Day 22: Purchased a Water Buffalo, Apple's Marketing, and RSS Confusion

Day 22: Purchased a Water Buffalo, Apple’s Marketing, and RSS Confusion

9 Jul, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

This is day 22 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new traffic to this website and demonstrate that blogging can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

My three tasks for the day were…

1. I purchased a Water Buffalo. No really…I did. Here’s why: I submitted this website to the Copywriting Maven’s Makeover Service so that they can provide a critique of my website and help me sell more books. The service is free but it requires a donation to Heifer International, so I donated a water buffalo. Ok fine, it was a “share” of a water buffalo for $25, but still.

It’s amazing how powerful just asking the right questions can be. For example, in filling out the application for the marketing makeover, they asked me to provide any metrics I had on click through rates and conversion rates for who was purchasing the book. What I came up with is that 0.24% of people who visit this website end up purchasing the book (which is pretty dismal), but that fully 7.6% of people who visit the page where the book is sold end up buying (which is outstanding and way above average, I almost don’t believe it!).

I think what this means is that I’m not going a good job letting people know about the book when they come to this website. More people would probably buy, but they just aren’t seeing the page. Did you know that there was a book for sale on this website?

2. I created some new content for this site (other than the marketing challenge) with the article on Apple’s Marketing. I’ve started keeping an idea file for post ideas whenever something pops into my head. I had the thought for that article about a week ago and let it sort of percolate in my subconscious for the last week before writing it today.

3. I started writing a new article for ProBlogger on why RSS is so confusing to people and how to structure your site to make it easier to get subscribers. Now that the draft is finished, I’ll most likely give it a once over later today and send it to Darren.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

7 Comments so far »

Pedro said,

Wrote on July 9, 2007 @ 2:59 pm

Brian,

Yes I did know there was a book for sale but never took the time to really check it out.

Regards,
P

[Reply]
chris.pund said,

Wrote on July 9, 2007 @ 3:45 pm

How successful was the ProBlogger series in sending people to your website? Did you see a large spike in traffic or at least something noticable?

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 10, 2007 @ 11:06 am

Hi Chris,

According to Google Analytics, the ProBlogger series only sent 200 visitors. Not as big as I was expecting. However, the visitors from ProBlogger spent twice as long (7 minutes) and viewed twice as many pages as regular visitors (4.2).

The LifeHack.org articles tend to sent quite a few more visitors.
Brian

[Reply]
Lisa said,

Wrote on July 10, 2007 @ 11:35 am

Brian, Thank you so much for keeping us updated. You have me hooked!!

Lisa

[Reply]
chris.pund said,

Wrote on July 10, 2007 @ 12:56 pm

I am glad that they articles are showing some success for you. They are definitely a great way to drum up traffic to your website!

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 10, 2007 @ 4:33 pm

Thanks Lisa!
Brian

[Reply]
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Wrote on September 29, 2007 @ 11:01 am

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