Rather than just drop kick the project into the ether I thought it would be fun to nudge it along and continue posting updates at regular intervals. One of the biggest advantage that a store front like this has over a traditional brick and mortar edifice is that, once established, maintenance costs are nearly zero. The various services purchased range anywhere from a few months to a year in length. I could do nothing from this point on and potential buyers could still purchase items – but what's the fun in that? While it won't have the attention that I spent on it through September the Militant Geek store is too valuable a sandbox to give up.

Yesterday was the Day Against DRM – you might remember that this was one social media promotional bit that paid large traffic dividends. The site was again picked up by Boing Boing in a recap piece. After that, numerous sites re-broadcasted the story which had the nice side effect of also linked back to the T-shirt shop.

There is also good cause to expect business to grow, with little help, in the next several months – spending some time with Google Trends shows two very noticeable cycles:

1. a bubble over the summer months when T-shirts would be preferred clothing

2. a sharp spike around thanksgiving, indicating heavy holiday shopping.

Trying to garner traffic in the month limit provided for myself was extremely challenging for a number of reasons. A large one happened to be that it can take several month for natural search engine traffic – the kind from all mighty Google, to begin coming to a site. By starting the project in September will have 'primed the pump' for this chief buying time.

Spreadshirt, within the last day, also launched their categories feature. It was one feature that I wish I would have had at the onset of the project – the ability to group designs logically along different themes. Amazon also send a friendly reminder email that their affiliate program was available. Like I said, there are plenty of programs to try out.

Next: What I did Wrong (prepare for a long post ;))...

Total Spent: $38.95
Total Shirt Revenue: $16.27
Total Ad Revenue (all sources): $ 4.91
Total Revenue: $21.18
Total Visits/Pageviews: 2010/ 3526