Does that mean I’ll be successful? Well, I hope it’ll happen someday. No more “I hope” or “I wish”. That’s positive thinking.

I would have to agree with John Chow that the first step has to be taken to achieve success. That’s taking action as mentioned in his e-book. And it has to have a time limit. I set to reach my goal in 2 to 3 years, with a posting each day. That’s over 700 posts! Well, maybe the interim success would be to earn the first cent in a few months time. I know it’s possible.

I’ve actually already made my first cent, but not from this blog. I paid for an advertisement space to promote a Clickbank product. I tried affiliate marketing.

My first cheque is USD73.99 and the second cheque at USD19.60.

Not very successful as an affiliate I would say, but at least I know it’s possible. I stopped buying the advertisement space to try other traffic generating methods. Another reason is, the product I’m promoting is really not that very suitable for the kind of content the site is offering.

That’s my mistake. Like John Chow said,

“… failure is required in order to succeed”. – page 5, para 5, Make Money Online with John Chow.

The mistakes I made…

• Too eager to advertise without doing much research.
• The site is offering “free” downloads, so the chances of people wanting to pay for a product are actually very slim.
• Hence, the click-through rate is very low, not to mention very low clicks too.

I did not make any profit from this internet marketing campaign, but I learned a lot along the way. I paid $150 for a month of the advertising space. You do the maths…

So much for the second dissection of John’s e-book. Next post will be more interesting, covering the whole list of John’s Recommended Money Makers, out of 130 advertising networks he posted on his blog.

Chow!

That’s the sub-header on the front page of his e-book. That statement followed by “How You Can Too”, attracts almost everyone who wants to create some income from the World Wide Web aka Internet. Each of us aspires to make online income our source of living while giving us freedom of time. When that aspiration seems too hard to grasp, we conclude “maybe some side income would be good”. That side income too seems difficult for many.

Along came this free e-book that I stumbled upon and finds it very interesting, with no lack of humour. Thanks to John Chow for giving this away, free.

First off, page 4 of the book, last statement… “I make money by blogging, not by selling E Books.”

How true. My personal opinion is that it’s difficult to sustain writing e-books and make sales of the same book over a long period of time. I would argue that e-books are easily circulated; hence the profit margin drops significantly if you know underground sources of getting them. Also, methods change. What you write today may not be relevant in a few years time, or even worse, a few months time. This fact makes it tiring to sustain a living by only writing and selling e-books.

However, I would also say that if you hit the jackpot, selling your own e-book can bring short-term lucrative returns. Looking at Clickbank Vendor’s Spotlight, you can easily see that the highest gravity product have refd (referred sales) of 90% to 100%. This means that most, if not all of the sales are through affiliates. Vendors did their product, launch it and marketing are done by affiliates. The biggest winner would have to be the vendor, as he profiteers from all the sales while affiliates take 50% to 75% of the sales but divided over many affiliates. How then an affiliate wins? I would opined that a super affiliate makes the biggest money when he has diversified his affiliate product range and rake in from multiple vendors.

My conclusion… It’s hard to say or argue. There’s money to be made on the internet no matter which approach is taken. The only difference is the amount made.

Cheers!