My marketing experiment - failure.
Have you seen “Revolution”? Its an inspiring movie that has been released not that long ago. I watched it the other month and I must say, found it quite touching. Even though this is not my kind of movie. Anyhow, I am not here to discuss the film. I want to talk about the marketing concept that was used to monetize this movie. The video bellow explains the new ticket sales concept quite well:
I can say this concept was a massive concept for these guys. I’m sure you can research the exact figure on your own if I intrigued you enough.
So I decided to try the same approach online. I picked my best selling Ebook that sold like crazy not that long ago. I knew it was a quality product because I have sold 100 limited copies within a few days and not only had 0 complaints, I had people contact me to say thank you. I did not just stop there however. I have bundled the Ebook with more tools and bonuses in order to turn it into a truly great product. I then gave it away for free and asked the “buyers” to pay for it afterwards if they found the product useful. There was no set price either. I asked them as to pay as much or as little as they want, depending on how satisfied they were with the product.
50 copies later do you know how much money I have made? $0! Not a penny! I had people contact me to say thank you. I had some people say they will pay me later as soon as they get more paypal founds. Some said they would send me a cheque… But at the end of the day I got nothing.
You are probably thinking… There are plenty of open source projects that rely on donations from its users. I myself started my online journey with a project that relied on donations because I never even heard of Adsense etc back then… However what I tried with my ebook was slightly different. I knew that my “customers” had the money, I knew that they were willing to pay for this product before, I encouraged them to pay at least something, I made my concept clear and I even followed up some time later.
PS: Obviously they was not a scientific experiment. It was small scale and not so random in terms of customer demographics etc.
May 4th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Had it succeeded… you would have been a genius, and you would have been able to sell a $97 ebook ($47 if you buy by midnight tonight) about it…
May 12th, 2008 at 3:03 am
I think this only really works if you use it as an enticement to buy more, either through affiliate links, paying for extras or by limited functionality. Otherwise you end up with nothing or just a few dollars.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
@ Link Building Bible
lol well its not really a new cocept. I just tried it online.
@ Frank C
I guess that could work too… Hmmm…
June 6th, 2008 at 1:20 am
uhm, I could have told you it wouldn’t have worked.. but then you didn’t know me.. ha ha.
Another bad point of this is that all your previous customers that forked out good money for the ebook would feel cheated if they descovered you gave the ebook away for free!
Having said all this I just remembered that somewhere in northern Italy there’s a family restaurant/locanda where you go in, get your food from the fridge, eat and leave the money you think you owe. There is basically no host. The place does work fine, however I think the customers are selected regulars (small village where everyone know each other).