Marketing wisdom of Gloria Estefan

Turn the beat around. Turn it upside down.
Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine

The orthodox conservative view of affiliate marketing books by blogging and email is to write a glowing review of the "must have" marketing book du jour, and to give an affiliate link. The theory is that your loyal followers will click the link and buy the book, because you recommended it.

There are few minor bugs in the theory. The main flaw is that it does not work in practice all that well. It is a low-percentage conversion process and it takes loads of targeted traffic to make it amount to much. see: Click the damn link.

I suspect the emphasis is misplaced. A good portion of affiliate sales come from anything but the specific product recommended. The critical component is clicking the link and setting the cookie. After that, I don't care what you buy. Look around until you find something you really want to buy today, please.

Rather than a time sequence of  (1) Read my timeless wisdom of a book review and then (2) Clicking on the affiliate link, I think I'll reverse the process using Amazon aStores. If you want to know my opinion of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik, you have to click through to that specific Amazon aStore product page to see it. Please do so now.

Turn the beat around. Turn it upside down.

The trick is you are limited by aStores to 1024 characters. That is 7.3 times the maximum Tweet size, and it is actually a lot of words. But, writing book reviews is not my strong suit, as you can see.

I don't recommend that you buy this book. You will probably hate it. It is very detailed and technical. All I want is for you to click the link and set the cookie.

Bootstrapping digital goods

A low-cost method of selling digital goods online is provided gt E-junkie.com. I've used the service as a consumer to buy a instant e-book download, which is relatively compact.

E-junkie pricing involves only a monthly subscription fee; with no bandwidth cost, no per transaction fee, or any other hidden fee.  Currently, the minimum monthly subscription fee is $5 per month, which is not payable until after the free 7-day trial period.

The bootstrap strategy is simple.  Line up your ducks so that you can sell at least $5 in digital goods in the first 7 days, during the free trial period, and at least that much every month afterwards, and your fixed costs are covered.