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'd suggest, if you want to run publishing on niche business topics as a business, that you take a page out of the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / et al formula. (There exist many others who do similar things, but they're locally recognizable examples of it.)

Trade the book, or some other incentive [+], for the customer's email address. Attention is fleeting, but relationships with one's email list are enduring, if you do them correctly.

Send people who give you their email address lots of valuable stuff for free. Then, ask them to buy your products. Charge an appropriate amount for those products.

The math is, as has been widely reported by people writing books/etc on HN about a wide range of niche business topics, quite attractive. (Ballpark numbers? 650k people with some level of interaction with an online version of the book implies probably between 20k and 50k folks who would have been happy to swap their email address for a downloadable version. That's basically a nice house which temporarily happens to exist inside of an e.g. Mailchimp account.)

[+] I will note the author appears to have aesthetic reasons to reject creating a PDF/e-book/etc version of the book, despite people literally offering him money to do so. http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-pdf.... There must be something which adds incremental value to the book which would justify incremental closeness to a portion of the readers.

Hmm seems like he made the classical mistake of thinking that an x86-64 server is somehow special and more worthwhile than just buying a bare-bones PC.

I've managed Dell servers before (real ones) and aside from a bunch of stuff to make managing them in mass easier (like DRAC), there isn't very much value in trying to retrofit one for home use.

VT-x or 24 GB of RAM support isn't exactly a hard requirement in 2014. Plus the Xeon E5410 is a 2007 chip (7 years old!) and gets it butt kicked by even a low end i3 from 2012 [0].

Plus modern systems consume less electrical power which makes running them cheaper and a PC is certainly quieter than any rack mounted server (which are designed for maximum cooling, noise be damned).

Additionally if he had purchased off-the-shelf parts he would likely have a warranty for 12 months (or more). With the eBay purchased Dell machine he not only doesn't get any warranty but ALSO Dell themselves don't even support it(!) so no firmware updates.

So while this was a fun read, it just reminds me of my more nieve days when I thought doing stuff like this was a good idea. Go over to any SysAdmin forum (e.g. spiceworks community) and they'll tell you the same thing.

[0]http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5410-vs-Intel-Core-i3-32...

edit: Originally linked to an 2012 i5 comparison ($180 CPU). Altered it to an 2012 i3 comparison ($100 CPU) which still out-performance the 7 year old Xeon. The $100 price tag seems a lot more comparable than a near $200 CPU. Plus the i3 supports 32 GB of RAM and VT-x (the OP's requirements).

> AirBnB spent 5 months hiring before they hired a person. Brian Chesky: "Would you take the job if you had a medical diagnosis that says you only have a year left to live?" - culture of extremely dedicated people

I couldn't help but feel an extreme level of utter disgust at this. Somehow portraying that its heroic to work for a start up for the last 12 months of your life.

Really? Utterly fucking ridiculous.