How to make extra cash selling useful guides on pretty much anything (a guide)

How I used Gumroad to set up a super-simple sales page for a roommate application template and used affiliate marketing to make $1000s a month.

In big cities like San Francisco and NYC, spare room listings on Craigslist get hundreds of email inquiries. So, in 2014 I created a guide on how to write the perfect roommate email so folks could stick out in the crowd, and created a simple landing page to let people pay to download it.

How to make extra cash selling useful guides on pretty much anything (a guide)

To make it popular, I asked websites that came up on the first page of Google for “moving to San Francisco” to link to my guide and we’d split the profits. A few said yes.

Since launching, The Miracle Craigslist Guide has sold thousands of copies. My girlfriend even bought it before we met!

The secret to making this work was a website called Gumroad

Gumroad makes it dead easy to sell simple e-products like PDFs, music, or digital subscriptions. Gumroad lets you accept payments, build a simple sales page, and payout affiliates.

So, looking for a weekend project? Do this:

  1. Pick a valuable piece of information. Something everyone asks you about, like a resume or a nutrition plan.
  2. Create the document and upload it on Gumroad.
  3. Write a badass landing page. (Don’t know how to do that? Take this course offered by my buddy Neville. It changed my life.)
  4. Google what customers would search for to find your product.
  5. Email the top 50 results, and offer to split the profits that come from linking to your page, using Gumroad’s affiliate feature.
  6. Do people love the product? Expand.

— Sam, Chief Roommate Matchmaker

PS: What other products would you like me to write about? Comment here and tell me.

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