Umm guys, parrotsecrets.com no longer sells an ebook.. were we scammed? | Hacker News Reader

Umm guys, parrotsecrets.com no longer sells an ebook.. were we scammed?

parrotsecrets.com

30 pointstocomment29 comments

This is pretty common...internet marketers are constantly testing new things. In this case, he's switched to a squeeze page that hypes a free e-course. If you sign up for it, you get setup in his Aweber autoresponder and you'll get the free e-course (hopefully) along with offers for the product he's selling. He may just have switched to test the overall conversion rate through the whole pipeline and see if it's higher. Often it'll better to hook people with a free offer and build trust over time, selling them multiple products, rather than trying to convert cold traffic to a sale up-front.

Also, I just want to point out that he's likely never made $400k in annual profit from this. Not only was Cringely's estimate based on the $79 price that gets cut in half for a lot of the orders, but a lot of these guys give their affiliates 50 - 75%, plus he's probably paying for a lot of paid traffic. That said, if he's selling 10-15 of these per day, he's probably doing well, especially if he has premium products that he upsells people to.

Lots of lessons here for the HN crowd, IMO.

As an experiment, I'm currently cooking my own site (for a different market) using the parrotsecrets.com recipe (as it was described in Robert Cringely's post). If people are still interested in this, I'll make sure to post the results to Hacker News, including all of the relevant data such as anonymized traffic logs, financial results, etc.

I feel like this change on the information products "flagship" kind of invalidates the whole business model. (Maybe I'm just freaking out though)

It doesn't...the business model is to sell stuff to a niche market. He's still doing that, but he's either determined that getting them on his list and selling to them over time converts higher overall, or he's testing to see if that's the case. I wouldn't be surprised if it does...opt-in rates for cold (but targeted) traffic on squeeze pages like that can be north of 30%, compared to a good sales letter conversion rate of 2-3%. That's a lot of people who have given you permission to send them valuable info and offers for your product(s). Many people won't buy until they have multiple contacts with the offer. Hook them with a free offer, give them value over time, and then sell them your product.

I would really love to hear more about this. What phase are you in?

Are any other HN folks experimenting with this after reading the original ParrotSecrets story?

Yesterday I received the first 12 pages from the ebook author. I found her on Elance, and I'm paying $800 for 30 pages. Elance was very effective: I received over 30 bids for the project, several of which came from extremely qualified writers (including two PhDs). While I wait for the book to be finished (another 3 weeks), I'll be working on building the site and planning the marketing strategy.

If you'd like to discuss it in-depth, Ryan, feel free to contact me via email or Gtalk.

So how'd you find your niche?

Just wanted to second this. Please post some of your results - when you get them.

Once you have the product ready, how do you sell it? Using adwords or Affiliate marketing? If affiliate marketing, how do you find your affiliates? ClickBank?

I have a feeling that the owner is trying something else out. A free email list with heavy advertising for the ebook.

If you look at the FAQ it talks about an ebook:

"1. I have been trying for days to get the training e-book but I keep getting error messages stating that the site is either unavailable or cannot be found. . How do I report such a site error? :"

http://www.parrotsecrets.com/FAQ-parrot.php

I wonder why he's trying something else out? If he's making 1000's per week, why change it up so much?

My assumption would be that he is no longer making thousands per week. I'd imagine there's a somewhat limited market for people interested in an e-book about parrots, at least enough that at some point the market would be saturated.

I really doubt it. People are still buying parrots, so there's always new folks to sell to.

Also, he's almost certainly never made thousands per week in profit from this. Affiliates and PPC eat up profits pretty quickly.

Because the amount of attention he received made people think it was a scam?

is there a backstory here? some context would be nice..

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215

sorry, figured it was infamous by now. I think there was someone about it on the front page of HN for about a week ...

Slightly offtopci - wasn't the guy behind that also behind the acacia berry site?

I can remember hearing about how they were optimizing to adwords / adsense - just filling a need, basically being nice about it all.

Then every now and then I'd google something obscure and come across pagerank shennanigans related to similar keywords. That's when I started to think that the people who got excited over the parrot book might have been scammed.

No, that was a different person. He was Canadian, I believe. ParrotSecrets guy is from India.

Thanks for that - I was pretty unsure about what was going on.

With all due respect, who cares if they've changed course?

If the poster child of successful niche content production changes business models, we would like to know of it; are they still in content production? are they still niche?

Success should be measured against the backdrop of time; how long can they keep it up?

If you subscribe to the free emails, you'll eventually get this link:

http://www.parrotsecrets.com/Parrot/index1.php?page=training...

On that page you can buy the ebook set for $40.

Don't you mean $79?

But it has $137.17 worth of bonuses included (it's a special offer for today only) so they actually pay you $57.22 to buy it!!!

There seems to be a "time-limited" 50% discount which is always available, so it ends up being $40.

"3) Order through this pop-window! Don't order off the main website or you will end up paying the normal price of $79.95. Order here, just below for $39.95!"

They have an AFFILIATE program for the ebook.

http://www.parrotsecrets.com/affiliates.php

I'm pretty sure they still sell it.

Still, it is good that the OP is questioning the accuracy of information previously discussed on this site.

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