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So I have finally done it. I have finally opened up the video tutorials that I have been talking so much about. I have called my program The WordPress Classroom. It has videos about setting up the blog all the way through installing various plugins and hiding affiliate links.

All of the videos are not done yet so I will upload more as they are finished. I just wanted to get this online and going so people can have access to them now. I know a lot of people from Alex Jeffrey’s course will get great use from these.

Please give me your feedback in the comments below!

I don’t know why I call these sneaky marketing tricks. They are really tricks that help you earn commissions but add value to your customer.

Offer a complement.
The main trick that I like to use involves adding a complement to the product that you are trying to sell. If you remember in my previous post about how to make a WordPress theme, I offered to personally create the theme for anybody who signed up through PowWeb. This little technique can be used for so many different products. I am a fan of the theme creator Artisteer, so I offer free tutorials and personal help to anybody who purchases through my link. If you can think of creative ways to complement the product that you are trying to sell, you can gain an upper hand against the competition selling the same product.

In the past, I have also pushed products through Clickbank. This method works extremely well for digital products as well. The trick that I like to use is that I look for areas where the e-book or digital video product may be lacking a little bit. I then explain to my readers how this product lacks. But then I offer a complement to the product to offset the deficiency. It is an insanely powerful marketing method. The whole idea behind this method is that you are grabbing people who would buy the product anyway but convincing them to purchase it through you instead of somebody else.

Offer your product for free.
The other technique that I commonly use is to flat-out offer a really great product for free. Give the people who are going to be reading or using this product extreme value. When somebody accesses your product and they see what great value you offer, they are going to want more, and they are going to want to purchase your follow-up products. This technique also relates to list building. You offer your product for free in exchange for an e-mail address. Once people realize the great value that you are giving to them for free, you will have them on a mailing list to offer your follow-up products. This technique only works if your free product is truly a great product. If you offer the people a crap product, they are going to think that your paid product is crap as well.

Only promote products that you feel strongly about.
Many online consumers have an ability to see past insincere product promotions. It is important to promote products that you have used and that you feel strongly about. This works in two ways. First, it is so much easier for you to write about it because you feel strongly about it and you understand its worth. You can honestly recommend this product and feel confident that the people you are recommending it to will enjoy it as well. Besides, if you are offering a complement to the product, how will you know what to offer or how to offer it if you do not really know what you are promoting? The second reason this is important is because most online consumers can feel your passion and your sincerity towards the product. It is so much easier to sell a product. When you know exactly what you are promoting and exactly how your customers will benefit from it.

Use some of these “tricks” and watch your commissions grow. Have any other tricks or want to let me know how these have worked for you? Please leave your comments. I love the interaction.

So you’ve got this really sweet blog setup. You have a cool theme installed, you’ve got all the plugins that make the blog really kick butt, you’ve got some affiliate links sprinkled in to make a few bucks here and there and you’ve got a ton of tools to make your online life so much easier. There’s one problem… How the heck are you really going to get people to your site? I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there are so many different ways out there to generate traffic to your blog. The bad news is that they all require either quite a bit of time and hard work or money. If you really want to get anywhere in the business, you are going to need to spend one of the two, either time or money.

Be active in your niche’s community.
I can not stress this enough. This is the biggest thing and the fastest way to build free traffic to your blog. Find as many other blogs as you can that are in your niche, read the posts on those blogs, and leave good, relevant comments. Don’t give them the crappy “great post” comments. Those will usually get tossed out as spam. Read the post and try to add a comment that will add to the topic. Give input or more information that the readers of that blog will enjoy and get something out of. People will come to your blog if they think they can learn something from you.

Jump in to the forums that are related to your niche. I guarantee that there is a forum for your niche, no matter what the niche is. There’s always a forum. Get in to that forum, put your blog’s address in your signature, and make helpful, useful comments. The more valuable and relevant your comments are, the faster they will convert in to traffic. Once again, stay away from comments like nice post or good idea. Give people something that adds to the conversation. You are much better off not commenting at all than leaving a plain, boring comment. People will get irritated and will be counterproductive.

Another method of giving to your niche’s community is to write guest posts. Find blogs that are in your niche and write a post for them. E-mail them before you write the post, give them compliments on their blog, and ask if they would be interested in letting you write a guest post for them. Give them three or four ideas of things that you would like to write about. Let them pick the topic. Using this method, you have the opportunity to grab the readers of that other blog. Unlike comments, your guest post will go out to their RSS subscribers and it will sit on their front page for a few days in most cases. It is an excellent way to get a quick boost. Want some examples of guest posts? Here is a guest post that I wrote about how to make money with Clickbank. Notice also, Bill Romer made a guestpost on my blog. When it comes to guest posts, use your best ideas. You want your absolute best material in these guest posts because you are trying to grab new readers. You need a great first impression.

Article marketing
Article marketing works because sites like ezinearticles and GoArticles are more popular than yours. It’s the truth, Google likes them better. Basically, you want to write an article about your niche and post it to one of those sites. At the end of the article, toss in your blog’s link. When people stumble across your article, if the content is good, they will find you blog.

Using websites like HubPages and Squidoo, you can generate the same effect. Leveraging the fact that these sites are very popular and Google likes them, you can create quick, relevant sites that link back to your blog. My typical technique is to create a squidoo lense with about three articles and a couple relevant YouTube videos. I then throw my blog’s link in at the bottom. People like what they see at my lense and come to my blog to get more.

Social Networking Sites
This is a pretty quick and easy way to help generate traffic. Post the address to your blog on all of your social networks. Make sure you have a link in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social network you can think of. People find you and are curious about your site. It’s quick and easy.

Social Bookmarking Sites
This another powerful way that could potentially generate massive traffic. Every time you create a blog post, submit it to places like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and any other social bookmarking sites that you can think of. I have had blog posts that went viral because I submitted them to one of those sites. The next thing you know, your blog that receives 10 views a day, has over 600 in one day. It happens all of the time. Use these sites. They have the potential to explode your site’s traffic.

Link Exchanges
I like to contact as many other blogs as I can that are in my niche and offer to swap links. I’ll give them a shout out in one of my posts if they sneak one of my links in to one of their posts. This is beneficial in two ways. First you can snag a little bit of traffic from their blog and second, Google loves to see your site linked from other sites. This will help your search engine ranking.

Pay Per Click
This is the first of my paid traffic generation methods. I don’t tend to recommend this for blogs because, at first, you won’t make that money back. It is, however, the absolute fastest, easiest, way to boost your traffic almost instantly. You pick some keywords in Google AdWords and every time someone searches for your keywords, your ad will show up for them. Google will charge you every time someone clicks on one of your ads. As you can imagine, the cost can build up quickly.

Purchasing links
Another option is purchase links from other, more popular, websites. This may be slightly more suited for blogs because I tend to think it will bring more relevant traffic. However, this method is a risk as well because you are paying for that link to appear, not for the clicks on that link. You might purchase a link for one month on a website for $20. If no one clicks that link all month, you just lost $20 and have nothing to show for it.

There are so many more traffic generation techniques available. For a blog, I would stick to free methods. It will take a long time to see a return on a paid ad investment at this stage in your blogging career. I will post a follow up in a few days with more ideas to generate blog traffic.

Stick around! We are just getting started!

Yesterday I discussed Affiliate Links and gave you some ideas of where to get started. Hopefully you went and checked out some of those options and maybe found some products that you think you can promote on your site. Today, I’ve created a video to show you how to clean up those affiliate links so they don’t look so ugly.

As you can see it’s a real simple process. You are going to log in to your WordPress dashboard, download a plugin called GoCodes, and use that program to hide your affiliate links. This will keep people from stilling your links and throwing their own code in them. It will also give readers the impression that they are just clicking around inside of your blog, as opposed to clicking on affiliate links. This plugin has worked wonders on my other sites. Like I said, I keep the link hiding to a minimum on this site. (Full Disclosure… Remember?)

Anyway, please comment below if you found this helpful at all. I really do appreciate all the interaction I have been receiving from people. I like to know when people find what I’m giving them valuable. Please comment. Share your thoughts, questions, better ideas, etc. below!

Tomorrow I will be giving you some awesome free tools for internet marketers. I will also give a progress report on my coaching with Alex Jeffreys. Trust me, good things are starting to happen!

There are several ways to monetize your blog.
The main three are affiliate marketing, pay-per-click advertisements, and e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is actually an extension of affiliate marketing but it is so powerful that it warrants a little bit of separate attention.

To begin with, we are going to focus on affiliate marketing. I was going to really go in depth about PPC advertising with adsense but decided that affiliate marketing is probably a better way to start. I don’t think that posting Google Adsense ads on sites about internet marketing is the best strategy. The main reason being that people who visit internet marketing sites tend be a little more web savvy. They tend to be more blind to adsense type ads. Promotion in the internet marketing niche is much better and much more profitable when you affiliate your self with products and companies that you like to promote.

What is affiliate marketing?
Basically, when you are doing affiliate marketing, you are promoting someone else’s product. When the product sells, you get a cut of the profits. I believe CDNow was really the first company to start affiliate marketing on a grand scale on the internet. Nowadays, Amazon.com and eBay use affiliate marketing heavily. Each company that you sign up for has their own process of bringing on affiliates. I can’t really go in to the process of how to sign up for each of them on this blog.

How can I make money with affiliate marketing?
First let me give you an example of affiliate marketing in action. My blog has a recommended reading section. You’ll notice that in this section, I am talking about all of my favorite books. If you click on one of the books and decide to purchase it, Amazon will give me something like 4% of the sale. As you can see, it’s not huge money. 4% of a $15.00 book is $0.60. I need to sell a lot of books to make real good money. Another example of an affiliate is PowWeb. My blog is hosted over there and I am a huge fan of their services. Every time someone clicks on their link and signs up for an account, they pay me $77! It only costs someone $45 per year to sign up! They are counting on the fact that people are going to sign up and hang around and continue to renew. As you can see, I do not need to get a whole heck of a lot of people to sign up over there to make a good income. This is the power of affiliate marketing! There’s some good and some bad but if people trust you enough and value your opinion, it can all really add up quickly.

Another great place to find affliates is called Commission Junction. They have a whole bunch of different companies that you can promote with all different types of offers. This is where you can find any product from any niche to promote. If promoting eBooks is more up your alley, I recommend Clickbank. Here you can find all sorts of eBooks that offer up to 75% commission.

Here’s what you should do.
Signup for the affiliate programs at Amazon.com, Commission Junction, and Clickbank. Find some products between those three companies that you think you can promote and that your readers would enjoy. The companies will give you a special link with a unique tracking code. Use that link every time you talk about the product. People will click through the links and, hopefully, buy the products that you recommend.

Tomorrow I am going to teach you how to cloak the links. This will make the URL that people see in the status bar look different from the actual link you are sending them to. Psychologically, people may respond better when they don’t think they are being sent to an affiliate link. I don’t do much cloaking on this site (It’s called Full Disclosure Internet Marketing for a reason) but I do want you guys to understand how to do it. It will definitely come in handy.

Until next time, you should now have the tools to get a blog set up and start making some dough.

If you have any questions, comments, or better suggestions about affiliate marketing, please leave them in the comments! I will thank you for it and so will the other readers that would greatly appreciate more advice!