Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate Review

Regular readers will know that I don’t think much of ebooks.

The typical ebook in this niche is full of information you can get for free other places, and mostly just forms a skeleton on which the author can hang a bunch of affiliate links. Ebooks that actually provide what they say they’re going to provide are rare, in my experience.

So rare that I gave up buying ebooks a while back. So why did I purchase Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate?

I’d like to say that it’s because I was maintaining the promise I made when starting this blog, to spend the money so you don’t have to. But frankly, I’d rather focus on providing information that helps you succeed, rather than spending money on ebooks.

I bought this ebook because of a very thoughtful question and answer list that came across one of the lists I’m on. The answers caught my attention, and I decided to purchase the ebook for a review.

The sales page of most ebooks is full of unbelievable hype. I was pleased to see that this ebook has a more reasonable sales page. Chris, the author, does make some claims for what he’s earned, but he also provides some useful information on the sales page itself.

If all you want to do is learn how he promotes his sites, click through to the sales page and read about it. You’ll get a list of the basic steps he goes through to start his sites ranking well in Google.

The ebook itself isn’t particularly earth shaking in any one aspect. He covers identifying hot markets, picking affiliate programs to promote, creating the site, and promoting it.

But I was impressed by the plan of action Chris outlines. He gives enough detail that you can reproduce what he does. He doesn’t minimize the amount of work involved, but gives great ideas throughout on how to outsource much of it. Obviously, if you’re on a tight budget, you’ll be spending your time instead of outsourcing until you generate some profits.

Toward the end of the book, Chris gives a look at the strategy of creating your own products and then upselling more expensive affiliate products on the back end. This allows you to recruit affiliates of your own to sell your product, in order to get people in front of the more expensive upsell.

Again, nothing brand new, but the style of writing and the action plan was appealing.

The most original part of the book is where Chris talks about using software you create to drive affiliate sales. He covers how to create the software without being a programmer, although you will need some basic HTML knowledge. If all you’ve ever done is use the visual editor in WordPress, be prepared to put some time in acquiring HTML skills.

The idea of using software submissions to get backlinks has gotten popular lately, and my position has been that those links would be useless for SEO purposes. I’m glad to see that Chris reports the same. But by combining the software submission with an affiliate promotion, he’s done well.

This ebook does have a variety of affiliate links in it. They’re all appropriate to what’s being discussed, though, so I never had the feeling that the ebook was written solely to make affiliate sales. More that those were the services the author uses, and so of course he’s linking to them using affiliate links.

The ebook should work well for someone who has been around Internet Marketing for a while, and has created a few sites but not had much luck promoting them. The promotion section, in particular, shows that a systematic approach using a variety of techniques works well, rather than the hit or miss approach many people use in the beginning of their online careers.

The biggest weakness of the ebook is in the area of actually creating the web site you’ll use for recommending affiliate products. You do need experience at creating web sites to be able to take that section and put it into practice. Again, someone who has been around Internet Marketing for a while will have already done that.

Despite my distaste of ebooks in general, I have to recommend this ebook in particular. The entire package is professional, and throughout you get the feeling that Chris knows what he’s talking about and is writing from experience.

Read more about Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate here.