It's not a new idea. Tim Ferris has been preaching that since the Four Hour Work Week was published, and affiliate marketing programs are clearing houses for people doing this sort of thing.
Is anyone on HN doing this, or have you done it in the past. I'd love to hear some anecdotes from this community.
Its been my sole source of income, and its not a bad living, although I personally know people who are making $1-$10 million a year in profit from sites like this.
They're not one-man shops though, they usually have about 5-10 employees to help run everything, but its still very profitable. Digital goods cost pretty much $0 to copy and distribute, so the profit margins are amazing.
It really amazes me how a lot of people, especially in a community as open-minded as this, are quick to label everybody who has a strange-looking site a scammer. I use the salesletter format for most of my sites, and it works. I don't care what it looks like as long as it gets results.
As for the Parrot guy, I know nothing about him so I have no idea if he really does ignore refund requests. I use http://www.clickbank.com/ as my payment processor, and they handle all that. They honor all refund requests, with or without an explanation, so I couldn't even deny one if I wanted to.
I'd be happy to answer any questions anybody has about this market. It's basically an evolution of the direct mail market from before the Internet. Its looks a little strange to the Web 2.0 people here, but its a valid market.
I looked at the parrot site and I had a hard time finding the buy button.
I have no idea why. Maybe people like to read?
The same tests also show that the less graphics the better. You'll notice that the Parrot Secrets site has almost none. Not even a logo or a header graphic. That's on purpose. The tests I've seen show that fancy graphics just destroy the conversion rate on a site like this.
I have no idea why this is the case. But I'm going to do what works, not what looks fancy.
Did you qualify your niche the same way - by reading newsgroups?
And I never did any research or anything to get into my niche. I found myself helping my friends to set up simple websites and I realized that other people might want the same help. I'm not a writer, so instead I just wrote software for the same group. It worked out for me.
The long copy is about building excitement. You're trying to stream the user down to the buy button -- but make them read the testimonials and the bonuses so when they get to the call to action, they'll have no reason not to buy.
The key to it working is getting interested parties to read. If you don't care about parrots, no amount of copy is going to convince you to buy the book. If you've got a problem parrot, you'll be hooked after the second paragraph.
When I used to work for IMC (http://www.marketingtips.com -- company that teaches these techniques), I remember reading an internal news letter about a successful client. The site was about fitness/building muscle -- something I was interested in at the time. I clicked to his website and started reading. I knew about all the tricks in the sales letter, yet I still found myself wanting to buy his product. I 'snapped out of the trance' and didn't buy his ebook, but that was the day I realized long copy really works.
Example inspired by him: http://salsadancesecrets.com
Some of the best sales letters I've seen are direct mail.
For example, get on the Nightingale-Conant mailing list. Their 'This audio program will change your life' letters are supreme examples of the genre. And once you get on their list, I think you will get more examples in your mailbox (BottomLine Personal, Jay Abraham)
Basically, the software programs I have let people create and run websites very easily. I also have some hosted solutions for those who don't even want to have their own server.
That's how I started in the niche basically. I found myself helping my non-techie friends set up a simple website for themselves and figured others would need the same help too.
However, the challenge for folks new to the game -- is NOT the product. Product is simple.
Repeat after me: don't worry about the damn product, worry about the salesletter.
It is that salesletter that separates the winners and lowers.
Often, it takes me longer to write the salesletter than it takes me to create the product.
I jest not.
And that's why we are all discussing the parrot's salesletter.
I've seen many folk stumble because they can't twist their brain to write good long-form salesletters.
If you want to win at this game, print out dozens of these letters, get out your pencil and highlighter and study them like your life depends on it.
Follow this simple step and I promise you can make money in the info-product game.
Most of you won't follow that simple step, will go out and create "the most amazing product ever", crank out a lame salesletter and won't make a nickel.
Seen it over and over and over and over.
And then you'll poo-poo info-product marketing the rest of your days.
(Notice how you are more apt to read a post when it's short paragraphs? That's just one "hacking for humans" technique we use.)
I decided to do a DVD because I wanted to include a lot of screencasts. The companion PDF is more of a checklist/workbook. We did a 1,000 DVD run at DiskMakers and also let people access it online.
We're pretty much sold out of the initial run of DVDs (I have a few left in my closet) and we've sold the online version to a lot of overseas photographers who didn't want to wait for it to ship. We charged $79 for the DVD so you can do the math there. http://www.photographyseo.com.
One thing I want to emphasize is that we did absolutely no marketing other than linking to it on our main website and blog. No AdWords or other online campaigns. If I had tried hard, I imagine we could have sold 2 or 3 times the amount we have by now.
I'm considering doing a revised version that is an online/ebook version only–or possibly doing a version that has a slightly broader audience ("SEO for wedding vendors" for example).
If anyone wants to see the PDF or browse the videos, drop me an email.
First I tried launching it as a premium ebook, priced at $65 with some 6-7 pages long copy (see the source code of the page, the long copy is still there)
I didn't sell even a single copy. (Though I must admit, the traffic was really low, not even 5-6 visitors per day as I didn't do Adwords)
Then I dropped the price to $5, and did a short copy of the sales letter. Still nothing happened.
Now I am offering the ebook as free download and I get 2-3 downloads per day thanks to Google First Page Result for the term 'How to Start an Online Business'. Nothing sells like free stuff!
Maybe it was the ebook or maybe it was the sales letter or maybe it was both, but the fact is that I didn't sell even a single copy. With stories of an ebook making a million, there are a million (untold) stories of ebooks making zero.
Having an affiliate program is good because it gives you a chance at seeing how someone who is used to do this kind of marketing works (at least that's what I imagine, I haven't launched my website yet but was planning to have an affiliate program where people get a percentage of sales right from the beginning).
It seems to me that the most important to get sales is not the book but the ad copy and the use of sem to get the traffic there...
That said thanks for the book I'll see how it is :-)
1. Find a niche. "Start an online business" is not a niche.
2. Try affiliate programs and SEM to drive targeted traffic. These work best in a smaller niche (see #1)
3. You've got a lot of links on your page that take people away from the page, which drives down conversion, which drives up your cost per conversion, which hurts your ability to do #2
4. You're selling the steak, not the sizzle. Why do I want to start an online business? What's my core goal? What problem does your book solve?
5. A "huge list of resources" sounds like a lot of work. Google provides me with millions of links on this subject for free. What's valuable to me is that someone has culled those millions of links down to just what I really need to know, not 11,000 links that I then have to pick through.
There are other issues, but fixing those would be a big step in the right direction.
Here's what I know.
Pick a niche, be an expert, outsource everything but the content creation, and spend your efforts selling.
Pick a payment gateway that handles charge back procedures well, even if you can get it cheaper somewhere else (use paypal)
Price Higher than you think it's worth.
I've seen some really incredible results. Lots of money being made here. People do buy this sort of stuff, but I think that most of us at HN...don't; which is why it seems foreign.
I am interested because I am looking for different monetization models for my GF who is a fine art painter and photographer.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516821
The value of services such as ClickBank is that they provide you access to a large established affiliate network - something that is very hard to build yourself...
I would think that faking a testimonial is a snake oil salesman tactic.
I've also done affiliate marketing and that's done well also.
But I view this as means to cash rather than means to a true business. More like a springboard, I suppose.
The perception of ebook is pretty negative (low quality)... Amazon will improve this perception I hope...