Purple Squirrl

Dating ebook experiments shows how to make money online

Lana R. (member of Gather.com) provides some great insight into an experiment she did with ebooks. She explains how she used the sale of ebooks to launch her affiliate marketing campaign. As you look around the web today this is an ongoing trend. There are a ton of free ebooks out there stuffed with affiliate deals. The author signs up with a bunch of affiliates on a certain topic then writes and ebook. In the ebook they suggest those affiliates as good destinations and the ebook customer then signs up with the affiliate - cha ching.

The experiment Lana R undertook was to use Torrent sites to advertise her ebooks and see how much she could push the envelope with SEX as the ebook topic. It turns out that even though these torrent directory sites (ie. the pirate bay) allow users to download apps illegally for the most part (or at least pushing the boundaries of what is legal) they will ban an ebook if the title is too obviously sexually explicit. So Lana R worked her experiment with a dating related ebook.

Here’s some info from her article on the affiliates she used -

Now I’ve tried a great number of adult dating sites, so here are two of my best performing STATS and results:

Disclaimer: These are my stats from various testing which I don’t track. So you should be able to get even higher conversion rates which turns to higher per signup $$$:

#1 - Iwant
7 uniques per FREE signup ($7.10 per free signup)
71 uniques per PAID signup ($50 *35/week* to $100 *279/week* per paid signup)

By far my best performing dating site, choose the Pay per Profile for starters and once you see more and more traffic, start using the Pay per Signup campaign instead.

#2 - AFinder
5 uniques per FREE signup ($0.35 per click)
55 uniques per PAID signup ($100 per paid signup)

My 2nd best performing affiliate site, only Pay Per Order is worth using.

Some of the takeaways from this experiment when creating an affiliate stuffed ebook -

1) You don’t need a website to make money online. Lana R did this without a webiste. She simply made the ebook and submitted it to torrent directories.

2) Title of the ebook has can’t be too sexually explicit or it will be banned.

3) The ebook should not be longer than 5 pages.

4) Create 2 or 3 versions of the ebooks and track success.

5) Sign up with 2 affiliates and track success. It’s best to do #3 & #4 independent of each other.

I like the idea behind this method but not crazy about the subject matter. So, I may try it on a different topic where I can provide good value.