Ok, yeah... but, as someone who actually writes long form sales pages, I'm impressed. He nailed the shit out of it. I bet he'll make a mint on this page.
I saw the headline bolded(old trick) two+ times and knew this guy wanted money. I almost closed the page then, but read on for the sake of procrastinating learning objective-c and getting to post this comment.
He's perfected the art of clickbank. I was waiting for the 2d photo of the woman to pop up in the corner and audio to start blaring over my speakers on why his advice would be pure ROI once I reached the first buy button.
Because Giles is a cult of personality. He's the Matt Lesko (http://bit.ly/cEUsK5) of Hacker News. You know every fiber of his being is lousy and watching him makes you a worse person, but his outrageous suits keep your eyes glued.
You're going to make a lot of stuff. Some you will give away, some you will charge for.
You pretty much HAVE to give _some_ stuff away not because we live in a post-Napster, open source apocalypse where everybody expects things to be free, but just because you need something to get people to give your idea/song/software a chance.
As I have a lot of friends in bands, I often come back to music: "You will make a lot of music. You will probably give most of your recordings away, with the exception of special packages now and then. You will probably almost always charge for your live performances, with the exception of a few special occasions. You will regularly make some thing related to your art and charge for it (screen-printed posters, sweathshirts, etc.)"
People who make any kind of intellectual property can basically put it in one of two buckets:
* stuff i will charge for
* stuff i won't charge for, but is used to attract attention/keep people feeling involved
The difference between the two isn't arbitrary, but it isn't exactly based on qualitative difference. It's mostly based on distribution, limitations of medium, and a stuff like that. You'll probably tend to give away stuff that's easy to pass around, and charge for stuff that's not. Not in a piracy-centric mindset, just thinking mostly of friction, etc. It's entirely possible the thing you charge for doesn't take more work to do than the things you don't charge for.
It's true that video files aren't so hard to pass around. But it's way harder to pass videos around than a blog post links.
My main point is was related to your interesting "ads that look like content" observation:
That there can be little difference between the things that many people give away (ads), versus the things they sell, especially in terms of labor by the creator.
I read it as a sort of parody. The point of the article wasn't to sell the video but to demonstrate how to sell the video. It's a lesson on advertising in the form of an add. Very clever.
Some things were a little over done, but I'd assume that it's to emphasise techniques.
And yet by doing so, he sells the video. Unless we see another article pop up in the next few days "selling the video," I think we have to assume this was it.
