The monetisation strategy

So I shared a little about the growth strategy for the new VP site the other day.

Today, I'll do a little info on how I'm planning on monetising it.

There's 2 methods I'm gonna be implementing to add a financial element to the site.

Method 1 - Affiliate commissions

VP is a book deal website.

Every link sends people to Amazon, and attaches my affiliate URL.

So basically, every click I send should help me earn a small amount of commission.

Here's the thing that all of those "make a bajillion with affiliate commission" people never tell you.

The revenue from this is gonna be poor.

I estimate maybe 10% of overall revenue will come from this when it's working well.

Why?

Cause for books, I only get 4-5% of the revenue Amazon makes from the sale.

And most of the products I'm promoting are either free or on heavy discount.

So we're looking at like 4% of a $5 purchase.

Which is like $0.20.

Now, that could increase if someone's on Amazon and also decides they need something else. I get the affiliate commission for that too as I drove the link.

And the cookie stays active for 24 hours.

But still even at huge scale, this is not gonna be a "put your feet up and relax" revenue stream.

That's where the real revenue stream comes in.

Method 2 - Sponsorships

At it's core, VP is an email business.

The brand will live or die on it's ability to grow an email list.

The daily deals are really only there for me to build an active, engaged email list of people who like reading.

When the lists are built, I have an asset that other authors and publishers will pay for access to.

Think of all those newsletter businesses you know that sell a sponsorship spot for a few hundred bucks+.

This is essentially the same thing.

But, because there's so few good ways to promote your book, you can actually charge a decent fee if you have the list.

When I was researching competitors, the heavy hitters can charge up to $3500 for a single promo within certain categories.

So I just need to make sure I grow the audience!

I'll be building a self-serve promotion purchase system where people can by a spot at the top of the daily emails.

I'll also be adding in bump and upsells for featured promotion in other places like...

On the site in various areas
On the social platforms I'm building out (we have 9 platforms with an automated system for multiple posts per day)

If the audience is built, I could - theoretically - charge a few grand per book promo.

And I could promo a few books every single day.

... in theory. We'll see if it plays out.

Method 3 - Promotion of my own assets

This whole business started off as an experiment to see if I could grow a fiction book and get it to the #1 spot on Kindle.

I managed to get the latest one to #12.

Not bad, but not good enough.

Here's the thing. That book is now selling for $4.99 and I'm making a few bucks every day from Kindle Unlimited royalties.

If I'm able to grow a big enough list, I can simply promote my own books to that list for direct sales and revenue myself.

So if I don't have a promotion spot filled by a client, I just pop in one of my books.

Method 4 - Book sale services

One final method I'm looking at is a fully managed book sales growth service.

We could make the promise of getting newly launched book to the top 10 of their category and do all of the promotions and system builds for the client.

Charge a few thousand for this and leverage the audience and systems we've built to ensure success.

Not sure on this one yet, but it's definitely a potential.

What this could mean

Between all of these different formats, I think multi-6-figs is completely reasonable and achievable for this business.

I could then keep this as a cash cow, or sell the audience and systems for a nice multiple.

However, I think if I'm able to grow an audience like some of the competitors, I could realistically hit 7-figs+ with this.

Time will tell, but I'm quietly confident on this if I can get the build right.

Speak soon,