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Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

The article is just a host for affiliate links.

I wrote the article. Yes, I'm trying to use affiliate links to make this passion project more sustainable in the long term, but I'm definitely not just cranking out content for the sake of sales. I'm actually quite discouraged at the moment because I can't get any traffic to the affiliate. I'm 90 days in and my account will be canceled if I don't get 3 sales by 180 days.

My general strategy is to write about books that I happen to be reading anyway. I'm finding that it's a great way to deepen my knowledge retention of the books that I read. It took me about 5 to 7 hours to synthesize the contents of the book into these main themes. If you read the book you'll find that it's organized very differently from the themes that I've identified.

So, sorry if it's coming off as garbage affiliate content just created for the sake of sales. Definitely not my intention.

Just bought through the link instead of just wishlisting and buying tomorrow (I had seen the book before and had some interest, if not previously enough to buy it).

Hopefully that gets you a step closer to 3 sales.

Very interesting, and I also appreciate the discussion that it has launched here as well (for example, I didn't know that salt dissolves part of muscle protein)

Wonderful, thank you. I do think I'll eventually get it to drive its own sales without my involvement. I obviously need to create a lot more high-quality content. I'm just feeling daunted and intimidated here at the start. So your support helps a lot.

I'd encourage you to expand the book-promoting paragraph to include a bit more info / some interest-generating hooks about what the book offers that the article itself hasn't already provided.

If you really want to make this model sustainable long-term I might even make the recommendation paragraph dynamically customized based on referring source (here's a WordPress plugin that would let you do this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/if-so/). History enthusiasts are likely to be intrigued by a different set of things from the book than HN's business & systems-thinkers or an RPG community interested in world-building inspiration.

Lots of people will read a general-interest article (quick & no cost), but to get conversions to an actual sale, you need to target specific interests.

Great, thank you for the tips.

You read the article. Hopefully you’ll send over a micropayment to support the author. Otherwise, how are content creators supposed to keep creating content? I found the article interesting despite not having an interest in buying a book. It wasn’t trying to “sell” me anything or get me to sign up for anything. It was an unobtrusive experience. Do we criticize news articles because they are tracking our every move or dismiss news articles as just a host for tracking and advertising? That’s what journalism and broadcasting is— the writers and producers trade content in exchange for you seeing an advertisement.

I appreciate the author’s work and, if I were in the market for a book about the history of salt, I would have been glad to click his link. I am sure the more financially blessed among us would love to live in a world that wasn’t so gauche as to require people actually making money from their work, but that isn’t reality. Not everyone has the privilege of just giving away work for free. The funny thing is that if the author had a paywall, people would complain about that. I don’t understand the resistance to people trying to make money with content, especially when done in an unobtrusive way.

Thanks, this is encouraging to hear. I can also sympathize with GP's skepticism. I get suspicious whenever people try to sell me stuff on the web. I think I'm going to try being very explicit and upfront about the purpose of the site and the role of affiliate marketing within it.

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