I recently started an affiliate website in order to understand how I could build the most awesome affiliate system in the world. My new membership site, Hardworking Millionaire, will be sold mostly by affiliates, so a key step before I opened the site was to become an affiliate of something. I needed to know features to look for if I decided to sell Hardworking Millionaire subscriptions through an affiliate marketplace.

After reading Steven Wagenheim’s Honest Income Program ebook, I signed up for ClickBank. ClickBank is essentially a marketplace for ebook authors and companies to advertise their products. It means you as a publisher don’t have to set up complicated affiliate referral scripts and manage billing of your product — it does it all for you and sends you checks in the mail, minus a small percentage cut.

While I certainly understand the draw of ClickBank to product sellers, it leaves a significant amount to be desired on the affiliate end. (more…)

I expect most of you have read my thesis on how I plan to make $1 million a year on the Internet. Having read that (and perhaps observed my Twitters about how motivated I finally was!) you might expect I’d dive headfirst into creating the site, sales letter, and promotions for Hardworking Millionaire.

You would be wrong. 🙂 (more…)

I recently joined The Warrior Forum as part of my quest to learn a lot more about Internet marketing. On it, I found a post from Robert Plank asking how to contact a web host. An unscrupulous scammer had copied some of his paid content and posted it for free.

Copyright infringement is commonplace on the Web, since it’s so easy to copy and paste content and post it on a website. Unfortunately, many web hosts do not respond in a timely manner to copyright infringement complaints, making enforcement more difficult. Since I ran a web host for several years, I know exactly what you need to do to craft a takedown notice, and better yet, how to figure out where to send it. (more…)

I have spent the past month reading basically every Internet marketing idea and writing idea I could find. I subscribed to ProBlogger and started reading sites of those who make a lot of money online, such as Steve Pavlina and Jeremy Schoemaker.

The reality is that most bloggers and writers don’t make a lot of money online. Most make only a few cents a day. I know the same is true with web hosting companies — most hosting companies don’t make enough to even justify that the owner quit his or her day job. From being in the web hosting industry so long, I knew what most web hosting company owners didn’t do right. That probably should be a blog post of its own, but here is the top “no-no”: (more…)

My goal with posting goals every year is to focus my energy on creating specific milestones for the next year — publicly — so both you and I can easily see how I’m doing and where I need to kick more butt. 🙂

You can see how I did on my 2007 goals in my 2007 year in review. I did well, so this year I am going to set more aggressive goals.

There is a lot of ground to cover in 2008. First of all, I have two new businesses to start. I have had both of them in my mind for a while, and it’s time for both of them to come to fruition. One of my new businesses is InspiringInnovators.com. Every week for the next two years, I am going to interview one person who has made a significant impact on the world. We are going to talk about challenges, obstacles, successes, and wins for this person, in a much more in-depth interview format than would typically occur in a magazine or newspaper with limited space available.

Why did I decide to start Inspiring Innovators? (more…)