Cringely: Making 400k/yr profit on an eBook about parrots
cringely.com
cringely.com
William: "Ugh. I was really excited you’d found something that entrepreneurs could do to bring value to the world. But this guy’s taken the basics somebody could get from any $20 parrot book, added a heap of the sort of dubious marketing that fills the low-grade tabloids, thrown in a web forum they could get for free, and charged $80 for it. From an economic perspective — which is something we clearly could use more of — this business adds little or no value to the world. All it does is extract money from people who aren’t smart enough to find the right parrot book through Amazon or their local pet store. It moves money around, but it makes us net poorer, as it consumes more value than it creates. I’m sure it’s great for the guy running it, but don’t fool yourself into thinking this does anything good for our economy at all."
Mike Gamerland: "Following this model, you would suggest we all pick a niche market, identify ourselves as someone we are not, with experience and expertise we don’t have and sell products to people who, by the very nature of the market – would find it difficult if not impossible to know the truth... So - instead of identifying expertise and raising it above the clatter of the girl 'who would love to talk to me now' and the 'banker from Africa – who can make me millions,' I am stuck with more liars working to get money from me."
All your grocery store ever does is extract money from people who aren't smart enough to find the right produce through their local farmer.
This is a new model of retail. Instead of creating a central box into which a hundred different products can be dumped, for a thousand different people, this site creates a single location for a single product, which a huge number of searchers will find. The fact that there is a Parrot Book, and that it's easy to find, is good for humanity. Not sure if the rewards are commensurate to the goodness, but if you average this in with a few hundred other sites using the same scheme with less success, you get a saner picture.
If working under a pseudonym is a "fraud" then a lot of great writers were frauds: Charles Dodgson, Samuel Clemens, Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, a sizeable percentage of the artists who draw your newspaper's comic strips, and 100% of the authors of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, among others. Many musicians are "frauds" (Farrokh Bulsara, Robert Zimmermann, Reginald Dwight), including most famous rap musicians. Half of Hollywood is a a "fraud": Frances Gumm, Archibald Leach, Margarita Cansino, Marion Morrison, Allen Konigsberg, Carlos Estévez, Maurice Mickelwhite.
(Sorry about the flood of examples. I just can't resist them. Isn't it fun how much less bland the world looks if we just remove the whitewash? But, alas, I can't blame Marion Morrison for deciding that he'd sell more tickets as "John Wayne", because I don't doubt that fact for a minute.)
As we've seen, many pseudonyms were chosen precisely to hide the author's true race or gender from the buying public: George Sand, George Eliot. And there's an analogous practice: the creative use of initials. (Especially common for women trying to break in to SF/F. Isn't that interesting?) Thus, Joanne Rowling publishes as "J.K. Rowling" [2], Carolyn Cherry's 60-odd works of SF are published as "C.J. Cherryh" [3], and Celia Friedman writes as "C.S. Friedman".
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[1] I single out Middle America because it's the place I know -- I was born and raised in Ohio. I'm sure Middle America isn't the only place where this is true.
[2] Of course, this doesn't fool anyone anymore in her case.
[3] According to Wikipedia, the extra "h" is there because "Cherry" sounded too much like a romance novelist's name.
Yeah, that one would be a little harder to explain away. ;)
Creating a single location for a single product may be a new model of retail but selling a product with little value to a naive market is not.
EDIT: I just realized it's not a new model of retail at all. One person selling their wares predates the concept of retail stores and it's still alive today on streets and in markets.
Let us not forget Joe Ades: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ia7TF2yVQU
The self-improvement market is very much like that. You could sell people a video of a Tony Robbins seminar for $20. But when people pay $1000 and devote a long weekend to it, they're more likely to change their behavior as a result. The $1000 product is actually worth more than the $20 product.
If you're going to spend 4 hours reading a book and your time is worth $100/hr, you can see that the price of the book itself is irrelevant.
Also, many of us would be embarrassed to admit that we were making our money this way, so we avoid even considering such activities.
So, what other information niches exist that would satisfy the needs of some small fraction of other 90-some percent? Yes, this question is arrogant, crass, and probably repugnant to many. However, it's the kind of question that Parrot Guy probably asked himself when he got started.
Or anything health related.
Yesterday on the TeeVee, I saw an ad for a DVD on how to make one's child behave himself. Given that we have a 3 1/2 year-old who is a terror, I paused to evaluate the claims made. Perhaps mental health-related stuff would get around the "playing doctor" problem? I mean light claims like "feel better" rather than "cure your depression."
Not that I actually want to do any business like this...I'm no better at it than the next guy. Also, isn't a bookstore the oldest form of this? The only thing new is the disintermediation and electronic distribution.
I'd speculate that this arrogance is more a consequence of the content being sold than the format it's being sold in.
If someone wrote a "real scaling with memcached" (or whatever) ebook, with actual setup, use cases, performance numbers, patterns, etc, I suspect the users here would be intrigued.
Sure, much of the information could be gleaned from blog postings and READMEs, but how much would it be worth for all the topics to be aggregated and treated with a consistent depth?
'The product never arrives!! The user ID and password won't get into your mailbox!! You will keep getting daily emails urging you to buy products for your pets!'
This obviously is a pretty serious complaint. I can't help but think it should have featured more prominently instead of 'The guy is an Indian and an SEO!!!' being the main thrust.
I'd be interested to see if there is any further information on this. I wonder if Cringley (anonymously) ordered the product to make sure he would be comfortable promoting the guy's business practices first.
Both may be true.
Whether this guy has terrible customer service is a different discussion than asking if the business model works. I'm much more interested in hearing if the business model works or not.
There is a lot of money to be made off of unsuspecting people in a perfectly legal way. Are you into that kind of thing?
Don't ask me where I think the line should be drawn. But the line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it shouldn't be right at the boundary between what is technically legal and what is not.
http://www.parrotsecrets.com/
These sites spend quite a bit of time perfecting the copyrighting and the small details like making certain headlines have a yellow background. To someone who can't tell a spam site from Facebook it can be pretty effective - assuming your aiming for that market.
The reason all these pages have that look is that each paragraph is designed only to get you to read the next paragraph. The idea is that if you've already decided that you're going to buy it, you'll just scroll down to the bottom. And if you haven't yet decided to buy it, then the next thing that needs to happen before closing the sale is that you need to read the next paragraph. The logic of it actually makes a lot of sense.
The longer the better--12 pages isn't too long.
It's amazing, but it's well-documented.
For something like a $79.95 ebook on parrot training, it would probably take you a fair amount of convincing to buy. That's why they give you a long list of reasons in storytelling format. If it were free, you would need less convincing, and the copy would be drastically shorter.
The core theory is in fact quite simple: People have a (serious) problem to solve and the text presents the product as a solution to these problems by pointing out its benefits. In other words: People are expected to be self-interested.
Of course, potential buyers also wonder whether the product will deliver. Since media is not interactive, you have to deal with typical objections up front. Thus, these latters tend to be rather long.
Next, you'd need the attention of the audience. Thus, you make (lots of sub-) headlines that are easy to scan and makes readers interested. Among others, curiosity is often induced to make people willing to read the rest of the text. "Do you make these mistakes in English" is a classic example. The magic word here is of course "these". It promises an answer in the text without revealing it yet.
In the text, you can use typical sales tactics to overcome buyers' fear of later remorse. Caldini's 'Influence' describes the common 6 tactics.
For example, people tend to buy from people they like. One way to make people like the seller is to point out similarities. Thus, the seller often uses a profile similar to the buyers -- in the above example: "Natalie ('A Parrot Lover For The Last 12 Years')". This also establishes the seller as an authority -- 12 years is quite some time to gain experience and thus she probably knows what she's talking about.
Additionally, you have a clear call to action. For some reason, people are either unable to figure out what to do next or they are willing to obey commands.
And that's it, basically.
As far as I know there's no agreement about an explanation on why these tactics work. Why do people obey commands by authorities? You may construct an explanation based on the different models of economic or biological or psychological behavior.
But it's hard to test which of those (if any) is the one 'true' explanation.
I've long wondered about those long-paged red-yellow-and-white sites. They've always seemed like they live in this other, mysterious world. A parallel web, at least. Who would read this stuff? Who would /write/ this stuff? Do they not know what they're doing? Now I know they (often) /really/ know what they're doing. It's not my thing at all, but it's impressive.
And yes, very much 4 Hour Work Week. Equally yukky and impressive all at the same time.
In particular, I cringe inwardly whenever I see someone with a parrot on their shoulder.
"When Bob Dunlap of ClickBank told me that one of his clients made $500,000 last year selling an ebook about how to attract humming birds to your home, I had to interview him."
http://blog.mixergy.com/sell-ebooks/
The article for that post pretty much outlines exactly what parrotsecrets.com has done.
Important part of business like this is the role of affiliate marketing in driving traffic to these sites. Affiliate costs (that can be very substantial) should be factored into how much these sites make.
On the other hand, it is not easy money as it may appear. You have to drain a lot of hours and money into testing different markets/products until you find a niche and product with a math that returns a profit. Pros of it is because it uses adwords, the business can scale in most cases.
I finally arrived at a solution, but backwards. I sealed all the entrances into my house, but I hadn't sealed the bats out, I had sealed them in. For a couple of months, whenever I moved a piece of furniture, I'd uncover another dead bat. Dead bats dont look like dead bats. They look like balls of dust. I had vacuumed up a couple before I realized what they were.
I've seen/met some of the success stories. The system does work. As always, money out is dependent on effort in. Plus luck.
I'd much rather my effort in be code based than marketing copy based.
This web site may collect personally identifiable information about you. The information may include your name, your email address, your location and mailing address, and your phone number.
Your personally identifiable information may be used to send you emails or postal mails about special offers that may be relevant to you. Your personally identifiable information may be disclosed to third parties who may be interested in sending you emails or postal mails about special offers that may be relevant to you.
It's much more important to have a good reputation than make a few dollars off of an email address. That good rep means more testimonials, which leads to more consumer confidence in buying from your website.
Just because you think the book is crappy doesn't mean its a scam. Who cares if Nancy Roberts or whoever doesn't exist, he's just realised that parrot owners from middle America aren't likely to buy a book from a guy called Manupek Chandajee.
Do you see the problem here? Do you perhaps realize why I might want to discourage salesmen like that from coming in contact with my grandma? Look, it's just a guy selling a book, right? If my grandma decides that she needs it then that's up to her, right?
Why is it hard to understand that there are people out there who can be taken advantage of legally but shouldn't be? There is a point when you cross the line from providing value to taking unfair advantage of others. It's reasonable in the latter case to call it a scam, ebook or no ebook.
But people buy stupid stuff, it's up to them to decide what they spend their money on, not for some arbiter of fairness to ban products that they think are too expensive or don't provide enough value.
Capitalism isn't ethical, it's morally neutral, if you start banning people from selling books that are too expensive or that you think don't provide the correct information (have you even read it?) then the whole economy doesn't work.
What about razors? They cost $20/£10 and the advertising preys on men who are likely to be convinced of the necessity of "FOUR BLADES!" when in fact it makes no difference at all. They don't have to buy the overpriced razor.
The last reason was actually kind of the reason I've been wanting to get a parrot. Inappropriate? Yes. Hilarious? Even more so.
http://goodbirdinc.blogspot.com/2009/02/buyer-beware-parrot-...
Ultra targetted non-tech savvy traffic like the parrot site gets from adwords is worth a lot.
As long as the topic of your ebook does not appeal to the mainstream[1]
First instinct: I call shenanigans.
Second take: remember the numbers 37signals posted on the "Getting Real" eBook?
The average joe doesn't make a lot of money because they get the "information" part but not the "marketing" part.
Look at his salesletter -- it's traditional direct marketing copy. Big on the hype, big on the "getting you emotionally" involved. That's how you convert eyeballs into sales. (Wait on the page until you get a pop-up with a discount, another big technique.)
I'm betting he has lots of affiliates helping to get eyeballs to his site, too.
I'd believe he's making every bit as much as Cringely says he does.
Even though I don't have a problem with my parrot, I'm acutely aware of the possibility that my executor might someday have a problem with my parrot. And I've got one of the shorter-lived species!
But, centered? thats completely unjustified!