find that they want various updates or have friends that want to use your services. Nothing sells you better than a happy customer telling their friends.

Sorry for the delay in posting – we were waiting for the new theme to be done before the next theme went up but the coder has proved surprisingly difficult to contact over the last week and a half.

One of the newer features of posts on this site is that we will try to reply to questions – so if there’s something about this specific method that you don’t understand, drop a comment and we’ll try to respond. Cheers!

First off – no, we’ll be keeping this blog for the forseeable future (unless someone makes us an awesome offer). We did receive a couple of tentative offers in the one thousand dollar range but turned them down as this blog is already worth a bit more than that. I’m not going to make excuses for why this wasn’t updated – the simple reason is that Casey was away on business and I was away on vacation (and at the time, way too out of it to worry about blogging). I’m back now and he will be soon so we can push on with this.

I’m going to be honest with you – both of us are busy, and this blog is free. Yes, it is important, but we don’t have the time to update frequently. We will be updating – the goal is one post a week; sometimes it may be a few more, sometimes a few less. However, each of our guide posts will hopefully teach people something, for the cost of nothing. That’s why I recommend subscribing – to be honest, I don’t really care about metrics like how many page views this blog gets, how many clickthroughs and whatnot – if you subscribe, you get updates emailed to you on the day they go out, whenever they go out. You can do that here.

Although we didn’t plan to really make money with this blog, it’s already generated around $500 in revenue, most of that through a tiny link for Poll Factory in the email / zip submit post. I see potential, and I’m willing to wait and work towards making this blog big… but patiently.

We’re still going to be following the same plan we were before – guides and interviews. Guides about various ways to make money online, and interviews with those that are currently doing it. Two other things we want to run with is a contest (cash prize and easy to participate in – will probably just require subscribing, as we don’t want to make people have to jump through too many hoops) and the new theme. Unfortunately the person that was supposed to create the theme flaked out on us at the last minute and now we need to find another one.

We can cover the interviews, the guides, the theme, the contest ourselves. However, we really want to hear from you guys – that’s who we’re running this for. Without your wants, your opinions, we can’t do jack.

So let us know what guides you want to see (any specific way to make money online you want discussed?), who you want to see interviewed, any ideas you have for this blog. User contributed feedback is the easiest and most useful way to know how a blog is doing.

Thanks again for sticking with us!

First off – the credit for this idea has to go to Keith Kogane, who brought it to my attention through this awesome Warrior Forum thread. A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even think about starting an automated niche blog; when back I plan to run a few hundred of them. The thread is old but the idea works.

I constantly test different ways to make money online… now I have no problems with admitting that most of them don’t work. You can’t get lucky all the time, and individual people aren’t good at everything. The key is to keep testing until you find things that work, and then build on those methods.

Anyways, blogging is commonly tipped as one of the best ways to make money online – build a website, put out good content, and the visitors will come. Sadly real life doesn’t work like that.

You can make money blogging – but don’t count on your blog becoming one of the biggest in its niche.To build a single large blog that you can live off, you’ll need to have thousands and thousands of visitors.

This is why the concept of niche blogging is becoming more and more popular these days.

And of course, the best thing about automated niche blogs… is that once you’ve set them up, you can forget about them… because they’re automated!

The Duplicate Content Myth.

If you visit most webmaster / marketing forums, you’ll find people scrambling over themselves to warn others about the “duplicate content penalty”. Woe betide anyone that has even a sentence of duplicate content on their blog as the mighty Google doesn’t like it.

Luckily for you, that’s all BS.

As long as you don’t have duplicate content on the same website, you’re fine.

You can use the same article in multiple places without any issues. You can take articles from article directories that have been used countless of times before, you can use private label rights content… neither will affect your ability to rank in big G.

You will notice that quite a few of the largest websites out there – Yahoo included – are not much more than syndicated content from elsewhere.

Anyways, let’s talk about the automated niche blog model.

You can read the above thread to find out more about this, but I’m going to put out the results of my tests, as well as what I did.

I setup one blog with this idea, not expecting much. I already had the blog idea in mind, but didn’t have the time to organize unique content for it, so working with an automated solution seemed a good enough idea to me.

I bought the domain – a .NET three word domain with the keywords I was trying to target in it; used Fantastico to setup a simple Wordpress blog on my reseller account.

I decided to go with Adsense for this blog, as I couldn’t really find decent affiliate products for the niche and didn’t want to spend too long searching. I already had the niche in mind, and knew it was hot because it’s a fairly large niche.

Now, the above thread recommends you pick an optimized theme. I like to use Pilkster on my Adsense niche websites, so used it for this one. It’s a nice, easy to customize (all you do is change your Adsense pub-ID in). Delete all links in the footer except the one back to Pilkster.

Next, we have to automate the blogging process. You already have a theme and blog with your Adsense ads, so all you have to do is start publishing content.

To find RSS feeds that are relevant, I use Google.

Just type in “keyword blog” in Google and you’ll find plenty of potential blogs for you to use.

Choose 4-5 good ones. The above thread recommends using WP-O-Matic plugin; I installed that, but saw you had to do a cron-job which scared me (I’m a tech newb and have no idea what that is – it’s probably very simple but hey) so decided to go with Feed Wordpress, something I’ve used in the past and know how to work.

It also recommends using the GoCodes plugin to redirect common phrases to affiliate links (for example, on a weight loss blog, you could redirect how to lose weight to a product like Fat Loss 4 Idiots). I didn’t use GoCodes for this blog as I couldn’t find products, but will try it on a few other ones.

Remember to change your permalinks structure for posts. Change them under your Wordpress dashboard, Settings, Permalinks; choose custom and enter in /%postname%/

Lastly, install Google XML Sitemaps and build a sitemap.

Next step (now that you have posts going out) – submit your blog to Digg. Create or use a new / undeveloped account for this; you don’t care about promoting it, just about the high powered backlink. Ping the Digg entry using Pingoat or Pingomatic.

You should see your blog indexed in Google within 24 hours, usually 1-2 hours. This little trick works for any kind of website, so go wild with it.

Next step… the ping list and the RSS feed directory submissions.

For the RSS feed submissions, I outsource these on every blog I create. You can find a list of decent places to submit to in this article by Susan Suarez.

The ping list… my list isn’t massive but it’s good enough.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp
http://blogbot.dk
http://blogdb.jp
http://blogmatcher.com
http://bulkfeeds.net
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net
http://rpc.blogrolling.com
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://topicexchange.com
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net
http://www.blogroots.com
http://www.blogshares.com
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com
http://www.lasermemory.com
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com
http://www.popdex.com
http://www.snipsnap.org
http://www.weblogues.com
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

You can copy and paste the above list into your Wordpress admin, under Settings ==> Writing.

With all the above, you should generally start seeing a trickle of visitors start flow in… sometimes quite a bit more than a trickle if you syndicate content from multiple blogs.

End results? Of course, this is the most important thing.

My Adsense blog has so far made $8.62 in three days. Enough to live off? Definitely not. A hugely positive figure for the amount of work put in, and considering I’ll never have to work on this blog again? Hell yes!

I plan to build as many of these as possible. The above one has already paid for it’s domain, which is the only cost (I get RSS feed submission under a bulk deal) per site. One hundred sites making $2/day is two hundred dollars per days… hehe.

Remember, test, tweak, see what works, see what doesn’t. Good luck!

Hope everyone that reads this blog has a good Christmas, mine was awesome albeit I’m a tad drunk at the moment.

We’ve slowed down posts in the last week because people will be away for the holidays (the last week of December tends to be one of the worst for traffic in this niche) but will pick up in the New Year.

This blog still hasn’t gone through it’s ‘proper’ launch yet… the advice we hooked you up with so far was just a light pre launch and we’re going to go the whole way in the New Year. Just in case you’ve missed the posts currently on site:

Make Money With Email / Zip Submits

Joint Venture Online To Make Money Offline

Make Money With Email Lists

How To Make Money With Cookie Stuffing

Make Money With Wordpress Themes

We plan to bring you much, much more.

At the moment this blog is on a premium Wordpress theme, which although nice and functional, doesn’t really stand out… something I’ve never been content with. Casey is working on finding someone to commission a custom Wordpress theme for us – if you feel up for the job send in your portfolio and price to MMDynamo@gmail.com

We’re looking for a high quality Wordpress theme, one that’s better than most out there… however we’re also willing to pay more than your average buyer and for working with us you’ll get exposure to a large list of smart internet marketers (they’ve subscribed to this blog so have to be pretty intelligent, remember – haha); something that will do you well in terms of referral business if your work is good.

Merry Christmas again – I hope all of you enjoy it!

Despite his success, Steven hasn’t lost touch with others – something that many of those doing well online are accused of. I sent emails to a few marketers, some accepted but most ignored me – Steven responded in less than a day from when I private messaged him on the Warrior Forum, and replied to my emails with the questions in less than thirty minutes! The interview is posted below, and it’s our first one – feel free to add any comments or suggestions. =)

JP – Jason Pereira (me)

SW – Steven Wagenheim

JP: Hey Steven, thanks for agreeing to the interview. How did you get started generating income on the internet?

SW: I got started when I lost my corporate America job back in 1999. I actually didn’t start right away. I spent several years trying to find other employment, but after not having any luck, in January of 2003, I turned to the Internet. It was a long hard climb. My first 5 months I made all of $28 simply because I had no business plan and no direction. I had a lot of learning to do to get me to where I am today.

JP: How much on average do you make per month, and where does that income come from?

SW: Right now, I am averaging about $11,000 a month. That income comes from a variety of sources such as eBook sales, membership sites, Adsense and freelancing my article writing and copywriting services. I have a rather odd business model as I don’t do just one thing. I also have a vast number of products that I promote. So if you look at my income and then see what I do to get it, it’s really not all that impressive. It’s just a lot of little pieces added together to make a decent whole number.

JP: Our readers are constantly on the lookout for high quality products that will help them add to their income. Could you tell us a little more about your “Make Money Today” WSO report?

SW: Well, it’s really very simple. I show people how to capitalize on the latest hot trends of the Internet. I show them how to find them, how to determine which ones are good, how to write content for them, and essentially give them a promotional model that is dirt cheap in order to profit off these trends. In actuality, you can do this model with absolutely no out of pocket expense. That’s the thing I like best about it. Plus, this model can use just about any income generating program such as Amazon, CPA offers, Adsense, or even Clickbank affiliate products. It’s very versatile.

JP: What’s your philosophy on succeeding online? Can anyone do it or do you need a lot of luck to get started?

SW: Luck is the last thing you need. There is no luck at all involved. It comes down to three basic things, niche research, a solid business model and either the skills to do the required work or the money to outsource it and have it done for you. In other words, there is no quick and easy button to push. It takes work and commitment and if you’re not prepared to put that into your business, don’t quit your day job.

JP: You’re a very reputed and established member on the Warrior Forum, with over 10,000 posts. How has this added to your income?

SW: Well, it’s gotten me a lot of respect, especially since I am constantly making posts sharing a ton of valuable information for free. In return, people check out my signature, see what I have to offer, opt into my lists, and many of them purchase my products. My income, since coming to the Warrior Forum and being a contributing member (that’s the key) has more than doubled. But it took a lot of hard work and commitment, just like anything else.

JP: What’s a hot niche you’d recommend article marketers attack right now?

SW: There is no such thing. Any niche with a demand can be made profitable. All you need to do is think about the problems that you have in your everyday life and then see if there is a solution out there that exists. If so, sell it as an affiliate. If not, and you have the smarts to come up with one, create your own product and sell it yourself. If it’s good enough, word will spread, you’ll get affiliates, and you’ll make even more. This isn’t rocket science. It all comes down to demand. If people want it badly enough, they’ll buy it, especially if it solves a burning need and/or problem.

JP: Have you ever used or tested blackhat methods in aspects of your online business?

SW: No. I don’t even know what they are. So I can’t even comment any further on this. I run my business using standard methods. They work just fine for me. I’m not passing judgment on black hatters. It’s just not for me.

JP: Do you run a high traffic and well promoted blog of your own? If yes, what is it? If no, why not?

SW: My blog gets modest traffic. I don’t really promote it actively. You won’t even see a forum link for it. If anybody is interested, the URL is:

http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/

Right now I have about 265 articles up there so there is plenty for people to read and educate themselves on. I cover many topics including article writing, copywriting, marketing and business planning. There’s a whole education there for free.

JP: Last but not least… if we could “exploit” your brainpower, please share a way that people can start making money from scratch within the next week.

SW: The easiest way is to do the following:

1. Go to Clickbank marketplace. Find a good selling product with a gravity between 30 and 70. This way you’re not going against too much competition.

2. Contact the product owner and ask for a review copy. Tell him you want to promote it. Nine out of ten times, they’ll say yes.

3. Go through the product and write a review of it.

4. Get a blog at blogger picking a name that’s relevant to the niche.

5. Post the review of the product on the blog. Make sure you put your affiliate link to the product after the review with a strong call to action to check it out.

6. Write a series of articles on the topic and submit them to Ezine Articles. In your resource box, have a strong call to action to your blog where the review is.

That’s it. It’s simple and won’t cost them a dime. I make as many as 20 sales or more a month for some products and it doesn’t take a lot of time. The key is writing a good article and a good review.

If your readers have trouble writing articles, they can pick up a copy of my Complete Article Writing and Marketing Guide here:

http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html

This isn’t rocket science. After a while, you’ll be doing this in your sleep. It’s that easy.

JP: Thanks again for the interview, I’m sure our readers will benefit from your knowledge. Good luck in your business ventures, and I hope your success increases tenfold! =)

SW: Thank you Jason. It was a pleasure.

That’s our first interview – the story of how a currently successful marketer got started, his tips on doing well online and a step by step method revealed on how you can start making money within the week. Steven’s proof that going at it hard and not giving up works, so make sure you follow suit!

What is cookie stuffing?

Cookie stuffing is basically embedding your cookies into someone else’s computer. That is, your affiliate link.

When someone performs an action based on your affiliate link, it will be the same result as if they had clicked your affiliate link – however, they will not know it. In this way, you can rack up $100s in affiliate commissions.

How do you cookie stuff?

Cookie stuffing is pretty easy.

The first thing you do is edit your .htaccess file under your web hosting. If you do not have a .htaccess file, create one in Notepad and upload it.

The below is what you will need to put in your .htaccess file:

Redirect /img1.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink1.com
Redirect /img2.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink2.com
Redirect /img3.jpg http://www.youraffiliatelink3.com

Remember to make sure that those images do not exist.

You can put as many affiliate links as you want, of different kinds of affiliate programs.The ones that work well are eBay (pays up to $35 commission per person), GoDaddy, Hostgator (pays up to $100 per sale!) and other hosting companies. However, you can use any kind of affiliate you like, although higher paying ones are obviously better.

Spend one day going through affiliate organizations like Commission Junction, NeverBlue Ads, Pepperjam etc and looking for affiliate programs that look good.

Once you have a few programs decided, you are good to go. Now let’s talk about three ideas that you can use to send your cookie stuffing profits through the roof.

First off; if you really want to make the most out of cookie stuffing, you will need to buy traffic (if you do not have a website with high traffic already). Why is this? Because if you have 2,000 impressions and 2,000 clicks, of course your affiliate company is going to get suspicious and you will get banned.

If you are going to stay low, you do not need to buy traffic, but why do you want to stay low? You can do this in bulk, just be smart.

Place your uncloaked affiliate link on a normal webpage that you own and pay for traffic to it. Junk traffic will be fine, but send it through somewhere like TinyURL first.

You can find providers of traffic on various webmaster forums like Digital Point or V7N. You can buy 100,000 visitors for just $40 or less. Try and stick with a traffic provider that allows you to set the number of hits you can deliver per day or per hour et cetera. Take a small package to test out your traffic provider, and then order in bulk if it is good.

How to cookie stuff on forums

On forums, all you do is place your images (that are not real) inside IMG tags and you will be cookie stuffing. For example, something like:

[IMG]http://www.yourwebsite.com/img1.jpg[/IMG]

If you are satisifed with the amount of clicks you’ve gotten, delete the code from your .htaccess file. As there is no real image, your code will remain invisible and someone will only sees it if they view source.

There are many cookie stuffing eBooks around, but they all tell you to use forums… in fact, nearly 90% of cookie stuffing eBooks tell you to use Digital Point. It is way too saturated on Digital Point and anyways, you will be getting a lot of useless affiliate cookies embedded from people that are never going to look at your affiliate link… if you want to earn with this, you need to look for targeted users that will make you money.

Let’s talk about how to find those targeted users, and three methods that you can use to make a whole lot of money cookie stuffing.

Targeted users on forums

Stop using places like Digital Point. It’s a waste of time.

As with ‘normal’ affiliate marketing, you want the most targeted users possible to be cookie stuffed so that you will save a lot of time and make a lot of money.

An easy thing to make money off cookie stuffing is with hosting referrals. I made over $2,100 in a month when I was doing this off hosting referrals, and this was all paid out.

All I did was start a few threads on various popular hosting forums, asking a leading question.

What is a leading question? A leading question is a question which you KNOW what more often than not the answer is going to be.

The question I asked (and a few variations of it) was something like:

Is Hostgator Worth the Price?

Now… as Hostgator only costs $0.01 for the first month, I expected answers to be positive… and they were. Of course, I used the above way to stuff my Hostgator cookie in everyone that looked at the thread.

Can you imagine what a newbie looking to buy hosting would think when she or he sees the thread? All they will see is people talking about how cheap it is, and even if there might be problems with Hostgator sometimes, $0.01 was cheap enough for it not to matter.

The good thing is… if you do this on aged forums, there is a good chance that your thread will rank highly for some search engine terms. Meaning long term income. Rinse and repeat for as many different hosting companies as you like.

Is that idea not enough for you? Here’s more.

Join an eBay forum, and start a thread something like “If you HAVEN’T joined eBay, why not?”

This question means that most of the people viewing your thread will (guess what) not have joined eBay yet. And with eBay paying so much commission (up to $35 per user) all you have to do is prod them gently (tell them some of the benefits) and stuff your cookie link. You’ll not just get the signup commission, but also commission on anything they purchase for the first few days.

Another idea… join a blogging forum and ask something like “Do Pay Per Post payout?”. Most people that have used them will say yes, and people seeing the thread that have not joined PPP yet will be happy to join a reputable posting company. Of course, you get $15 per registered user.

Another idea… join a forum where people talk about specific books (for example, a marketing forum would discuss marketing books). Ask a question like “Should I read books by Famous Author?” and stuff your Amazon affiliate link for his best few. People are going to say you should and any marketer looking at the thread may pick one or two up, netting you a few dollars commission.

An example of where I cookie stuffed in the past was for the popular information product called “Make $150/Month On Autopilot” which was about Matched.co.uk (now defunct).

That eBook was sold with master resale rights meaning soon enough there were dozens of people selling, giving it away on forums. Every thread that I came across doing this, I stuffed my affiliate link and ended up with more than fifty referrals, paid out.

Just look for targeted forums and targeted affiliate programs that pay out well and you’ll start making money.

The best forum for cookie stuffing is deal forums. You know, forums where people talk about the best kind of deals.

An example of one HUGE deal forum is:

http://forums.slickdeals.net

As you can see, there are more than 73,000 active users, all looking to save (and thus SPEND) money. Just browse through your CJ account and cookie stuff as many times as you can for as many different (TARGETED) programs as you can.

A way you can find targeted forums is of course our good friend Google… find a good offer, type in “ keyword niche forum” and cookie stuff. How hard is that?

On to the next method. This method is very blackhat and not for the weak of heart.

Cookie Stuffing Blog Contests

If you read blogs, you’ll know that there are a lot of blog contests going on – sometimes maybe even too many you’d say. However, the more blog contests, the BETTER.

Why? Because blog contests are cookie stuffing paradise.

For example, a large webmaster forum held a blog contest a while ago with loads of prizes. What does loads of prizes mean for us? Loads of targeted interest.

One of the requirements in the contest to get more points was to sign up for Pepperjam – who paid $5/referral. Now, imagine if you had cookie stuffed your affiliate link in that same contest thread; they had at least 100 signups, maybe even more than that. How good a return on time is that for having to make one single post?

At the time I did not get in on the contest, however a marketer I knew stuffed his link on the second page and had more than twenty referrals sign up.

Any contests that require people to signup for an affiliate network is gold because most affiliate networks either offer a) a lifetime percentage of commission or b) a flat fee per signup.

At the moment for example, some affiliate networks offer 5% commission or more lifetime AND sponsor quite a few blog contests. Are your wheels ticking? Leave a comment stuffing your cookie and you can easily get a few signups. Even if you get 100 signups, and only one of them makes $100/day (which is possible) then you are making $150/month doing no work for the rest of your life.

Again, look for targeted contests with high prizes (which means high interest) and requirements that people signup or do an action that will benefit YOU.

Cookie Stuffing eBay

This is just another idea for you guys… cookie stuffing eBay users.

What you do is list something that people will be interested in… really, really cheap. For example, the latest sports car, a house, even technical gadgets like the XBOX, Nintendo Wii, Playstation, iPhone… you get the idea.

Start it at a cheap price, like $0.01 – this guarantees lots of people looking at your auctions. People that are likely to buy on eBay, since your auction is on eBay.

Now… you can try cookie stuffing in the auction listing itself, however I wouldn’t as a) you have no control and b) it is too dangerous as it is easy for eBay to find out.

The way you get around it is saying that something like you could not upload pictures on eBay, so people can check it out at your website (you can use a Blogspot blog). Make sure you cookie stuff them on that Blogspot blog.

The problem is that you may get people interested in your listing.. however the way around this is to use pictures of broken things. Search for “smashed up console” on Google images, take one of those and put it up on your website.

Of course, no one is going to be interested in your auction after that… however you don’t care! Your affiliate cookie is embedded in their computer, and anything they buy over the next few days is your commission.

The higher priced items you do this with, the more money you will make. People looking to buy a house or car will have $xxx,xxx to spend or maybe even more and although they will not buy in your listing, if they DO buy their house or car on eBay you will make hundreds of dollars in affiliate commission.

Note that some are being sued for large scale eBay stuffing. If you keep it to small amounts, you can do this successfully however this is a blackhat method that is short term. There are other blackhat methods which are longer term which I’ll be covering in a few later posts.

Lastly, this post (again) is purely educational. Neither I or Jason cookie stuff anymore however both of us have made money in some ways doing it before. If you want to try this, stay safe, don’t get greedy. We hold no responsibility should you get banned.

With an email list, especially a targeted one, you have immediate leverage in your niche – you can sell products directly to them or as an affiliate, and even joint venture with others to increase both your levels of income.

Of course, you have to provide value to your list or else they are going to ignore you. Make sure that you focusing on providing value FIRST and making money SECOND. By doing this, you will not just build trust and credibility in the eyes of your readers, but also eventually make more money.

Email marketing is all about conversion rate. The *standard* theory is that it takes seven high quality emails on average to produce a sale.

Of course this can differ depending on the price of product, what niche you are marketing in and how credible you are before hand. A well known marketer may only need a single email to sell a product, whereas you may need to work with ten.

First, you need a high quality autoresponder service to manage your emails and subscribers.

There are free ones available but I do not recommend them. Firstly, most of them have ads for other / unrelated services that will vastly decrease your conversion rate. Secondly, when you do decide to move to a paid service, you will have to transfer and risk losing most of your subscriber base.

Start out with a well known autoresponder service – you can even pay monthly or use their free trial to test them out before you commit.

I personally recommend Aweber – I’ve used it for the last few months and have been very pleased with it.

Aweber’s service starts at just $19 per month and it is well worth it. They’re one of, if not the most well known and well used autoresponder services in the business and the functions they offer make it very easy to get started with email marketing. They also have a set of videos and tutorials to help you make the most out of your experience. Sign up for Aweber today.

After you have your autoresponder, you will want to setup a landing page. You can create this by yourself if you know HTML, or find free landing page templates using Google.

We used a simple Wordpress make to create our landing page which was worked pretty well so far. You can check it out here.

As all you’re asking for is a name and email (which is free to the end user) you don’t want to make your landing page too long. Information overload is definitely a problem for most users online, and they don’t have the time to spend thirty minutes reading your landing page.

I’d suggest you provide an incentive – we did this by offering a report detailing how I made $5,030 off a product flip; everyone loves something for free.

State the benefits of your freebie, provide proof if possible (may not be possible in some niches) and clearly mention that the information you’re providing is valuable but is being given away free.

You don’t need to have your landing page look world class (it helps though, obviously) but make sure it doesn’t look like crap. This is why I love using Wordpress, as there are countless templates that look good and cost nothing. Any of which you can use.

After you setup your landing page, you want to have at least one or two emails going out. Try and mention how often you’ll be sending emails, but give yourself a little bit of leeway. Don’t promise something and then not deliver.

If you setup Aweber’s blog broadcast function, your subscribers will automatically have blog posts sent to them via email. Like we’re doing on this blog. If you already have content going out, you can update less manually, as long as that content is of high quality of course.

Setup the incentive you offered as your first message – it will go out immediately. Some people will unsubscribe instantly after they get the freebie, but don’t worry about that. Most will stick around to see what you have to offer, especially if the information is of high quality.

Now, it’s time for the numbers…

A small list will not tend to make you huge money (that is, enough income that you can live off monthly). Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but most often you will need a list of at least 1,000 subscribers before you start seeing a trickle of income. If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers, and a 10% conversion rate (which can be built by offering them value over a period of time), you will make $2,000 if you offer them a $20 product.

You can build your list of 1,000 in less than a year. We’ve done it in less than a week.

How? Make sure you provide value, and make sure that you get your opt in form in front of as many eyes as possible.

If you aim to build a list of 1,000 subscribers in a year, that’s only around 3 subscribers a day (take a few days off to relax!). Once you break that huge figure down, it’s not that hard is it?

Three subscribers a day, or even double or triple that is easy if you are willing to work at it. Of course, some people don’t know where to start, which is what we’re here for.

Here’s some ways you can use to increase your subscriber count:

1. Killer landing page. In the internet marketing niche, this is not as necessary, but in other niches where people are not as used to opting in for things you’ll want your landing page to be as good as possible. Keep it simple, yes, but make sure it doesn’t look like garbage and offer testimonials if you can.

2. Article Marketing. The key in article marketing is to target longer keywords that are easier to rank for. The full process for article marketing cannot be covered in this post, but there are plenty of tutorials out there. We will cover article marketing in depth in a future post.

3. Video Marketing. Video marketing is becoming more and more popular of late with sites like Youtube, Viddler and Metacafe generating millions of pageviews per month. Create a simple video talking about your website, link to your landing page in the description.

4. Forums. A large part of our list was built using forums. Forums are a great resource – post quality content and place the link to your squeeze page in your signature, and you’ll not just prompt people to subscribe but also build up your level of trust and credibility just from forum posting.

5. Joint Venture. You’ll need to have a medium – large size list (at least 100) but once you attain that figure you can joint venture with other marketers to build both your lists together. How it works is that you promote his/her list and they do the same – you could also offer a freebie and they could reciprocate.

6. Blogs. Blogs are a great way to build a list – not just off your own, but off other blogs too. Look for medium to large sized blogs in your niche and ask if you can guest post on their website. Link to your squeeze page in your author bio. If your guest post is good, you’ll see people subscribe – you can also outsource the guest posts.

7. Ezines. Some niches have special, large ezines that you can advertise in for a set price. Most blogs and forums will have this as well. Create a well written ad and people will click through to your landing page – depending on how good your landing page is, you’ll see subscribers.

8. Pay Per Click. This is not for newbies, but if you have reasonable experience you could drive traffic to your landing page using pay per click services like Adwords. Make sure you target your ads so that you don’t waste money. Subscribers, those that are looking for information are worth a lot of money – as long as you can get subscribers cheap, you’re doing well.

9. Offline. Going to a marketing conference? Create business cards with your landing page URL on the back and hand them out to whoever you meet. Make a good impression and people will be rushing home to type in that URL. If you want to get it in front of more eyes, create tshirts, signs, advertise on radio… it’s all up to your imagination.

10. SEO. This will take longer than most of the methods above but will ultimately build you the best kinds of subscribers. Do search engine optimization on your landing page (meta tags, h1 / h2, targeted links etc) over time and get it to rank for targeted keywords. If you can do this successfully you can build up a list of many subscribers, all potential customers in the future.

Above are ten things you can do to increase your opt in list. If you can get yourself just one subscriber per method per day, you’ll get 3,650 per year. Simplistic? Yes, but most things online are.

You can also work with other ideas – for example using social networks like Facebook / Myspace to build subscribers. Be creative! If you have any questions feel free to ask below.

If you want to make money, you can’t keep doing the same kinds of things that everyone else is. Often, you have to do things better than everyone else… or think out of the box. Thinking out of the box, that is being creative is a skill that you can learn over time.

I’m continually buzzing with ideas… now I’ll admit, most of them fail. Some of them DO hit it off though, and when they do they tend to do it well. Here’s one of them. I shared this on another blog a few months ago but wasn’t as in depth as I’m going to be here.

Fluff apart, let’s get started.

The offline world is a lot, lot easier than the online one – first off, you don’t have to (generally) compete with people living in other countries who can charge less for anything because their cost of living is less; secondly, as long as you do it right, it’s always easier to sell face to face rather than through email.

Most of you will know about the idea of offering website creation services to local businesses – this is something I’ve used extensively in the past, but will not be covering today. We’ll save that for another time.

What I will be covering though, involves no selling, no website creation, and you won’t even have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to.

What’s this magical thing? Offline contests.

You seen, on the whole offline companies tend to be less creative and less clued in (I’m talking about small to medium sized businesses here) than online companies.

A lot of them will run contests – often with huge (relative) dollar amounts. Over here in Dubai, which is not the most developed country out there, there are usually weekly or monthly contests. Most of you guys will find more of these in the countries that you stay in.

One example of a contest would be that for the logo design for a company. Some companies here have offered up to 10,000 dirhams (around $3,000 USD) to have their logo created. You also see contests for naming various monuments, for good photos to be sent in, for stories, for poems… you get the idea.

What I’ve done, and done successfully in the past is outsourced those tasks (for free!) online by joint venturing with freelancers, and splitting the profit with them should I win.

There are a lot of freelancers on various webmaster forums – Digital Point, Sitepoint, V7N, Namepros, the Warrior Forum just to name a few… that charge very little for quality. For example, the logo for this blog cost around ten bucks.

If you offer them the chance to make ten times that, most will be interested. So here’s what I did.

A company offline here ran a logo contest (they were an engineering company). The prize offered was equivalent to roughly $900 USD.

I’d been thinking of doing this for some time, so a few days before the contest just decided to run with it. I started a logo contest on a webmaster forum offering $100 to the winner, and had slightly more than twenty designs submitted. All of which I sent in. The contest ran for a week, both offline and online.

That’s 20+ different concepts, ranging from medium to high quality. End result? I won the contest, paid the freelancer whose design was chosen $100, and pocketed $800 for myself. No work whatsoever on my part other than emailing the designs to the company.

This however could be seen as unethical – for some reason I felt bad. So what I did for the next contest was contact 4-5 of the best freelancers, and told them what I was doing. Contests ran for $X amount here, and if I won I’d share 25 – 50% of the prize. Which was obviously a lot more than they were used to getting.

If I didn’t win, I didn’t pay. Most agreed with this, because a one time win would cover them creating around 20+ logos at the prices they usually charged. If they didn’t win, they got to use the logos in their portfolio anyways, so it was practise at the very least.

As long as you’re up front, there is nothing wrong with doing this. I won a few more contests over the next few months, nothing for as much as the original amount but I won a few contests with the prize amount of around $500 or more.

Another contest I entered offline was that a large newspaper ran here. They ran it weekly, and paid around $300 USD for the *best* photo sent in (chosen by them). The kicker was that you didn’t have to take the photo yourself, it could be one that you found.

I knew that *cute* photos (the ones with a dog and a duck cuddling etc, you get the idea) are loved by people, so I went to a few stock photo websites, looked for those kinds of photos and asked the photographer for the same kind of deal. Most were happy to comply.

Photos at IStockPhoto (for example) used to cost $1 – $10. I won the contest offline four times before the paper stopped running it (sadly!). Total result? Around $1,000+ net profit, and again, little to none work on my part.

You can do this for contests in your country, and make yourself a ton of cash. Again, be up front with the freelancers you work with and you’ll have no problems whatsoever.

Another idea is contests where short stories are sent in… with the winner getting a dollar figure. You could contact writers on writing forums, ask them if they were interested in a percentage split of the money. As long as you explain yourself well, most will be happy to take you up on your offer.

Another idea… is the *guess the score* challenge that they run offline for various sports. I’m a huge fan of football (soccer to those in the USA ), specifically the English Premier League.

Now… I suck at guessing the score, because I predict with my heart rather than my head. So even if the team I support is playing a difficult game, I’d predict them to win (and they likely end up losing or drawing). If their rivals are playing difficult games, I’d predict them to lose or draw (and they likely end up winning).

What I did was contact the person who was leading an online version of predict the score, and asked him for his predictions for the week – basically telling him what I was going to do. He sent them to me saying that I could use them at no cost.

End result? I got seven out of ten results right, and won myself free television subscription to the sports channels for a year. Which was worth around $300 – $500 USD. I plan to use this strategy on a few betting websites, and I will update here in future with my findings if it works.

Be creative, and you’ll make money. Of course, the key for this (and all other ideas) is first tweaking it to suit you, and then taking action. You don’t take action, you’ll never make money. Good luck, and feel free to ask questions if you have them!

Jason