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Comment by jjets718 | Hacker News Reader

Nathan, if you see this, have you thought about using AdWords to promote your books instead of using an affiliate network? I think it might be interesting to see if the CPA with AdWords or other online ads can be optimized to the point where it is cheaper than the CPA with affiliates.

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I think Adwords and other paid traffic would be more effective driving traffic to an email capture squeeze page that delivered a series of free reports over a few weeks.

The final few emails would then try to sell the book. IMO it's too hard to sell this sort of product to an audience that has never heard of you.

Yes, absolutely. I can't believe I overlooked this. Especially if I had other related products to cross sell down the road.

Right now it is just a matter of figuring out where to spend my time.

Check out Influads.com - very targeted display advertising for your target audience. CPM's are slightly high though. If you can pull a .5% ctr you would probably end up paying ~$1 click (note: I WOULD not try CPM media buys BEFORE making sure it converts with CPC first).

Shoot for an optin rate ~45.1% at least (if this is hard straight out the box, just have 1 data field, i.e. email address not name+email address)

Profit hack: consider a funnel like this:

squeeze page-->immediate redirect = sales page-->sales page thank you has something like PayWithATweet.com on it...offer a bonus for a social share.

Good luck!

Thanks for the response, Brennan! That's an interesting insight!

When I worked out the value of each visitor (on average) I thought about using AdWords. I really don't know much about it, so it will be a new area to pursue.

Unfortunately selling with Gumroad I can't track conversions effectively, so that may make page optimization more difficult.

I'll give it a try soon and report back the results (on my blog).

Gumroad doesn't give you meaningful metrics? Can someone recommend a competitor that does?

Gumroad gives awesome metrics and stats, they even track the source of each sale. The downside for me is that almost every sale is through my site, so the referrer is always the same (nathanbarry.com).

Since the entire purchase happens in a secure iFrame I have no way of knowing on my site when the transaction completes. So I can't use Visual Website Optimizer or Google Analytics to track the conversion.

I hear they are working on this... Otherwise they are wonderful.

They don't allow you to pass through a custom id with each customer? That way you can record the referrer and customers actions on the site and tie it back to the sale, if they allow it.

Hey Nathan, I'm working on my AdWords eBook called "Your first three months on AdWords" right now (this post was quite timely!!)

Would be happy to share it with you for free in return for an endorsement if you find it helpful.

My email is iain@workingsoftware.com.au if you're interested!

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