Interesting Experiment

We talk a lot in here about things we can do to improve sales, and various ways to promote things.

John "Zeus66" Schwartz and I recently released a product called Zombie Blogging. And for various reasons, we didn't have sales copy, but we needed to get it on sale.

So we stuck it on a web page (www.zombieblogging.com - although it may have been changed by the time you read this) that was essentially the title page of the ebook. It literally had the name of the book, a picture of zombies, a subtitle about "blogs of the living dead," a text box for a discount code, and a small, white "Buy Now" button with Visa/MC logo - not a Belcher button.

Then we went and handed out discount codes on forums. For example, on this forum, we provided the "zombiewarrior" discount code for $20 off. On another, we provided the "zombiehorde" code for $10 off. We did all of this in normal posts and signatures, no PMs, no paid advertisements.

We didn't drive traffic. We didn't email a list. All we did was post in a couple of forums, and in some of them (including here), we just put the link and a discount code in a signature.

Over the past 24 hours, with no sales copy and near-zero promotion, the product sold 16 copies. (Since not one of the "$10 off" coupons was used, all of them were updated to "$20 off" instead. Apparently the market wants half-price or better.)

So challenge assumptions. Everything was done wrong with this "launch." It shouldn't have made any money at all... but it did.

There are any number of lessons to be learned from this kind of thing. You never know what you'll stumble across that becomes the Next Big Thing in IM... even if it's just in your IM and nobody else cares.