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Comment by jstorimer | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for reading.

I had < 250 twitter followers when I started, < 50 blog subscribers. I had some reputation as a Ruby developer from open source work and participating in different things but I would say I had a very small network to start from.

I kept the 'fake' sales page as simple as possible. It was static HTML (written with slim-lang) and pushed to heroku (free hosting). I spent $100 on Adwords to get traffic. That bought ~300 visits which led to ~15 people clicking my 'Buy' button. The page wasn't all that different from what I have now, list the benefits of the product, what buyers can expect, etc.

I didn't pay for Twitter ads. In the beginning people retweeted my announcement. Later on readers of the book would share the link to their followers.

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I'm really interested in the 'fake' sales page idea, thanks for sharing the details. From these numbers, did you have a formula in mind that would determine if you could make money from the book? In other words, if you sell for $27, those 15 buys generate $405, which is obviously more than the $100 spent on Adwords. But how many of the 15 people who clicked Buy would actually buy? Also, did you list a price on your 'fake' sales page next to the Buy button?

Also, given your fake sales page experience, have you considered advertising with Adwords?

I didn't have a formula in mind with the fake sales page, but my conversion rate was 3-4%. Not bad.

In my mind it wasn't scientific. If I could put a sales page for a product that doesn't exist and even one person attempts to give me money, imagine what I could do if I had a real product and could even show a sample, testimonials, etc.

The fake sales page, for me, was just to test that I wasn't off my rocker with the idea and to get a little motivation to push forward.

I have spent a bit of money on advertising (<$200) and saw almost no returns from it.

Thanks again for sharing.

Would you say the "niche factor" made it easier to attract traffic, buyers and followers?

Roughly how many paid full price versus discount? How powerful was discounting in bringing in more sales?

re: the "niche" factor, what do you mean? The fact that the target audience was a subset of programmers?

I don't know exact sales volume for the discounted days but as you can see those days brought in the most revenue, so it was certainly powerful.

Re niche. Yes, do you think the whole sales/marketing process was easier because your target market are quite narrow (ruby, UNIX, programming)?

Would you have priced differently knowing what you now know about discounting effect?

It's always easier to target an audience that you are familiar with and are a part of. Since I would have bought this book myself if someone else had wrote it I knew what people would want to know and how to reach them.

If I were targeting the book at sysadmins, for instance, I would have had no idea how to get in front of them or talk to them at their level.

re: pricing, nope. I think the discounting works because it's intermittent and gets people sharing. If I were to lower the price permanently I wouldn't expect sales to remain that high.

Why not consider capturing emails with those landing pages initially? That way you have a list of qualified leads who are ready to buy the product.

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