Converting followers to buyers

I am a great fan of Seth Godin, and it was quite some time that he wrote about fans and followers and how high the hurdle has become to convert visitors to sales. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/07/fans-participants-and-spectators.html
It is very hard to sell things, and the more generic the publication, the harder it gets. A web site can be quite focused, but there is only one Facebook or Twitter, and you have to work much harder for people to filter you in. Google is being extremely evil and trying to do the same thing to the web by driving the other brower vendors in the same direction, which is probably why they forked themselves out of the HTML 5 standardization - while in truth, the web has been good enough since HTML 4 with CSS, and there is no need for all this other stuff. Which is about to change publishing as we know it, but that is another story.
A focused web site can be very profitable in terms of advertisements, as well as selling products like ebooks, even if very few has taken that route yet. There is still a lot of milage to be had from the traditional publishing industry, if you are a publisher of anything but fiction. And even those could do a better job at leveraging the fans than they do.
Now, I have written a book about defensive driving. My wife, who is usually right (especially when we have an argument) thinks this is the most boribg subject I could have selected, and wanted me to write the nect Harry Potter. To tell you a secret, I did choose it because it is boring. But also because I can hardly become a worse driver if I try to teach others about defensive driving. And it is a challenge. When I was editing a computer magazine, the problem was to engage readers. In that case, enough that they signed up as readers, even though it was free at the time. Having registered readers helped us prove to the advertisers thatbit was worse advertising with us. A friend, who used to run a magazine about well-being, managed to get people to show their committment enough to pay for the magazine.
The process is the same, and it consists of three parts.
1. Make an interesting product which matches the interests of a target group.
2. Show the product to the target group and make them sign up for the product. Preferrably paying for it as well.
3. Refine the product and return to step 2.
A magazine has a limitation in its periodicity, which means it can only land on the readers desk so often, normally once a month. But this limitation is also an advantage, since you have to revise the magazine completely once a month. Very few newspapers or magazines use this as an advantage, even though it should be. Most websites have borrowed the process, even though they could revise themselves between page views continously. To be honest, this is probably more a case of borrowing the project management process from old media without reflecting about it.
What is the new model of the new Internet? How does a would-be small publisher really make money? We had the answer for the web, but with new media channels like Facebook and Twitter, and the swith of paper books to ebooks, how does an author/publisher make money? How to convert followers to partners, for want of a better word. There is nobreally good term for people who are paying friends, although that is what you need. They have to be more than supporters, and much more than readers. Fans are closer but they are still consumers, even if they are active. But what you need is really co-producers, who engage in a dialogue with you as editor/author, and are interested enough to pay for it.
The first step, finding the target group, is ongoing. I thought it might be the general public, but defensive driving is not as interesting to ordinary drivers as I thought. But there are many people interested enough in the subject, even if it seems to be a rare defensive driving tweeter who has more than 1500 followers. Twitter seems to drive traffic to the blog site. At least when I tweet about a new blog post.
Next step is to identify blogs and offer guest posts. The rage of the day seems to be texting and driving, which is completely forbidden in Japan. But still easy to blog about. Eventually, I might get enough readers to take the next step. Now I get about ten readers a day, and that is not enough to build a publishing empire on. There has to be at least a hundred times that. Let me come back as I get closer.