
Umm guys, parrotsecrets.com no longer sells an ebook.. were we scammed? - tocomment
http://www.parrotsecrets.com/
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ryanwaggoner
This is pretty common...internet marketers are constantly testing new things.
In this case, he's switched to a squeeze page that hypes a free e-course. If
you sign up for it, you get setup in his Aweber autoresponder and you'll get
the free e-course (hopefully) along with offers for the product he's selling.
He may just have switched to test the overall conversion rate through the
whole pipeline and see if it's higher. Often it'll better to hook people with
a free offer and build trust over time, selling them multiple products, rather
than trying to convert cold traffic to a sale up-front.

Also, I just want to point out that he's likely never made $400k in annual
profit from this. Not only was Cringely's estimate based on the $79 price that
gets cut in half for a lot of the orders, but a lot of these guys give their
affiliates 50 - 75%, plus he's probably paying for a lot of paid traffic. That
said, if he's selling 10-15 of these per day, he's probably doing well,
especially if he has premium products that he upsells people to.

Lots of lessons here for the HN crowd, IMO.

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markerdmann
As an experiment, I'm currently cooking my own site (for a different market)
using the parrotsecrets.com recipe (as it was described in Robert Cringely's
post). If people are still interested in this, I'll make sure to post the
results to Hacker News, including all of the relevant data such as anonymized
traffic logs, financial results, etc.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I would really love to hear more about this. What phase are you in?

Are any other HN folks experimenting with this after reading the original
ParrotSecrets story?

~~~
markerdmann
Yesterday I received the first 12 pages from the ebook author. I found her on
Elance, and I'm paying $800 for 30 pages. Elance was very effective: I
received over 30 bids for the project, several of which came from extremely
qualified writers (including two PhDs). While I wait for the book to be
finished (another 3 weeks), I'll be working on building the site and planning
the marketing strategy.

If you'd like to discuss it in-depth, Ryan, feel free to contact me via email
or Gtalk.

~~~
smountcastle
So how'd you find your niche?

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weaksauce
I have a feeling that the owner is trying something else out. A free email
list with heavy advertising for the ebook.

If you look at the FAQ it talks about an ebook:

"1. I have been trying for days to get the training e-book but I keep getting
error messages stating that the site is either unavailable or cannot be found.
. How do I report such a site error? :"

<http://www.parrotsecrets.com/FAQ-parrot.php>

~~~
tocomment
I wonder why he's trying something else out? If he's making 1000's per week,
why change it up so much?

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icey
My assumption would be that he is no longer making thousands per week. I'd
imagine there's a somewhat limited market for people interested in an e-book
about parrots, at least enough that at some point the market would be
saturated.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I really doubt it. People are still buying parrots, so there's always new
folks to sell to.

Also, he's almost certainly never made thousands per week in profit from this.
Affiliates and PPC eat up profits pretty quickly.

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htsh
is there a backstory here? some context would be nice..

~~~
mariorz
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215>

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dave_au
Slightly offtopci - wasn't the guy behind that also behind the acacia berry
site?

I can remember hearing about how they were optimizing to adwords / adsense -
just filling a need, basically being nice about it all.

Then every now and then I'd google something obscure and come across pagerank
shennanigans related to similar keywords. That's when I started to think that
the people who got excited over the parrot book might have been scammed.

~~~
pmichaud
No, that was a different person. He was Canadian, I believe. ParrotSecrets guy
is from India.

~~~
dave_au
Thanks for that - I was pretty unsure about what was going on.

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_pius
With all due respect, who cares if they've changed course?

~~~
mahmud
If the poster child of successful niche content production changes business
models, we would like to know of it; are they still in content production? are
they still niche?

Success should be measured against the backdrop of time; how long can they
keep it up?

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markerdmann
If you subscribe to the free emails, you'll eventually get this link:

[http://www.parrotsecrets.com/Parrot/index1.php?page=training...](http://www.parrotsecrets.com/Parrot/index1.php?page=training_ebookspl&src=eml9)

On that page you can buy the ebook set for $40.

~~~
weaksauce
Don't you mean $79?

~~~
ramchip
But it has $137.17 worth of bonuses included (it's a special offer for today
only) so _they actually pay you $57.22 to buy it_!!!

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whatusername
They have an AFFILIATE program for the ebook.

<http://www.parrotsecrets.com/affiliates.php>

I'm pretty sure they still sell it.

~~~
hollerith
Still, it is good that the OP is questioning the accuracy of information
previously discussed on this site.

