Pros and Cons of selling textbooks?

price comparison engine a la BigWords.com

[rfung]

I read an article from asianweek from Nov 2001 where in 12 months, BigWords was making $200k from affiliate links for books,cds and dvds.

The college aged market is HUGE - what are the pros and cons, the easy steps and challenges of such a market (college age /textbooks/cds/dvds)?

I figure there's no point in trying to keep hush hush on such a market since its so big and popular - with Amazon affiliates everywhere to boot.

[fidibidabah]

Still trying to get in the game I see? Keep up the effort, you'll find something profitable soon enough.

I'm not so sure how anyone could 1-up a site like bigwords. A lot of time and skill was put into that engine.

I actually had a somewhat simmilar idea. Most of the people who daily read fark.com (and sites like it) are male, 18-25. These sites are generally pretty generous with advertising. With that sort of targeted environment, you could create something nice I'm sure. I'm just trying to figure out what :/

As far as college textbooks, imho, it's more likely for someone to type in specific names of books/ISBNs.. rather then something like "cheap college textbooks" (although that would also be nice). Maybe if one could just create a database of current books used in college, a nice user friendly look, and maybe some links. Y'know, simple stuff, real simple. Maybe even a $0.05 AdWord on each of the book names. It's just a TON of research, and I'm not even sure you could get all of that information. But I guess it would work.

Site development is a lot of time an effort. I can't tell you how many decent-looking sites I've seen which are exactly that. Average. They really don't go far. But I guess if you have enough average sites you'll get yourself somewhere. imho, the best way to go is creating a community around your topic. Let people interact, make it feel humanized, and use some pretty high tech Server-Side Languages to give people what they want quickly.

Now of course the problem with this, is you need to be the following:

Website Developer
Programmer (HTML/XML/CSS, JS, JSS/ASP/PHP, etc.)
Profficient with software (Dreamweaver, etc), and
One Hell of a Graphics Designer

Generally people who have any of these skills have boring cubicle jobs (which right about now, I wouldn't mind); to be a successful affiliate marketer, you need ALL of them. Plus some common sense, a little bit of Marketing skill, and a broad knowledge base of Affiliate-workings. It's really a tough job, that's why there aren't a Million of us...

Just half a million ;)

[rfung]

Lol. That same article mentioned that BigWords is a 2 man company. That's an even $100k for each - they have a marketing budget of $60k, so that's actually just $70k - which is awright. But that was 2 years ago - I'm sure they're making much better now(still).

So, as an entrepeneur, I'm forever hopeful.

As for the skills - that's me. I'm a web developer(you forgot to list CF) working a semi-boring job - I get to travel sometimes which isnt too bad. I lack design skills, but hey what are friends for?:) I also happened to be a business major in school, so lets see if those accounting/marketing/operations classes were good for anything.

Are you all of the above? ( I got the impression you may be from your post?) - if not, sticky me about your idea - maybe we could start something :)

[sdani]

I have a similar site.. If you want to take a look, send me sticky email. I cannot post the link here, but would love to share it with you (in anticipation of some feedback.. negative or positive)