First, I want to congratulate Matthew on creating a truly valuable resource that people love and are learning from. That's the hardest part of any online business. Typography for Lawyers and Practical Typography are great resources that deserve every bit of praise and attention they've received.
Whenever someone creates something this valuable I like to see that they get paid for their work. After all, the only thing better than creating products and content people love, is getting paid to do it.
Based on my experience Practical Typography could, without too much effort, make $100,000 per year. So you can think of this comment as a short article titled:
"How Matthew Butterick could have made 27x as much revenue from Practical Typography"
Let's jump in.
// The numbers
Matthew quotes a few numbers in his post, but the two I want to focus on are traffic (649,000 readers, actually I'm not sure if this means visits or visitors...) and book revenue ($3676).
My blog actually averages a similar amount of traffic. For the last two years I've had about 660,000 visits from 420,000 visitors. So about the same amount of traffic. This includes plenty of lower quality viral traffic from communities like Hacker News.
I wrote three books [1] and each one of them made $100,000 within their first year (roughly). That tells me with the same amount of traffic—which is probably better targeted than mine—it's reasonable that Matthew could make $100,000 off of one book.
That's 27x times as much revenue as he actually made ($3676). What I find most interesting is that increasing revenue by 27x actually comes down to three simple changes.
// #1: Have a price
If the first rule of making money selling products is to actually have a product, then the second is to have a price.
Donations are nice, but you won't get nearly the same results as if you actually had a price for the product.
Now having a price doesn't mean you can't offer the book for free to readers. Michael Hartl gives aways his excellent Rails Tutorial [2] book for free, but charges for the PDF version and extra content. Pat Flynn [3] gave away his LEED Exam study guide for free online and charged for the same content packaged up as an ebook.
I can't share Michael's exact revenue numbers, but he makes a healthy salary from a book he shares for free online. Pat Flynn made over $500,000 in a few years of sales from his LEED certification study guide.
They both gave away their content for free, but unlike Practical Typography, add a price to a version of the product.
// #2: Build an email list
649,000 readers don't mean that much if you can't contact them. I've had plenty of posts that get 50,000 visits in a day, but then the week there is no difference in my business. Traffic is fleeting, viral traffic is just a flash in the pan.
You need a way to push new content and products to your audience, so they have to subscribe in some way. That means Facebook, Twitter, RSS, YouTube, Email, etc.
I'll just cut to the chase: email has the highest engagement and drives the most sales. Often seeing 10-15x the value of other channels [4].
To get email subscribers add an opt-in form to each page on your site giving away an incentive related to the content. In your case that could be a free font, a typography cheat-sheet, or additional lessons. It doesn't have to be a hard sell or seem spammy at all. Just say, "if you liked this content you'll also like... enter your email so I can send it to you."
Then give them an option to opt-in to a free follow-up course on Typography. Keep sending them valuable information and you'll build a loyal following that is happy to read your emails each week or month.
// #3: Setup automated sales pitches
That free email course should be dripping out free training every few days or once a week. After demonstrating plenty of value work a sales pitch into one of the emails. Simply describe the additional resources you've created or the benefits of getting the content in a specific format and ask them to purchase.
Then your next email should be educational content again. An email or two later you can work in another soft sell.
Since email courses are timed to when each subscriber joins, you'll have automated sales pitches going out to each of your subscribers on the perfect schedule. Effectively doing a mini product launch to just a few people each day—except that you don't have to do any work other than set it up.
Then later on in the sequence put in links to your fonts and other products. Having an email list is especially powerful when you have multiple products (as you do). Automated selling for the win!
Patio11 has a great course on this [5]. You can learn a ton just from reading the sales page.
Even if you don't want to charge for your product—which I think would be a huge mistake—you can still put in a request for a donation in one of the automated messages.
// Good authors should make money
Authors not making money from their work is a huge problem. It's frustrating to see someone put out such good content and not be able to make a living from it. Especially when the hard part is writing a great book, and it just takes a few techniques to actually make a living from it. This problem bothers me so much I actually wrote an entire book, Authority [6], to try and solve it.
It's also frustrating to see authors not be able to contact their readers, so I built ConvertKit [7] (email marketing for authors) to solve that problem.
Matthew, I'd love to see you get paid for your work. You deserve it. All these ideas can be implemented now and I bet you'll see great results over the next 12 months.
If you ever want to talk, email me at myfirstname[at]convertkit[dot]com
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[1] http://nathanbarry.com/books/ [2] http://railstutorial.org [3] http://smartpassiveincome.com [4] https://convertkit.com/2013/email-subscriber-worth/ [5] https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails [6] http://nathanbarry.com/authority [7] http://convertkit.com
I've made $60k in a year with a highly topical 60-page ebook (PDF only) that I wrote in about a week, mainly by promoting to a mailing list with only a few thousand people on it.
As Nathan says, you need to set a price. Plus, tell people why it's worth more for them to buy and read your book than to either not have the information in it, or spend the time researching themselves.
My book is on supporting Retina screens on web browsers[1]. Yes, you can spend a week reading all you can ok the web about it. Or you spend $49 and know all about it in half an hour and spend the other 39 1/2 hours of the week making money with client work.
[1] http://retinafy.me
So you got about 1,200 sales out of a list of 3,000 subscribers? Would you mind sharing your exact conversion rate (total # of sales/total # of subscribers) that made you $60k in revenue from this book?
"If the first rule of making money selling products is to actually have a product, then the second is to have a price."
I read and paid for Practical Typography, and I'm familiar with the fact that having no specific price, like Butterick's "$5-$10", is a disincentive to paying anything for a product. And I still had a hard time deciding how much to pay and completing the payment.
I wonder if the followthrough would have been different if he had set a specific price, say $5 or $7.
I didn't even spot the pay link. I looked at a few pages.
First of all, what an awesome comment. Thanks so much for all this insight Nathan.
Out of your 420,000 or so visitors over the last year, how many converted into your email list?
Also, when you launch a product to your email list, what sort of conversion rate (subscribers to sales) do you get?
Maybe about 10,000. My email list is 25,000 subscribers and I've been building it for just over two years.
Cool, I appreciate the transparency. What sort of conversion rate do you get on a course launch?
This is an awesome comment. Thank you for posting it.