ViperChill Interview

Most of you will know of ViperChill AKA Glen Alsopp. If not, here is a quick intro:

• At 15 I built my first website
• At 16 one of my websites was featured in the book, “Dj’ing for Dummies”
• At 17 I was making thousands of dollars per month offering internet marketing services
• At 18 I was headhunted to become the Social Media Manager for massive brands such as Nissan, Land Rover and Hewlett Packard
• At 19 I quit my job to work on my own websites and projects
• At 20, I now make a 5-figure monthly income online and travel the world in the process

Pretty impressive stuff eh!

Q1 - Glen, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us today. So, to quote your blog "ViperChill is back baby". Cool title, but where did you go!?

Down too many wrong paths. Seriously though, over the last few years my life has taken a lot of turns with moving to South Africa before quitting my job and running my affiliate websites. I was at a stage where I was writing about internet marketing and having a lot of success for clients, but didn't really have many other personal sites that were doing well.

I decided to take a year out and focus on one of my newer projects, PluginID. The site grew massively in it's first year and I got to the stage where I only needed to work on the site for a few hours per week. This freed up time for me and allowed me to start writing about my other passion again for ViperChill: internet marketing.

Q2 - A lot of people say that starting and stopping blogging can cause you problems with your traffic and your audience. Have you found this? If so, how quickly did you get back to where you left of and where are you now by comparison?

When I started blogging again at ViperChill, all of the new posts were still going out to the 2,400 subscribers I had managed to build when I was actively working on the site. I think that if I didn't have this audience which were already connected to the site, it would be a lot harder to start blogging again after such a long absence.

In around two months I've added over 1,000 subscribers to that number and the site is on track for around 50,000 pageviews in January. My search traffic is awful and the amount of content on the site is low, but I believe that with some hard work and consistency, this will start to build back up again.

Q3 - You are a well known and highly successful affiliate marketer. There are lots of people out there who want to get started in affiliate marketing, what advice can you offer them.

Stop reading and start doing. I used to be afraid by the term affiliate marketing, thinking that it was only really an option for people with high traffic sites or for those who understood PPC. Well, despite that I make a lot of money online, I couldn't successfully run a PPC campaign to save my life (I do plan on fixing that this year, though).

Instead, I started building high-quality sites that would get traffic from search engines and used affiliate offers to monetise them. On one site I went from making $5 per day on adsense to $150 per day with affiliate offers. That's when I started realising the potential of affiliate marketing and built a few more websites. Now, it makes up the majority of my monthly income.

Q4 - One of the big questions that comes up in affiliate marketing, is should I have one site, in one industry, multiple sites in one industry or multipile sites in multiple industries. What are you thoughts on this?

If you're just starting out, then focus on one site in one industry. You're going to need to give one thing your full attention so that you can a) learn as much as possible and b) actually get results. If you spread yourself too thinly when you aren't sure what you're doing, you'll probably see little results and become demotivated.

Once affiliate sites are up and running, it's really up to you how much work you want to put in. You can test different elements of your landing page to increase conversions, you can build up more backlinks or you can even add more content. This only requires an hour or two per week so once you're at this stage, it might be a good idea to start building more sites.

I have about 6 sites that bring in a decent income myself: 3 of them are in the same industry and the other 3 are completely separate.

Q5 - What are your thoughts on affiliate networks. Do you use them? If so what advice can you offer a new affiliate. If not, how come. How do you manage all those accounts?

When I first started out, I used Clickbank rather than a network as it was what I knew and there were some products that interested me. I have used some of the networks like Market Leverage and Motive Interactive, but most of my income comes from standalone companies. For example, I promote a service that thousands of people look for each day, and deal directly with the provider of this service as an affiliate. This way I cut out the middle man and get the most commissions.

That's my favourite way of doing business online, although I know a lot of people who have success with the larger networks I have mentioned and other players like Azoogle. Right now there are only 4 logins I need to check my income across the web, so it's not too hard to stay organised.

Q6 - A lot of people talk about SEO all the time, as if its the be all and end all to making money on line. In your experience how important really, is SEO in making money online.

To me, it's more than I would like it to be. I have tried to diversify my income streams as much as possible in-case anything goes against me, but I still rely heavily on search engine rankings. Thankfully, in the fields I have entered I'm dominating them quite nicely and don't see those rankings disappearing anytime soon.

You have people like me who make a majority of their income from search traffic, but then there's people like JohnChow making $50,000 per month with a website that was banned in Google until recently. The importance of SEO very much depends on what you do online so for some projects it is crucial to me but for others (like my two blogs) I don't care for it too much.

Q7 - Taking into account ease of implementation, speed and ROI. What are your top marketing methods, strategies and tactics for making money online.

The easiest way to make money online is either to work very hard on something you're totally passionate about, or simply work very, very hard. When I refer to hard work in terms of internet marketing, I'm not talking about pushing yourself so that your body aches and you can barely breath. Hard work in this industry is simply about consistent output.

If you're continually working on improving your properties and increasing traffic, you will start to make money. No questions asked.

Working on something you're passionate about cuts down many hurdles people face such as lack of ideas, lack of desire and lack of belief. If you're writing about something you love or simply building a resource for it, it's fun. Instead of seeing any hurdles as a sign to stop what you're doing, you see them as fun to jump.

Just like the message being shared is far more important than the sites it's being shared on (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc), I believe that the 'tactics' to success will reveal themselves if you surround yourself with people who also love what you love, online.

Q8 - Do you think that spotting a niche or a trend early is important? There is an old saying "Once you've seen a band waggon, its too late to hop on". Does this apply in affiliate marketing too? The poker industry springs to mind here!

You can still dominate a niche without being the first to enter, but it's much cheaper to be the first. As an example, in one niche I have entered, I spent $500 on the domain alone for branding and ranking purposes. On top of that, I have tons of competitors who are writing great content every day and getting quality backlinks, so it takes even more work for me to get those top rankings and start making some money.

If you're first to a niche, the work-rate needed to rank well in Google or simply build a loyal audience is a lot lower than someone entering the field late.

I tend to prefer having a large piece of a small pie, rather than a small slice of a large one. For that reason, I won't be entering the poker niche any time soon

Q9 - What are your key projects for 2010?

My main aim this year is to decrease the number of projects that I work on and increase the quality of each. That means focusing on growing my two blogs and hopefully cutting down the number of affiliate sites I have to about 2 or 3. As I said earlier, I am in a number of competitive niches that are going to take a lot of work but also offer the greatest reward.

I would prefer to have a portfolio of just a few, very successful and high-quality sites than a lot of good sites that are making me money, but aren't great. I don't just want to make money on the internet, I genuinely want to give value to website visitors.

Q10 - If you had to offer one piece of advice to someone wanting to start out as an affiliate, what would it be?

Decide what you're going to focus on and then ignore 99% of affiliate marketing advice out there. First of all, the people who give you advice probably don't make money as an affiliate marketer themselves, and secondly their advice probably comes with a nice bold affiliate link somewhere.

This is not rocket science, but you are going to have to work. Find something you want to promote and do what it takes to start making money. It's up to you whether that is from social media traffic, PPC or even SEO. Have some faith in yourself that with enough effort, you can really 'get this down' and start making some great money online!