Quit your day job: if you want!

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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:

quityourdayjobpdfbook

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.

quityourdayjob

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.

5 Ways to Manage Finances Better

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beathatquote

Managing my own finances was easy: I simply spent everything, and didn’t worry about tomorrow so much. However, once I got married, things had to change! They had to. My wife was not interested in financial management, so I had to take up the reins, so to speak.

And I did. Beatthatquote.com is sponsoring this post to encourage us bloggers to share our true and tried tips for manaing our finances. In fact, I tried a whole bunch of different ways before settling pretty much on what we do today; and that’s what I’ll write about. These are my ten money management tips:

  • 1. Ration cash: it’s not necessary to have a budget so much as a limit on what you spend. It takes a while to live within the budget before you are successful. But, I also set up a soft limit that helped to control the amount of excess.

  • 2. Have different ‘jars’: don’t just rely on one bank account or checking account, sometimes it’s necessary to make money unavailable or difficult to access to keep your spending under control, especially if the money is for particular purposes.

  • 3. Borrowing Money: Use loans and credit cards sparingly. Know how much your interest payments are at all times, and avoid keeping debt on credit cards more than you have to. The interest rates can be too high: from 11% and up. And, interest payments are almost always expensive when compared to not having to pay!

  • 4. Maximize your Interest: Find ways to consolidate your ‘free’ money into places that pay decent amounts of interest. It’s not worth putting large amounts into your checking account as you’ll get practically no interest in most cases.

  • 5. Saving your Expenses: in many cases, you’ll find that you overpay for financial services if you don’t shop around. So you may need to compare car insurance policies, mortgages, life insurances and so on, it makes to shop around and find better deals. But of course, if you spend too much time trying to save a few dollars or get the BEST deals, you will find that the it becomes counterproductive.

Post sponsored. To encourage you to manage your money better!

OLPC vs. iPhone vs. PortableApps: Which will this tech tryout as the most influential technology?

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Well, I recently blogged about two innovations, both of which I thought would be significant in their own way: the iPhone and the OLPC. You can read about the first post here:

iPhone or OLPC? Which will have a greater impact?

This week saw two major technology announcements both of which have potentially large implications for users world wide. The first was the iPhone launched by Apple at MacWorld. The second was the “One Laptop Per Child”, a project that promises to “create(sic) expressly for the world’s poorest children living in its most remote environments.”

You can visit the websites to explore the projects yourself. Both of them are INTERESTING!The iPhone could, in fact, inspire a whole generation of users who would love the convenience and power of the phone in dealing with calls, internet, ipod and pc style functions. There is, however, a serious concern on the kinds of limitations that Steve Jobs is thinking about:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

As a result, we can consider that this will be a fairly closed system, despite being based on OSX. Now, as a PC user this seems quite a limitation:you won’t be able to run applications that Steve doesn’t want you to. The closed system will, in the long term, limit the expansion of the system.

On the other hand, there is the OLPC. This is potentially a huge development, both for the children in the developing world and, I believe, for the developed world. Its effects will be far reaching for the developing world by empowering a generation of kids who will be able to learn the ins and outs of both computing and the Internet.

However, the OLPC represents a number of positive points for the developed world: it will spur development of a whole new generation of information devices that will bring the Internet world to people and places that have now only been on the fringes. Educationally, the OLPC will allow schools to have units for every child in the school, as well.

In addition, since it’s open architecture, I think that the OLPC will be the device for a generation, if not in its first incarnation, in its second or third. It has very low power consumption, very light and strong construction, open design, USB ports for extensions, and networking facilities, both formal and informal.

posted here.

Naturally, I was beginning to think about a three way battle between these two innovative technologies and PortableApps (which I recently blogged about).

iPhone – Cool new iPhone from Apple: sophisticated mobile phone with technology to play music (like iPod) and media, internet enabled, too. It will run a version of OSX that may not allow external software!

OLPC – A new simple laptop PC intended for children in the developing world. The devices will contain flash memory (goodbye hard disks!), Linux and have ad-hoc networking so that everyone can access Internet from just one connection.

PortableApps – Take your applications with you on a USB stick, you can access almost any PC that has USB capability and run your own applications. There’s quite a selection. So pile in and tell me your opinions about these three technologies: Which will be the category killer or the footnote in computing history? Which will change blogging more than the others?