On John Chow’s blog, he does make a big thing of Affiliate Sales. In fact, in May 2007, it was his second biggest earner just after ReviewME posts. Now that’s not bad at all! I myself tried to do some Amazon affiliates, but found the whole thing quite counterproductive, as I ended up spending a lot of time promoting the affiliate links on pages with not much traffic.

Clearly there is a lot I have to learn before I can keep up with John’s record! As part of an offer posted on Payperpost, I came across an opportunity to Quit My Day Job! Unfortunately, I was too late to take the chance to write about the post.

However, I contacted the advertiser, and he offered me a free copy if I wrote a Review about the book. Naturally, I was interested. So, although it’s been a long time coming. Here is my short review of the book, called “Quit your day job“, published by Jeremy Palmer who claimed on their website:

Learn the Same Proven Strategies that I used to make OVER $1,404,784 in commissions last year (2006).

High Performance Affiliate Marketing is a recipe book that will show you everything you need to know to generate massive profits as an affiliate. Fast track your learning and take advantage of an experienced, credible, and well-known Super Affiliate.

I’m not going to investigate the claims of how much money you can make if you follow this system. Rather, I’m going to give you a down to earth analysis of this book’s system, and answer the question: Do I think it is possible using their system to make a worthwhile amount of money? For me, that amounts to something north of $100 per month.

The chapter headings best summarize the overall arrangement of the book: Affiliate 101, Finding Products, Understanding Keywords, Building a Website, SEO, Paid Search Marketing, and so on. Many of the sections have additional reading from books, websites, tools, and tutorials, all designed to further the lessons taken in and provide practical help.

From the reading that I did in the book, there are quite a few sections that are particularly helpful for all websites aiming to sell online, never mind the affiliate side of things! The chapters on SEO provide a good beginning to the whole area; while the help on website design and choices is practical, to the point, and very sensible. It avoids a lot of the flashy nonsense that look attractive to newbies, but really don’t work in the long term.

Given the structure of the book, the amount of detail in each unit, and the step by step details, I think this book would be a suitable way to start affiliate marketing, but the information contained in each chapter is dense, and so while you might skim the whole book quickly, it would be wise to go through each chapter word by word and try to implement what you find there before you move on. In fact, some of the stages of the program could take quite a while.

Naturally, in the Internet space, things do change quickly, so I was glad to know that the author had updated his book already in March 2007, and for purchasers, you can buy a kind of subscription to the updates he provides. You’re not really buying a book, so much as a subscription type service.

Some recommendations for all would-be authors (myself included): Make sure you proofread your work properly. The temptation with electronic publishing is to do things much quicker, but still the editing process has to be fairly thorough to find out the mistakes and glitches.

I quickly read the cover pages, and noted quite a few. While I realise that this book is more a practical guide, I’d encourage anyone working on any aspect of publishing to strive for the highest level of editing and checking BEFORE you publish.

Summary: this book provides a well rounded program to encourage people to experiment and develop their own affiliate marketing website. It does this in a detailed way, and provides a lot of excellent advice. Overall, this would be a great way to start affiliate marketing, and given the updated nature of the information, a valuable developing resource.

Disclaimer: to review this PDF, the author forwarded a copy to me for free (otherwise I could not review the PDF). I will return to this book as I develop some of my own websites using the information contained within.