As all of my awesome readers know, I’m a serious technology marketer.

Accordingly, I don’t associate myself with those sketchy “internet marketers,” who claim to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, from AdSense, or affiliate deals, or selling people PDF files. (It seems like most of these PDF files teach you how to sell people PDF files. What a great industry.)

I found the email list pop-ups spammy, the disclosure policys misleading, and the whole enterprise stinks of ‘get rick quick – instant success with no work’ promotion. While this is often a great way to get lazy people to buy things, it seldom is a path to real revenue. But, even with their cheesy sales tactics, these guys were making real money.

But I was curious – what are these people doing? What’s really their business model? And most importantly, do they know something we ‘legitimate marketers’ don’t? They don’t have to answer to VCs, they keep their team as 1099 remote workers, and they (apparently) travel around the world, constantly. In many ways, they optimize their businesses for personal freedom instead of scale. But can we learn something from the internet marketers and apply them to ‘legitimate’ company building?

I’ve been reading a lot of these materials lately, trying to branch out beyond the Silicon Valley online marketing knowledge. (I think Dave McClure’s stuff is probably the best guide to this, although Patio11 has a lot of good stuff too.) In this series, I’m going to break down what a few of these people are doing, how the written and unwritten business models work, and see what Silicon Valley can learn from the Internet Marketing Circus.

John Chow – Dot Com Mogul

The website I started with belongs to John Chow. It sits at JohnChow.com – the tagline is “Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul.” John claims to make more than $100,000 a month from his website, while living an expensive and location-independent lifestyle. (I would use words like gauche or extravagant, but it’s amazing how your perspective changes with your bank account balance)

It’s also worth noting that John has been banned from Digg and severely penalized by Google. Word on the street is this has to do with being public about selling links and blatant link exchanges.

I don’t think you’ll really understand the rest of this unless you go look at John’s site, so go take a look at it now. Notice the email address collector pop-up. It’s incredibly obnoxious. Also notice his disclosures section, which may be the most entertaining disclosure section I’ve ever read:

I make money from every post I put on this blog. If I’m not making money from every blog post, then it was an oversight on my part and it will be corrected soon.

Now that’s something you won’t see on TechCrunch.

John Chow’s Secret

Go download the eBook about making money with your blog. It’s pretty interesting, it’s a quick read, and it’s free. I believe most of the links are affiliate links, but when you’re dealing with the grey-hat corners of the internet, expect every link to be an affiliate link.

Most of these people have a pretty straightforward business model – they get people to their site a variety of means – anything from social traffic to SEO to paid search. Then, they try to get you on their email list, from which they sell you a variety of products on a direct, affiliate, or drop ship basis. Most of them have ads (and I mean LOTS of ads) on their sites as well, which also generate revenue. You’ll also see things like paid links and paid posts, which should be nofollowed to maintain compliance with Google Webmaster Guidelines.

But how, with a free eBook, is John Chow making thousands of dollars a month off his web properties? Lots of companies have unsuccessfully tried to give things away to make money, but a few have made it work. John Cho isn’t using a freemium model – he’s doing something much more devious.

In addition to normal, e-commerce and advertising based revenue streams, John Chow has found the motherload of passive income. Imagine you could have thousands of people paying you,every day, without even noticing it. That’s what John has done – and it’s (mostly) legal.

What is John Chow’s Secret?

John Chow attempts to sign people up for niche ad networks that he has affiliate deals with. He then receives a percentage of that publisher’s future revenue stream. Sure, most of the people interested in this kind of thing never really get their act together, but if anyone does, John makes a good deal of money, wherever he is and whatever he may be doing that day. That’s pretty clever.

So that’s his secret. But what can we learn from John Cho?

Five Lessons About Blogging & Business from John Cho

Deep Link from Your Blog Posts

One way to really leverage the SEO “juice” from a dynamic part of your website (like a blog) is through deep linking. (By deep linking, I mean using your keywords like this – Matt Gratt – to link to static parts of your website from your blog. Often blog posts that draw links will be about slightly different topics than the pages you’d like to rise in SERPs , so you can use deep links to use your blog for SEO.

Additionally, deep links can often get RSS subscribers onto your site. If you’re doing something advertising or page view driven, this is a good tactic.

Canonical URLs

Typically, WordPress sites have posts accessible from multiple pages – the post itself, the home page, the archive, the category pages, the tag pages, etc. Your WordPress pages are also both available at http://yourdomain.com as well as http://www.yourdomain.com. All of this causes your “link juice” to be spread out over multiple posts, when you really only want it in one place.

This can be fixed with canonical URLs, where I believe all the URLs are 301’ed to the main post. (A 301 redirect passes link juice while others do not.) Most good SEO plug-ins can fix this, so you should use one with canonical URLs.

Nothing is Free. Even Free Content.

As most people know, it takes time and effort to put things onto the internet, and even more time and effort to make that content interesting, discoverable, and aesthetically appealing. Very few people do things for free (with maybe the notable exception of the open source movement), and there are frequently ulterior motives behind content creation.
John Cho’s eBooks are free. You can enter his contests, generally for free. You can visit his site for free. But between the paid links, the affiliate links, and doubtless other clever ways to make money I haven’t even thought about, your attention and your clicks are being monetized.

Don’t Taunt Market Dominating Technology Companies

John has been one of the most outspoken advocates of paid reviews, paid links, and reciprocal link exchanges. One day, he was penalized and didn’t even rank for his own name. I imagine his traffic got hit pretty bad (although in the sites I’ve run I’ve seen a pretty solid distribution between search and social traffic), and thus his income. At that time, he didn’t even rank for his name. JohnCow.com and NotJohnChow.com were ahead in the SERPs.

When this happens, you must go hat in hand, and attempt a strategy of appeasement. John worked with Google Search Quality Frontman/SEO Whisperer Matt Cutts, and got his site compliant and resubmitted. Now he does rank for his name.

The Money is in the List

Getting peope to your website for the first time is tough. It’s gotten both harder and easier over the last several years (which I know sounds counter-intuitive), but getting that first order is still tough.

Rather than try to acquire a large number of one-time customers, John Chow focuses on using free content to build lists. These lists can be used to sell John’s own products, or to sell affiliate products through a astonishing variety of schemes. However, for this tactic to work, you need to deliver real value to your customers.

Even internet outlaws have things to teach use. What are your favorite lessons from the Internet Marketing guys? From other communities online? Leave a comment and share with the community…