I disagree.

Most of these so-called success stories are based on humungous lists. They're mailing out to thousands, if not tens of thousands of customers.

That part of the story is never revealed.

Just writing ebooks or having products has never been (and will never be) the way to selling more. The core is always the database that you're mailing out to.

The very fact that the person has 3000pages suggests that he's been in the game for a while. It also suggests that he's got a considerable list. It also suggests that he might be writing shorter articles to attract search engines.

There are too many gaps in this story. The biggest gap is simply the database numbers. Show me someone who's making $65K a month with a database of 1000-3000 subscribers.

Now that would be a real story

Sean http://www.5000bc.com

The reason I say 1000-3000 subscribers a month is simply because 95% of the people on the planet (and on the Internet) will be in that category or less.

All the stories are always about the big companies. The deep pockets. The people who've been in the game for 6-7 years.

And that's a slight distortion on reality.

This article would have been much more enlightening with (MarketingSherpa-style) links to samples of the content being re-packaged as e-books and the types of changes that were being made to the content when it was re-packaged (imho). My apologies if I missed links or additional info that is obvious to others.

As a freelance writer myself, my initial reaction is that the eBook writer/compiler is terribly underpaid at $400 to $800 per eBook. If the site owner is generating $50,000 in eBook sales for June and $65,000 for July (or $1,200 - $1,500 PER MONTH per eBook - based on a total of 43 eBooks), the freelancer is writing/compiling too much, too often, for too little!

As is very typical these days on the Internet, this article is only telling a portion of the story about "how to make money online" with this model - the portion that sounds so great!

I would prefer to see all the actual details of this method, not just the hype, so that I can see how to follow this success.

The two previous posts get at this same issue.

What is the URL of the site?

How long has it been up and running?

What is the niche?

What kind of site traffic does the owner get?

How large is his mailing list?

What is his advertising and PPC budget?

What kind of time does he spend daily on this?

As is usually the case with Internet businesses, the key is in the details of the execution. And at this point, we are only left to wonder and guess what those might be.

While I do agree with some of the previous comments about wanting more information because it would indeed be more enlightening and paint a more complete picture for the case study there is also a flip side to this argument.

There is a growing trend of people wanting complete and detailed blueprints exposing every aspect of a site's or businesse's revenue model handed to them and laid bare for the world to see.

Comments like, "they must have a list", "been established for a long time", "have a lot of content", "perform SEO" "spend money on advertising" etc are said as if they are negative things.

Building content, growing an e-mail list, and extablishing credibility and a realtionship with site visitors is intenet marketing 101.

Building a site is very hard work with many unrewarding hours but well worth it if you dedicate yourself to seeing it become profitable.

Would it really matter if you spent $50,000 a month in advertsing if it brought in $80,000 in revenue?

That's $30,000 a month in profit.

Is the niche really that important? Are we all going to go build a site on the same niche?

Maybe that is a reason not to reveal it so you don't get tons of copy cats and "me too" type people.

It would be nice to know more of the generalities of the site in question such as list size, types of advertising, frequency of e-mail follow-up, are they using an affiliate program, and whether the site is a forum, blog, review site, strictly articles and content, etc.

While the case study isn't as complete as I would like it to be, it gave me a copuple ideas I can use to repurpose and reposition my exisintg content in a similar fashion and found it rather useful.

Good questions one and all...

As one entry above notes, the successful publisher in question is both talented and hard working. He also values his privacy and doesn't want a "me-too" publisher invading his space. I won’t be revealing his name or his URL.

He does have an opt-in email list with more than 500,000 subscribers that he contacts several times per week.

He is also a big buyer of PPC - more than $50K for the month of June to drive traffic for both his AdSense revenue and his eBook sales.

As noted, he's also very good at SEO.

Our publisher is a full-time professional that has been working for more than 10 years to become an "over night success."

I'll thank him once more for sharing his insights with me and you.

I'll do my best to give you more real insights into the secrets for successful website publishing and information marketing three times a week. There will be no names or URLs to keep my sources happy and open with their data. Many are close associates who I've worked with for years and share what they share because they trust that I know where to draw the line between teaching and telling.

Both the Mequoda Library and Marketing Sherpa are great sources of well-documented case studies. You should use them both.

At the Cafe, I’m going to write about skills, concepts, techniques, tools and vendors without revealing the URLs that are using them. If that sounds good, drop by now and then to see what's being discussed.

Thanks for your time,

Don Nicholas

Don:

Thank you for the additional information which does clear up a few questions. Obviously, with a half million subscribers, $50,000/mo. in advertising expense, and 10 years of full time effort, the guy works hard and deserves what he gets.

I wanted to know the URL so I could see, first hand, what his site looks like, how it functions, etc; not to try to compete. The article becomes more credible when the actual site can be visited. Of course I realize why you want to protect the guy's privacy but it still leaves us wondering. Maybe there are reasons why this revenue model works in his niche where it would have absolutely no chance in others.

I wanted to know the niche to see if he was peddling, porn, viagra, MLMs or online poker (all hot topics these days, but not subjects most of us would ever care to tackle.)

Anyway, I have always thought information was power . . . and the more one can find on a successful revenue model, the better.

This is a useful article and enables me to realise that my own website content is ideally suited for me to create tips booklets and e-courses etc.

One other idea which has already generated traffic for me is to use website content, suitably amended as article content. This doesn't take anything from the website, nor the potential for bigger, value-creating content ongoing.

Regards

Hi All:

Another great question that deserves a good answer.

Any case study I post will represent a successful strategy I've seen work for multiple mainstream publishers. I, as a rule, will identify the publisher as B2B or B2C to help frame their experience. Our publisher here is a B2C play in a big family-friendly category. (When and if I cover a porn site, I’ll be sure to mention it.)

The eBook case study is one I've seen repeated again and again.

What struck me as noteworthy in this case, was the fact that 95% of the content in the eBooks was freely available as HTML web pages on the same website. That really pounded home for me what Fred Gleek (http://www.fredgleeck.com/) teaches about the modality of content: An eBook or print book, and a website are used differently by the consumer who will pay to have content collected into a book format that is organized and made to be read from cover to cover. Working with the folks at Consumer Reports over the years, I’ve seen a lot of data that further confirms Fred’s Media Modality Theory, which basically says consumers use, and relate to content in different media formats differently. This can have a profound impact on our ability, as publishers, to recycle content (a core principle of our own Mequoda Method) and both the economic model (see our report on Generating Website Revenue) and how we price the same content in different formats (from free on a Mequoda Editorial Hub to $$$ for live events and everywhere in between).

I was always the slow kid in class, so perhaps this isn’t a revelation to many of you. It was to me, and it certainly was to the publisher in this case. A very happy surprise, indeed.

Thanks for the feedback,

Don

Half a million visitors make sense. I asked, not because I wanted to know details, but because the story was only half told.

And the important bits were left behind.

Also on one of our sites, we have 1/100th the number that the person above has, and we spend zero dollars in advertising and do no publicity whatsover, and we still take home a third of what this person is taking.

So that kind of makes us feel warm inside :)

Sean http://www.psychotactics.com