Selling eBooks on your blog

Recently, I encountered two articles that made a combined impression on me. They were both related to internet marketing and the process of customer acquisition, conversion, and product fulfillment.

The first was a fascinating article about selling eBooks to monetize traffic on your blog or website. It describes a website called "Parrot Secrets", that provides information about caring for parrots and makes about $400,000 a year selling eBooks about parrots. For all I know the story could be completely made up, but I found it instructive.

Now most people that have a blog or website about Parrots probably would think it would be next to impossible to profit from the traffic. Selling an eBook about how to take care of your parrot was an interesting angle I never would have considered. It seems to provide value to the consumer while compensating the site owner.

Most interesting to me about the eBook is you are selling a product. Because you are a selling a product with fixed prices and fixed margins (95%!), you can model traffic acquisition costs and conversion rates to know exactly how much you would pay for a visitor. Once you know exactly how much a visitor is worth to you, you can buy traffic that costs less than that amount. The extent to which this is a large market and traffic is relatively inexpensive, you can grow the business. In otherwords, eBooks scale.

The other article I recently encountered was an interview with the ShoeMoney guy. I just found it interesting how he was able to build consumer marketing businesses. He originally built a site around mobile phone wallpaper and ringtones, and then tried about a million different ways to monetize it. Nothing earth shattering, but it was interesting to hear the process of how he built the business.

Anyhow, both the articles made me think it would be an amazing learning experience to write an eBook and learn the customer acquisition economics inside and out. It would probably be a cheap education!