Experts Tips – Chris Guthrie from Entrepreneurboost.com

Hi readers,

This experts tips post has expedient answers from an Amazon Affiliate Marketer cum Blogger, Chris Guthrie. 

My hearty New Year wishes for you to achieve your goals with great efforts. I always need your support to grow my blog and here is a beneficial expert’s tips post for you. If you are interested to make money with websites and through Amazon as an affiliate, the information listed by this expert would help you to do so. Who is that expert?

He is Chris Guthrie from entrepreneurboost.com. I have contacted him through his blog’s contact form, he admits my request to give answers for my expert’s tips category post and he gave his detailed replies within a day. Let me speak about his details now.

About Chris Guthrie

Chris Guthrie is a great internet marketer and super Amazon Affiliate. He is the founder of enterprenuerboost.com where he used to write about the internet marketing tactics like buying & selling of websites, make money with Amazon, how to build & earn with niche websites and so on. He got into blogging just to spend his spare time and started to make thousands of dollars from the website he built. So he left his job as he decided to share his experience on a blog to help the people who want to make money through websites. So through his blog, he used to share case studies with real numbers that he has successfully done to make money online.

Chris Guthrie worked as a game tester with Microsoft and he built his successful project, a forum for gamers in the year 2005. Then he started doing really well in Amazon’s Affiliate program in 2009 and later he released his Amazon WordPress plugin “EasyAzon”. He has been earning money with websites since 2005 and then he turned into a six figure income maker in 2009. He had written two books named “How to make money as an Amazon associate” and “Buying websites – How to invest in online real estate” and you could buy these books through Amazon.com. If I continue his intrepidness, then this post would be too long which might make you tired before reading his accurate replies for my questions. Now read his real reactions!

Experts tips – Beneficial conversation with Chris Guthrie

Hi Chris,

1. What inspires you to do blogging? Are you exactly a blogger or affiliate marketer?

I spent several years in building websites while struggling to find success. After many failures, I started to string together successes, and ultimately I started my blog so that I could help cut down the learning curve for others that are just getting started. I’d like to think that by cutting through all the crap and really highlighting what it takes to be successful online, I’m shaving months (years maybe) of potentially wasted time by simply sharing what I’ve found works and sharing successes and failures on my blog. I make money from affiliate marketing and also from blogging (and several other things) so I think of myself more as a marketer/internet entrepreneur.

2. Tell something about WordPress blogging and its plugins. Tell about your WP plugin too.

WordPress is one of the top content management systems in the world with over 20% of all websites running on the platform. I’ve been using WordPress since 2007 and because of how flexible the platform is (with support for plugins, themes etc) I’ve gotten into creating plugins for the platform as well that solve problems that I know other bloggers are having.

For example, creating Amazon affiliate links manually is really time consuming and generally requires you to go to Amazon.com for each and every link you create. So we took all of that and brought it into a WordPress plugin that people could use instead. That software is EasyAzon and available at EasyAzon.com

3. I checked your 2 books on Amazon for sale, can you explain about the books in detail?

Yah, so I’ve got two Kindle books right now and I have plans to write more of them. One book has written about Amazon affiliate marketing and outlines various successful strategies I’ve learned over the past several years as a successful Amazon affiliate. I’ve earned over $100,000 in commissions as an Amazon affiliate so I wrote the book to help make it easier for people who are interested in getting started with Amazon’s affiliate program. Then the other book is about buying and selling websites. The first website I ever bought was $500 and I’ve made over $7,000 from that website. Since then I only buy websites in the $10,000 on up range and last month I actually sold one of my sites that I bought for under $15,000 for $42,000 and I made ~$30,000 while I owned it as well. So that book just outlines various strategies for buying and selling websites. Buying sites can be extremely risky because websites are pretty risky assets so I cover a lot of that as well in the book.

4. I hope that you might have fixed some goals in your internet marketing career. Did you reached those or still working on it? After achieving your goals, what would be your future plans?

My main goal was to be able to work for myself which I’ve been doing for over 4 years now and in my first full year of self employment I made over $150,000 (which was over double my salary at my higher stress sales job). Beyond that I’ve been able to continue to grow my income and my next main goal is to hit 7 figures in profit in a year. Admittedly I’m still quite a ways off from doing that but that’s my next primary goal. For me it’s not really about the money though it’s more about being able to have control over my destiny and to be rewarded for the level of work I put into what I do and as an entrepreneur there is more of a connection between how hard you work (if you’re working on something scalable) than there is at a day job where you sort of run into caps no matter how hard you work.

5. Tell your secret of success with Amazon and also let us know some good resources (Blogs) where you used to visit daily to expand your knowledge.

The biggest secret is that Amazon isn’t the answer for everything. The most common mistake people make is to try and take a monetization method (like Amazon’s affiliate program) and tie it to a website and then get frustrated when they have no success. So what you really have to do is find a niche that is applicable (for example a product review website) and then create content that fits that niche. So the main thing really is niche selection. I picked a good niche and then just worked really hard on making the best website in that niche so that’s why I was able to eventually sell one of my top Amazon websites for over $100,000 a few years back.

6. What is your opinion about “Online money making”?

There will always be people making money on the internet. The best part about it is that you can do it from anywhere in the world. While I haven’t gone so far as to move to an inexpensive country (like Thailand) to maximize the value of my dollar that is something I could do if I wanted to. Instead I move south of Seattle, WA and bought a house for $130,000 instead of staying in the area I was at and buying a house for $500,000 (same size house basically – Seattle real estate is expensive). So because I can work from anywhere I choose an area still somewhat close to family but where the value of the real estate was more realistic and actually worth buying. Without getting too far into it, we all know that some areas of the country are overpriced in the country for real estate and it always makes more sense to rent than buy (New York is the best example, but Seattle is like that as well).

I delighted with your precise responses Chris, thank you so much for accepting my request to provide some useful answers for my readers. I am grateful to you for spending your treasured time for contributing your replies to my expert’s tips category post.

@ readers, If you want to learn from live examples of successful website, I suggest you to take the free course by Chris Guthrie on how to earn money with websites. It has been designed in such a way to decrease the number of mistakes in creating a profitable website. Also, have a look at his books, pod casts and some valuable resources through his blog. Connect with him on Twitter.

Hope you’ve engaged with this expert’s tips post with Chris Guthrie and do share your views with me 🙂