John Chow on how to make money online
Can there really be anyone left on this planet who doesn’t know who John Chow is? Well, here’s what he had to say for himself in a 50-minute presentation. Unlike so many horrible videos of people burbling on about not very much, there actually was some content of interest in this one. So here goes.
First of all John Chow introduces himself, just in case there really is anyone who hasn’t heard of him before. He’s the guy who makes money online by telling people how he makes money online. Yes, it’s mildly amusing, but it’s also true. That’s what he does. He also lists a lot of awards that he’s won. (Yawn.) Now he’s going to share how he does it with you. To his credit, he does actually tell you how he goes about things without trying to sell you anything. It wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour by any means.
Info products – the best way to MMO
He runs a blog, JohnChow.com, which gets about a quarter of a million visitors every day. The best way he’s found to make money online is to sell informational products. You don’t even need new content, you can just sell compilations of posts you’ve already done if you like. But, you might be asking, why would anyone pay for such a thing when they can read it for free on his blog? Well, the answer is that to read it free you’d have to dig for it yourself – or you can save your time and effort by buying the compilation. He’s already done the work for you.
The advantages of creating info products to sell are:
- the cost of doing it is near to zero;
- you can choose your own price point to sell at. Just base it on what you think the value is. You can sell your info products from anything from zero to thousands of dollars;
- selling info products is very easy to scale.
Next he tells us about a case study. His Malaysian friend decided to travel and wanted to earn some money online while he had no fixed home. So the case study revolves around “Work From No Home”. The set-up cost less than $1,000 and took four days. The case study lasted one month. This is how they did it:
- use WordPress (free software);
- use WishList to separate your paying customers from the freebies;
- use Aweber to run your email list;
- and use VimeoPro for your videos. (Don’t use YouTube! YouTube videos can be embedded on other people’s sites, as can the free version of Vimeo, but if you use VimeoPro then people have to visit your site to watch your video.)
When selecting a niche for your informational product, you need to provide what people want – dieting, weight loss, meeting and dating, that kind of thing.
How to get the most out of ClickBank
Then follows quite a lot of explanation about ClickBank (CB) and how to use it. You can get good commissions selling products as a CB affiliate.
Just as you want to rank on page 1 on Google, you also want to rank your product high on ClickBank. People won’t bother scrolling beyond page 1 looking for products to promote. Getting on page 1 of CB is “instant money”. Remember, the affiliates don’t care about the product, they only care about the money.
Gravity score is the most important metric if you’re promoting anything via CB. A high gravity score means that people are making money by selling these products. Promoting something with a zero gravity score just means that you’re a guinea pig. So if you want to sell your products on ClickBank, then you really do have to drive up the gravity score.
Here’s how to do it – Joint Ventures (JVs). You set up a page for your JV affiliates and you all agree to launch your promotions on the same day. All these new sales all at once will push your gravity score up high.
Another thing to use is upsales. Let’s say the average price of a product is $47, then he sells for $37. That way he gets more sales. But he still makes more money because he upsells something else to all these $37 customers. If you only sell one product, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Once you have a customer who is ready and willing to buy, then use this sales funnel to sell more stuff.
You have to make it easy for your affiliates to promote your product(s). Offer them cash prizes. Show them how your product will make money for them.
Do the marketing first!
The marketing is the most important thing. Loads of people create good products but then they wonder about how to sell them. The trick is to do the marketing first. Create your sales pages too. Get everything in place. Then you can go back and create a product according to the claims you made in your sales page. That way you can deliver what you promised to.
Also, you should work on building your email list. John Chow says that his list saved him from Google. A list is a big strength. He pushed things too far at one time and got banned from Google for three years. It didn’t hurt him because he carried on as usual doing his marketing via his email list.
If you want to build a list, you need to offer some kind of bribe – give something away. Then you can push all these names through your sales funnel. Recommend things for the people on your list to buy. Sometimes you’ll make commissions, sometimes not, but just keep promoting products to your list and you can make money with it.
That was quite an interesting video and I did learn a few things. Mostly, I would create a product which I thought people might find useful, and then figure out how to sell it, but apparently that’s completely the wrong way to go about things.
Another tactic I’ve not used is to get a whole group of people (JVs) all acting together at the same time to game any search engine, such as the ClickBank Marketplace – which is a type of search engine after all, in much the same way that Amazon is a search engine for sellers.
Well, I’m not sure if John Chow really is as bad as he’s sometimes painted. But at the end of the video I did at least think I’d learned something and got some food for thought in exchange for my time. So it made a nice change from some of the MMO things I’m occasionally obliged to watch, where the seller just burbles on with a load of nonsense or totally obvious information.
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