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Comment by msrpotus | Hacker News Reader

It might take some work but you'll definitely be able to get advertisers. The first step would be audience surveys to find out who your readers are and what they are interested in, and then you can go out and find advertisers who want to reach those folks.

However, if you're already doing books, what about Amazon affiliates or even, depending on the topic of these books, selling related products? If someone is interested in finance, business, or home improvement, for example, there's a lot of items they might buy beyond books. You can recommend them and make some money off each sale.

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Can't do Amazon affiliate links in email (yes this is stupid but it's one of their rules)

I guess the trick here is that while we can segment our lists based on interests, it might be a bit tricky & time consuming to constantly find interesting products to offer and tailor them to the many different groups. Which is not to say it would not be worth it.

Good idea about the audience surveys - though we do know our audience's geography, perhaps a general demographic survey would provide some interesting insight. Thanks!

I think that offering products that are interesting to your segments is exactly the reason they would be interested in them. Who's going to buy products/click on ads that are not interesting to them.

You're already doing the work to build the list. Why are you opposed to spending the effort to target the advertising?

Of course we're not opposed to spending the effort to target the advertising. It's a recurring theme in many suggestions here and we're definitely going to look for ways to improve our targeting. Thanks for your comment!

Ahh. Perhaps I misunderstood the parent comment?

And if you're going to the trouble of surveying for demographics, might as well add that data as fields in your ESP to allow for reporting and segmentation against those demos in the future. That lets you do things like target specific genders or ages with more relevant content/offers/ads.

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