Wednesday, December 26, 2007

How To Get Free Books From Amazon.Com

I’ve just got a fat Amazon.Com gift certificate and I’d like to share it with you – my loyal readers (gosh, the daily readership of this blog is already in the low thousands – and it keeps growing every day despite the fact that Google dropped Page Rank for the blog from 5 to 0).

So here is what I am going to do. I believe that the following five books are INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT, if you want to be a successful online entrepreneur. Take a look at the list and pick the one that you want and I’ll send it to you free (limited to US and Canada, sorry, no international orders, these cost more than the books themselves).

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition

Selling Sucks: How to Stop Selling and Start Getting Prospects to Buy!

Think Two Products Ahead: Secrets the Big Advertising Agencies Don't Want You to Know

Is there a catch? Of course there is. You’ll need to interview me first. For that you’ll need a blog. And not just any blog – your blog must have at least 50-100 daily readers, be updated regularly and be indexed with Google. Basically, I’m bribing you with a book.

What’s interview going to be about? That’s entirely up to you. Let me just give you some background information about me. My name is Dmitry Davydov and I am Russian. When I was 15 years old I moved to Northern California. I’ve graduated from Del Oro High School in Loomis, CA, then attended Sierra College in Rocklin, CA, until getting my BS in Microbiology from University Of California in Davis, CA. I’ve worked for a year at Dade Behring Microscan in West Sacramento when it hit me – WORKING FOR THE MAN SUCKS BIG TIME!

And basically I’ve never worked for anyone since, although I did hold a few jobs for fun – I was once a local TV news reporter and a freelance journalist for the local daily (local TV sucks too, by the way, ain’t nothing glamorous about the job like it seems at first glance).

So my best guess about the interview is that it should be about making money online. Here is my path. When I returned to Russia to see my old classmates, I learned that two out of my three best friends became programmers. And one of them created a game that he was going to sell as shareware. That was 2001, I believe. So I was struck with the idea of a startup that used Russian game developers to make games for the western markets. My startup eventually failed, but some of my Russian friends, like the founder of Alawar.Com, became multimillionaires within two or three years.

I didn’t give up on shareware and after working closely with Russian shareware community I launched Deprice.Com with a partner. Deprice was an instant hit. It was the easiest $100K I ever made. Better yet, the site still keeps making me money even though I and my partner haven’t touched it in over a year. If you want to talk about making money with shareware discounters – we could do that.

Next, I was hit with the AdSense mania. Remember, two to three years ago AdSense was all the rage. While I do make enough money with AdSense to feed me and my family (by the way, I forgot to mention that I have a wife and a baby boy and a paid off mortgages on two properties, even though I am only 28 years old), AdSense wasn’t as fun or profitable as I thought it would be.

However, AdSense was my entryway into the world of commercial blogging and affiliate marketing. Commercial blogging is the opposite of regular blogging. You do it for the money. Most often the content is not original, but it has to be interesting and niched. I have way too many blogs to mention. The two about weird ways people make money online and offline are Uncommon Business Blog and NicheGeek. Then there is wildly popular Madconomist (43K visitors yesterday alone!). Then there is BadCyclopedia.Com and I’ll just stop there. These are just my recent blogs, but I have over 40 different sites.

The reason I decided to develop a network of blogs isn’t just to milk AdSense. Like I said, AdSense is pretty boring. However, I quickly realized that if I was going to launch online businesses on a regular basis, I’ll have to find a way to drive traffic there.

Building a network of blogs was the smartest decision I’ve ever made. Now, when I launch a new online venture, be that TestedAdSenseNiches.Com (which never made me much money) or PickyDomains.com, I have all the free traffic I need to test the market. PickyDomains.Com has become a big success too and if you want to chat about making money with domains, either the way I do it or the way Shawn Casey does it – we can do that as well.

OK, this post is already getting too long, but before I let you go, the last two topics we can discuss is affiliate marketing and copywriting. These are my current favorites.

Alright, I am waiting for your questions. Don’t forget to mention which book you want to get for free and do include URL of your blog along with the questions.