It’s easy to be cynical about get rich quick schemes, especially the, “I Got Rich, You Can Too” pitches promoted by people who got rich partly by telling people how they can get rich. It’s a do-as-I-do enticement that has been around since the dawn of Capitalism. Getting rich online is merely the latest, most technological incarnation of the Ponzi scheme and it is damned enticing.
So when I attended the YVR Bloggers Meetup featuring the very rich online marketer John Chow, it was with a mix of skepticism and curiosity. After watching a few of his videos, I wondered, is this guy for real?
I’m here to say John Chow is everything and more of what I expected.
The John Chow Way
John Chow is the proudest Internet millionaire – sorry, multi-millionaire – on the planet.
And if you don’t believe that, watch his opening video. This man will show you how to choose luxury cars.
His program began with “Dare to Dream” a video that sequed from scenes of his purchase of a $124,000 car into his description of humble beginnings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
After giving us a short history of his even shorter employment history and his long meteoric rise online, he played another video of himself visiting the house in China that he was born in.
Rags to Riches is a theme that never dies.
Between his videos, Chow cranked through a list of ways to get rich online:
Build your List
- Use multiple capture methods to grab emails
- Offer a free ebook as an enticement
- Set up Facebook contests using Contest Domination and give away prizes you get free
- Use a squeeze page using LeapPages to squeeze email addresses
- Leverage other bloggers big lists by offering to split profits from Webinar fees
- Use a pre-populated email form using other blogger’s lists
Establish your Brand
- Branding is about a perception and assumption.
- Get a good logo, using eLance, Fiverr
- Use auto responder feature at AWeber, Constant Contact etc
- Send emails to build relationship, establish expertise, and recommend products and services
- Establish expert status
- Have a story to tell, ie, rags to riches
- Teach a class at a University and tout it
- Speak at a Meetup and tout it
- Have someone interview you and soak up their credibility
- Pay Walter Chronkite to interview you in his home studio. (Yes, after you Frankenstein him back to life)
- Take a self-aggrandizing picture of yourself
- Have your picture taken with rich and famous people to have their rich and famousness rub off on you
- If you can’t find rich and famous people, take pictures with them in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum
- Set a world record for something no one cares about
Publish a Book
- Use your book to get media interviews to promote yourself
- Write a book and use hard copies as a business card by buying $3 copies from Amazon Create Space and getting a 50% commission from Amazon
- Sell that book to your friends and make it a bestseller.
- Sell it as kindle book and make 70% commission
- Make a demo video to explain “what you’re all about” with testimonials.
Earn Passive Income
- Become an affiliate of AWeber and LeadPages and get 30% commission for life on each referred account
- Sell membership to a private, more special part of your site
- Have affiliates sell your products to earn big commissions from you
Use the Ascencion Model
- Push customers into the sales funnel
- Give away free ebook to gain trust
- Sell low level product to test customer’s trust
- Sell high ticket seminars and webinars for $10,000
Final Tips
Here’s my advice for getting rich online:
Become John Chow
Blog your head off until you acquire massive traffic, sell stuff to your mailing list until your site becomes profitable, describe in books and videos how you profited online and then sell those books and videos and become an authority on the subject of getting rich, and turn the whole thing into expensive seminars that teach people how to get rich online.
Repeat.
Caveat Simplor
But there are two necessary components of this formula that are elusive to most bloggers: traffic and personality.
Driving traffic is a uphill battle that everyone fights. As time goes on and more sites are built, there is much more competition online for whatever your niche is.
When John Chow started blogging in 2006 the Internet had half as many active sites, with more eyeballs going to fewer competitors. Not to mention the many changes of Google algorithms that have changed the outcome of organic search results in the past 8 years. Driving traffic is not as what it used to be.
And not everyone has the personality to get rich online the John Chow way. Few people have the oversized ego and the hyper confidence it takes to create a t-shirt that says, “I’m John Chow, Bitch!
Or the huevos to publish
“Please Note: If you email me, all of the information in your email is mine to do with as I please, such as exploit for financial profit, use as blackmail, or quote on my blog,”
on your Contact Page.
Or the temerity to use a young daughter as a prop in book sales promotions.
But that’s ok. We can’t all be John Chow. Even if you only want to be a hundred-thousandaire, many of Chow’s tips fit easily into anyone’s style of making money online – once you have the traffic.
Although I’m not sure I want to fly to Costa Rica for his $15,000 master class, I’ll be implementing some of his tactics soon, so watch out!