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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

What are some simple things I can build by myself?

You're already successful at selling enterprise services to at least one company in management and backend data processing. Have you considered selling management and backend data processing advise, perhaps delivered in the form of a PDF or series of videos? This is stupendously valuable to tech companies if you meaningfully improve on what they have already and would allow you to sell to people who have expense accounts tied to, to steal a friend's phrase, the economic engine of the planet.

You don't need a commandingly high bar of programming sophistication to sell books. There exist services that can do all the heavy lifting for you. If you prefer knocking together a site to sell your own books, it is essentially an hour to get the minimum thing to charge money and ~2 days to get something which could plausibly be the kernel of an ongoing business.

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> If you prefer knocking together a site to sell your own books, it is essentially an hour to get the minimum thing to charge money and ~2 days to get something which could plausibly be the kernel of an ongoing business.

But what about traffic? How do you get eyeballs to your book-selling microsite? Do you reach out to people who might be interested? Do you post on forums? Do you use paid advertising? I can guess it's a combination of various methods but the problem I have seen popping up often, at least with me, is reaching a meaningful conclusion.

If your landing page fails to gain meaningful traffic, what do you need to tweak? Your book pitch, the idea, or the marketing technique?

If it were me and I was coming at it from nothing I'd write, in order:

1) Minimal stake-in-the-Internet landing page. ("I'm writing a book on ActiveRecord optimization. I've worked for 3 years on AR optimization. For more details, [ ].")

2) ~3 blog posts about the topic at issue which each mention the forthcoming book and link to your landing page. Promote blog posts in the usual ways: tweet about them, send cold emails to folks whose audiences they are relevant to, post them in your usual community watering holes.

Checkpoint: if the blog posts go nowhere, don't write your book.

3) Write a minimalistic email drip campaign to send to folks who are on your list. Consider cross posting versions of the messages in it to your blog, depending on your appetite for doing this.

4) Write a proper landing page for your book.

5) Write your book.

6) Run a "launch sequence" for your book over 2~3 weeks prior to publishing your book.

7) Launch your book.

8) Get more serious about turning your book into a business via e.g. increasing acquisition, tuning the automated bookseller that is your email list, etc.

I've seen folks be really, really successful at this model on the strength of first books supported by hundreds of email subscribers and 3~5 blog posts. You do not need to be "Internet famous" to pull this off. (Anecdotally, most of my Internet buddies who do the meat-and-potatoes work here get $10k to $20k on the first book launch.)

To get "hundreds of emails" (let's say 500), with a ~1% conversion rate, you need 50,000 page views. How long to get to that point with just 3 blog post when you start from nothing?

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