Cringely: Making 400k/yr profit on an eBook about parrots

http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/parrot-secrets/

by tptacek • 17 years ago

157 73 17 years ago

cringely.com

tptacek2• 17 years ago

"The owner of Parrotsecrets, for one thing, doesn’t even own a parrot."

First instinct: I call shenanigans.

Second take: remember the numbers 37signals posted on the "Getting Real" eBook?

bprater• 17 years ago

I wouldn't be too quick to call shenanigans on this. Information marketing is a huge business.

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.

mixmax• 17 years ago

There might actually be more people interested in parrots than in how to run a small software company efficiently.

mechanical_fish4• 17 years ago

Indeed. Particularly when you consider that the average small software company doesn't live for 25 to 70 years.

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!

tptacek2• 17 years ago

(I've written unclearly: I believe the numbers now, but I didn't at first).

bemmu• 17 years ago

Link?

mechanical_fish4• 17 years ago

As the owner of a parrot and a reader of several parrot books and magazines... the advice at the top of the sample page looks completely legit.

In particular, I cringe inwardly whenever I see someone with a parrot on their shoulder.

zaidf• 17 years ago

I have friends making just as much using adwords so I would not doubt this.

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.

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Sorry for the meta-comment, but, the text on the page is justified -- strange! I can't think of any other significant web examples where they justify?

gord• 17 years ago

I can parse justified text, although I prefer left side only...

But, centered? thats completely unjustified!

siegler• 17 years ago

There's no way that a book on Perl 6 makes 400k/year!

acangiano• 17 years ago

It ships with Perl 6's source code. :)

mahmud• 17 years ago

"eBooks have no manufacturing costs, no inventory costs, and almost no distribution costs. Best of all, it is a GLOBAL business."

As long as the topic of your ebook does not appeal to the mainstream[1]

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516239

jcl• 17 years ago

This makes parrots a great subject choice.

garyrichardson3• 17 years ago

This is straight out of my old gig. Google Corey Rudl or visit http://www.marketingtips.com if you want a manual on the process.

quickpost• 17 years ago

Why did you decide to get out of it? It seems rather lucrative and straightforward if you've cracked the code...

garyrichardson3• 17 years ago

I was a sysadmin for marketingtips.com, then left for a startup.

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.

ashleyw• 17 years ago

Do sites/pages like this actually work?

    http://www.parrotsecrets.com/

I've always thought they look too cheap, scammy and desperate for most people to bother with...

dmix• 17 years ago

I used to think that, until I saw my Dad learn to use the internet.

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.

vaksel• 17 years ago

you are a techie, you know the difference between an actual site and a landing page...your average internet user does not. They see a site like that, and think it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create

Alex3917• 17 years ago

"I've always thought they look too cheap, scammy and desperate for most people to bother with..."

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.

access_denied• 17 years ago

And it is scientifically proven that it works. It is called direct marketing and works since the 1920s. No big deal.

cpr• 17 years ago

That's exactly the format that all the Jay Abraham-style gurus recommend (originally for snail mail spam, i.e., junk mail), and it apparently works very well.

The longer the better--12 pages isn't too long.

It's amazing, but it's well-documented.

Eliezer• 17 years ago

Does any of the documentation suggest why it works?

shafqat• 17 years ago

It's interesting that there is no BUY IT NOW type link at the top of the page. Nothing. No call to action to buy the book at all, apart from the small link at the bottom. I cant believe this actually works. Will old women who have parrots realize that there is something all the way at the bottom of the page to click? Will they even realize there is a product to purchase?

Hexstream2• 17 years ago

Well, I'm thinking a cheap and desperate-looking site must appeal to cheap and desperate people, which appears to be the target demographic. (How ironic that they then go and waste 60$ on a non-product... But it's to save hundreds of $$$!!@@@!!11)

MaysonL• 17 years ago

For a contrary opinion on the guy's ethics, see http://nancyrichards.org/ (hoisted from the comments on Cringely's site).

dejb• 17 years ago

Somewhere in the middle of all that text on the page is the actual complaint

'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.

jibiki• 17 years ago

When I see that site, I think timecube.

jsares• 17 years ago

you are educated stupid

Hexstream2• 17 years ago

I'm relieved! Here I thought I was looking at a site that absolutely looks like a scam yet is a legitimate business...

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

There is a difference between, "This guy doesn't deliver his digital goods" and "This guy is making money left and right selling digital goods".

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.

sofal4• 17 years ago

There are a lot of "working business models" that consist of tricking older people into paying much more than they should.

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.

airlabam• 17 years ago

"$79.95 is nothing to pay if it saves a vet visit per year and keeps you from losing a fingertip or having your parrot call Grandma a whore."

The last reason was actually kind of the reason I've been wanting to get a parrot. Inappropriate? Yes. Hilarious? Even more so.

steveplace• 17 years ago

If you guys want to know more about how to do this, I have an ebook for you. It's a steal at only $49!

RobGR• 17 years ago

This site reminds me of Timothy Ferris and that 4 Hour Work Week book.

arram• 17 years ago

I wonder how much of the profit comes from selling customer contact info. Privacy Statement: Personally Identifiable Information

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.

garyrichardson3• 17 years ago

Having worked in the industry, I'd say very little of it. An $80 ebook is almost all profit. If you can write/edit your own copy, your costs are typically a domain reg, super cheap hosting and whatever cut your payment gateway takes.

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.

tobych• 17 years ago

Despite having lived in the US for a couple of years now and beginning to lose my English accent, I think if I ever met the bloke who does this, despite my love of beauty, elegance and other good things, I'd inevitably end up slapping him heartily on the back and pronouncing: "Good for you, mate. Nice one. Gotta hand it to you."

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.

ShabbyDoo3• 17 years ago

We who hang out on HN don't have a very diverse group of acquaintances. If we find someone to be an idiot, we probably don't waste too much time with him. So, we end up with a very biased view of the world. Given this, when we see a smarmy-looking site for an expensive parrot book, we laugh and think, "Who the hell would buy that?" The guy who's running the site was able to see how dumb most Americans (or at least English readers) are and picked a business accordingly.

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.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Diabetes, go with diabetes and you'll make ten times more.

Or anything health related.

ShabbyDoo3• 17 years ago

Yeah. It's a category that people certainly have an incentive to care about. I wonder if there are laws that prevent claims like, "Learn the true secrets of diabetes management." Also, you'd be competing with WebMD and other free and legit sources.

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.

ShabbyDoo3• 17 years ago

I'm an amateur photographer, and I read strobist.com, a blog dedicated to inexpensive lighting techniques. To profit from the popularity of his blog, the author produced an eight DVD series on lighting techniques which sells for $150. I bought it. It's well-produced and worth the money. Perhaps I shouldn't think of this "selling info" business quite so negatively as I'm actually a customer!

chandler• 17 years ago

>> ...we laugh and think, "Who the hell would buy that?"

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?

miles3• 17 years ago

Two quotes from the comments on Cringley's site bear repeating (or should I say "parroting" - sorry ;-)

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."

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

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.

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.

miles3• 17 years ago

I agree that the market/individuals should decide whether a parrot ebook is worth $80. If he sold it for $1 or $1000 it wouldn't make any difference to me. However, I strongly agree with Mike's comments; setting up fake identities and passing them off as the real owners/buyers/etc is simply fraud. Cringley likens these fake identities to Betty Crocker - what a crock. No one believes there is a Betty Crocker any more than they believe there is a "Mister Doughnut" http://www.mister-donut.com/ or a "Wendy" http://www.wendys.com/ , nor do these companies lie to convince us of their reality ("Wendy came over with three of her friends yesterday to make a fresh batch of burgers - you just missed her!"). In short, sell the parrot book on its merits, not on outright lies.

delano3• 17 years ago

Every business extracts money from people. This thread is about the value people get in return.

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

tlb• 17 years ago

It may be that when people pay $80 for a parrot book, they actually read the whole thing and apply what they've learned. If they had bought it for $20 from Amazon, it might sit on the shelf.

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.

piramida• 17 years ago

Oh great, article about how much money a scam generates! We need more of these on the Internet, it's too honest and valuable now! Everybody that's out of job should do some ebay scam, why bother working while there are so many easy money making schemes...

pixpox3• 17 years ago

Why is it a scam? This guy is selling an ebook, with a money back guarantee.

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.

sofal4• 17 years ago

If you went up to my grandma and started telling her why she needs to buy a $100 book that tells her how to get rich, with enough convincing she would seriously buy it from you. This is because my grandma is not very money-wise and is especially vulnerable to that kind of thing. I doubt she is particularly unique in this respect among grandmas.

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.

hermitcrab• 17 years ago

Making up testimonials and pretending they are from genuine third parties is dishonest. There are no shades of grey here.

willhf• 17 years ago

Who is going to help me with the Jellyfish secrets eBook?

russell2• 17 years ago

Fried jellyfish are surprisingly good, crisp on the outside and slightly chewy in the center. I kid you not.

TY• 17 years ago

Here is another take on targeting a narrow niche from an interview by Andrew Warner (also about selling to bird lovers - an interesting coincidence):

"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.

AndrewWarner• 17 years ago

ClickBank told me there are a lot of people making this kind of money from ebooks on niche subjects.

ratsbane2• 17 years ago

Everyone missing the obvious thing here. It's not about the parrot site at all. It's about Cringely's site. Cringely has written a post about how to make a lot of money doing something easy. Cringely's post gets a lot of traffic. (Currently #1 on HN.) Cringely's site hosts ads. Cringely (and Mrs. Cringely) make lots of money. The parrot site is to Cringely's site what parrots are to the parrot site.

slance2• 17 years ago

He won't make much from the traffic from HN. Social media tech traffic is worth hardly anything.

Ultra targetted non-tech savvy traffic like the parrot site gets from adwords is worth a lot.

ratsbane2• 17 years ago

His traffic has come up sharply over the last few months (Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/cringely.com) to ~3k/month. Compare with ParrotSecrets.com at ~13k. Cringely is just following his own advice. What he's doing is as interesting as what he's saying.

russell2• 17 years ago

You know, I can see the logic of this from the buyers point of view. Last year bats got into my house and I couldnt get rid of them because I couldnt figure out where they came from. My GF was terrified. She wouldnt leave the bedroom without me around. I certainly would have paid $10-20 (not $80) for an ebook that even hinted at a solution.

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.

chops• 17 years ago

We had exactly the same problem several years ago. We had lots of bats in our attic of our vacation cottage. In an effort to lock them out, we effectively locked them in, and they started coming in to the house through openings from the attic to the main part of the house.

sofal4• 17 years ago

Here's what a legitimate parrot expert has to say about it:

http://goodbirdinc.blogspot.com/2009/02/buyer-beware-parrot-...

Cringely: Making 400k/yr profit on an eBook about parrots

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