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David Barnes
A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted -- Social Gaming Enters the Very Long Page Direct Sales Ebook Era
Top Secret! This Post Unlocks the Hidden Code to DOMINATE Your Way to Making Money out of Social Game Playing Mugs!
If I could tell you that there are people paying $27 for ebooks that tell them how to succeed in Farmville and Mafia Wars? Large numbers of people? Would you believe me?! Would you?!?!?!
I used to ask the same question. But then I discovered the secret of the Impact font, bright colours, and several hundred testimonials.
"I've been making more money than people who have been pan handling for over a year!"
That's right folks, social gaming is now so popular that it's reached the era of the incredibly long page ebook direct sales web site!
Now you probably think that these web sites are hopeless, marginal and niche. Think again! FarmvilleSecrets.com pulled in 798,000 unique visitors in January, according to Compete.com. MafiaWarsBluePrint.com is a long way behind at 80,000 unique visitors -- but still more than respectable. Well, disrespectable would be more accurate. If you click those links, I guarantee they'll make you feel a bit dirty.
With this visitor level, you could make a good living from these sites just by sticking up AdSense ads. But they don't -- they're selling a $27 ebook that tells you how to be better at a basic, free game. To make $40,000 per month revenue they'd need a conversion rate of only 0.2% -- and because you don't need to constantly work on updating these products or pages, you can imagine that a skilled author can churn one out every month.
I must admit, these sites are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. I love scrolling up and down them, marvelling at the breathless testimonials and the sheer pile up of incredible (but ultimately empty) promises:
At the start, I was just like you. Mafia of 50, Godfather points of 10, $35,315 in cash, not knowing what to do... it was bloody frustrating! Eventually, I got fed up and decided to start learning exactly what it took to become one of these epic Godfathers. I logged on, started researching and did a lot of in-depth spying. It turns out that these guys aren’t just masters of the game – they are geniuses.
But they are careful geniuses, guarding their secrets like Fort Knox. It took weeks of research. I would find them on forums, contact them on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. I would look over shoulders on the train and email them secretly from second and third email addresses. To put it simply, I dug everywhere I could find dirt.
Who can fail to marvel at prose like that? In its own brazen, profiteering way it has a kind of beauty. It gets me hooked every time. And bear in mind, these pages are always the same -- it doesn't matter what they're about. And the best ones always use Impact font a lot for headlines, Georgia for the body text, and go on for days.
Some of them -- and it seems on my limited research the less successful ones -- even include embarassing video that appears in the corner and talks directly to the viewer. Check this out. You will LOVE it! http://www.farmsecretsrevealed.com/
In any case, these sites show how much money there is burning a hole in social gamers pockets. While we're seeing more respectable "tips blogs" getting a little bit of traffic, according to Inside Social Gaming, these blogs have nothing on the ebook guys:
Would you ever build a site like this for a social game, even if you knew there was money in it? Have you no sense of shame?!?! And as an Indie developer, do you think selling "strategy guides" could be a workable monetization strategy for your work?
Posted
by David Barnes
