That being said, there is a lot of debate online whether it leads down a slipery slope. Some people completely oppose affiliate links, others pretty much only use affiliate links. I’m in the middle, I will only refer a product or service if I truly believe in it, whether I post an affiliate link or not. AND only if there’s a convenient affiliate link. For example in the ebook there’s no affiliate links to Perry Marshall’s ebook which I highly value.

What’s even more interesting, at least for me, is that most people don’t really associate Amazon links as affiliate links. They are. I’m not saying you use them Patrick, I suspect your site is exceptionally clean of all affiliate links, it’s just that a lot of people use Amazon links. Is that a good or bad thing? I don’t know, but I figure if I’m going to recommend a book I might as well post an affiliate link to Amazon.

Something else that’s interesting to me, and this isn’t aimed at you Patrick because we already know and respect your view on this topic :) What about Google Adsense? These can almost be considered affiliate links in one sense. If you have Adsense or Amazon links on your websites than I don’t think you can negatively view the use of affiliate links because that’s what you’re doing yourself. In your case Patrick, you use neither. You are a purist and a rarety! And I congratulate you on this!!!

For me personally, I’ve gone the route of include these to be able to cover my costs of running my blog. Btw, they don’t fully cover the costs, especially not if I include my time. But they help…

Firstly I’d just like to say I’m sorry that you didn’t find the book very good. On the good side I’m glad that you were honest in expressing your true opinion, I respect you for that.

In regards to the book, I suspect there might have been a miscommunication on my part. I would have loved to write an advanced book on the topic but the reality is that for such a book the market is too small (I don’t know the full numbers but I suspect Bob has a better idea from his book Micro-ISVL From Vision to Reality). I therefore elected to write for the newer ISV’ers, website owners, bloggers, etc. The reality is that for every successful microISV there’s about 1000+ other people with websites that want to generate traffic. If you look at BoS the majority of posts are about pretty introductory topics.

To explain further, let’s use some metrics which will make it more understandable. I also wrote about it here: http://www.followsteph.com/2008/03/04/ebook-update/ but I’ll cover it here again with different numbers because I could only speculate at the time I wrote the blog post.

The price of the ebook is $28.95. PayPal charges me a little over $1/sales. Adding other admin costs (accounting, etc.) let’s say the price is $25.00/ebook. The total time it took me to compile the book is 350 hours. Assuming my contracting rate is $100/hr (which is not accurate but very easy to calculate), than that means I have to make back $35,000 to cover my time costs. At $25.00/ebook, that means I need to sell 1400 copies.

Of course the metrics aren’t quite that simple. After I launch the ebook I also have to spend a good amount of time and money on marketing and advertising to make it successful, to get those 1400+ sales. Although this is below the actual numbers, let’s round it to 1500. In other words I need to sell 1500 copies to break even!

Can I do this within the MicroISV community only? Can I do it with an advanced book within the microISV community? The fact that we can pretty much name off the successes by first name and know who we’re talking about tells me it’s a very small audience… I don’t think I can sell 1400 copies which means I have to broaden my readership.

Therefore I elected to create an introductory to intermediate book on traffic generation. Yes for people such as you Patrick who are already very familiar with this world there’s not that much new. You’ve been there, done that. It’s like trying to write a book on how to play basketball to a Michael Jordan. I need to target the amateur to weekend warriors, not the Jordan’s. There’s just too few of them, and I’d be going over everybody’s else head.

I hope that makes more sense you why I targeted the demographic I did.

Btw, it’s great to see that although we differ in opinions, it’s not a flame war. That’s very rare, and shows the professionalism of us all!!!

Re the 80% – actually not. For every person who posts at say BOS, there’s about 10 who just read. I’ve looked over my sales logs and very, very few names I recognize.

Re fishing for change – I should try that! The “microISV market” is not fertile grounds for consultants, not big enough for published books, not concentrated in one place strongly enough for live seminars/workshops. The way I look at it, when I read for example a really good review by a blogger turning me on to Zen to Done, why not use the affiliate link since that blogger added value and saved me time?

Almost all of us read Ian, Andy, Gavin, Andrey and Patrick’s blogs to the point that I don’t have to do anymore then say their first names. If a book from one of our clique is mentioned just once on Planet mISV or BoS, I’m pretty sure 80% of the potential buyers will then be aware of it.

And affiliate links seem like fishing for quarters out from under a vending machine. Sure you make a*little* money, but you’ve probably lost more in prestige/respect.

Tip of the hat to you. Tip of the hat also to the (assuredly male! ;) ) Steph, who regardless of any opinions did in fact write an ebook, is in fact receiving money for said ebook, and is clearly doing some things right on generating traffic. Thanks for the effort, and the both of you inspire me.

I use affiliate links on my site – but I never have and never will – recommend a product, book, service, ebook or anything else just to have an excuse to put an affiliate link in front of people. If I think a particular book is worth praising – like Head First Software Development, which I hope to review this week at my site – I will include an Amazon affiliate link.

Why? Because since I decided to go down the career path of helping microISVs succeed, there’s not a lot of money in it. Matter of fact, there’s very little money in it. I really have no interest in helping corporations succeed – something I’ve done for 25 years – but I can’t ignore the financial implications of what I’ve chosen to do, so those tiny affiliate fees are very welcome indeed.

One last point about Steph Grangier’s ebook: Yes, it is an introductory text if you will – and all the people out there just starting out with this whole microISV thing will benefit from it, in my opinion. Please don’t forget for one of us that have started our own company, there’s 50x wage slaves yearning to be free!

You post – as do most of your posts – is good stuff! It convinced me to add both an [aff.} bug from here on in, and to add the point above to my post. Keep ‘em coming!

Thanks for writing this. Your ‘Internet Marketing races’ paragraph summed up exactly my immediate thought on starting to see these reviews: that the well-known mISV bloggers would start into this treacherous cycle of promoting each other’s books, regardless of actual value.
Good antidote to my natural cynicism.