A Guest post by Jade Craven.

Have you heard of Johnny B Truant? He started writing at ‘The Economy Isn’t Happening’ but recently, he revealed he’s made $10’000 in 3 months. In his Ittybiz column, he told how he made nearly $3’000 in one month. He’s also written a couple of guest posts here on ProBlogger here and here.

What really attracted me to him was that he didn’t earn this money by taking advantage of people or using questionable tactics. He did it by finding out what people wanted and providing them with a solution that benefited them both.

In this post, I’ll talk about how Johnny did it. I’ll provide strategies and case studies so you can apply these tips to your on blog. I’ll even talk about the tactics he used to promote his killer new ecourse, for those who are looking at selling information products from their blog.

Finally, I’ll give you an exclusive discount for that e-course Zero to Business – just skip to the bottom if you want 10% off.

4 Ways To Earn Money By Helping People

Give Free Stuff strategically

Image by Anil Jadhav

How Johnny did this:

• He released a free instructional ebook about setting up a blog.
• He did free website setups in return for testimonials

How You Can Do this

• Barter your services with other skilled bloggers
• Release an introductory report
• Do free work in return for references or exposure
• Do case studies highlighting your skills.

Case studies.

• Leo Babauta, Skellie and Chris Garret got a lot of exposure because of their guest posting.
• Neil Creek takes headshots of attendees at twitter meetups for use on their social media sites. He has received a lot of praise over this, both from the local twitter community and international photographers. He has gone on to get many more clients and enquiries.
• Darren used to do case studies on his blog as an advertisement for his consulting. He no longer offers this service.

Provide calls to action regularly

Image by kozumel

How Johnny did this:

• He would frequently have P.S at the end of his post – including a few humorous ones
• He would simply state “Call to Action”

How you can provide calls to action:

• In the conclusion of the post, tell the reader what you want them to do
• Give them an incentive to click through

Case Studies:

• Ali Hales guest post on Problogger. She talked about the topic of staff blogging before encouraging people to check out her ecourse. As an extra incentive, she gave the readers a discount code.
• Dave Navarros post on Freelance Folder, where he encouraged the readers to give an example in the comments.

Find your people.

Image by Elvire.R.

How Johnny did this:

• He got a guest posting slot of Ittybiz, offering himself as a case study
• He is on the faculty of Project Mojave
• He has guest posted on the places where his target readership hangs out

How to do this:

• Find blogs that attract the kind of people you want to target. See if you can guest post on that blog.
• Seek  work and joint venture opportunities
• Look for regular writing opportunities

Case studies.

I don’t need to offer any case studies. Look around at your favourite blogs. Do you see the same people being featured? Are the same people interacting? They are the loyal fans.

Are you a loyal fan of anyone? You’ll usually find you tend to hang out in that persons group. You may buy from more than one person. These are the people you want to connect with.

Selling something? Focus on selling solutions.

Image by Doug88888

How Johnny did this

• He offered wordpress installs at a discounted price. To compensate, he asked that people buy through his affiliate link
• He sold group coaching to those that couldn’t afford the price of individual coaching..
• When realizing that people were still needing information, he created a course that was cheaper than getting Johnny to help them through the process.

How you can do this:

• See if you can offer a service at a discounted rate in exchange for purchasing something through their affiliate link
• Find creative ways of making your products more affordable without underpricing yourself.
• Listen to your audiences needs and create products to help them.

Case Studies:

• Sarah Prout does this in her Twitter Success Blueprint. She realized that businesses needed an affordable way to learn about twitter, so she created an ebook with information catered to professionals, as well as other twitter users.
• Men with Pens do this with their blog critiques. They offer a discount for ones offered on the blog.

I know many people hate being sold too. Rather than promote his course Zero to Business, I’ll talk about what you can learn from it.

What you can learn from the course

There are three main things I loved about the promotion strategy:

• He created humorous videos with viral potential.
• He purposely  avoided hype in his sales page
• He provided real and useful bonuses

Lets discuss how you can learn from each strategy.

The Humorous videos.

• He mocked a number of the key sales tactics in the internet marketing niche
• In his letter to his affiliates, he recommended that people promote the videos rather than the product

So – how can you adopt this to your launch?

• Offering a quality resource that your affiliates can promote
• Mock some of the common techniques used in product launches in your niche

Avoiding Hype

• Johnny repeated several times that this product would provide technical solutions. It not make them rich.
• He then explained the costs of learning this if you paid his normal consulting fees.

So – how can you adopt this to your launch?

• Talk about the practical reasons about how your product can help someone
• Explain to them how your solution is better value than the alternative

Cool Bonuses

• He provided individual coaching to the first five people that signed up
• He offered group coaching to those who signed up by a certain date.

So – how can you adopt this to your launch?

• Offer bonuses that are exclusive and are not freely available to other marketers
• Offer bonuses that will provide real value to the majority of your buyers

My call to action:

• If you want 10% off Johnnys e-course, Zero to Business, just use the word ‘problogger‘ as the discount code. Its that easy.
• If you want to check out Johnnys blog, go on over to his fancy new site.
• If you want rants about zombies, check out his twitter feed.