18 Sep 2006, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Projects, 0 Comments
Online Business: Day 14
This is the fourteenth in a line of posts about an online business. The rules are simple: (1) I can’t spend more than $50, (2) must be software development related (3) built ‘in the margins’ (the three hours or so after my toddler goes to bed) and (4) needs to make a car payment by October 1st (net revenues of $495.01). It's all part of an experiment in how far some talent, determination, and web based dinking can go. The project is MilitantGeek.com, a geek T-shirt site with bite.
As I last described, the MilitantGeek site has begun festering lots of link love around the net. I even got a mention on the enormously influential Boing Boing over the weekend. The processes that I’ve employed, as I’ve recently learned, are called ‘Social Media Marketing’ (I had previously referred to them as ‘Pinko’). The reason I chose this route was because I didn’t have the depth of content or the time to wait for natural search results to happen. Search engines can take anywhere from 1-6 months to crawl a site. Even then if there isn’t a high volume of relevant content a site will not do well. By using a bit more elbow grease and knowing the interested audiences I’ve been able to increase visitors to the site/store.
Unfortunately, despite talking about laying groundwork, I failed to have Adsense in place for the first wave of traffic. I had always meant to increase my potential revenue streams beyond just TShirts. Google Adsense, as you’ve no doubt heard, provides an incredibly easy way of serving advertisements on a site. The text based ads can be tuned to match a site’s color scheme and are relevant to the content down to the page. And while I can’t entirely be certain I believe that placing Adsense on a site gets it listed faster with Google’s search engine; after all Google has to continually crawl a site in order to return content related ads. I did have some initial difficulty getting the Adsense code to play nice with various WordPress plugins (thus the delay). However, those seem to be fixed. Going forward I’ll also be sure to mention any Adsense related revenue with the daily totals.
The polling feature seems to be doing well. As I described before polling is a great way to get user feedback and create reader ‘buy-in’. The first shirt design created from poll results will be appearing sometime this week in the store. The second poll has been posted.
Along those same lines a feedback form has been created. This is another one of those ideas, like Adsense, that should have been done in the beginning. If you’ve got an idea for a T-Shirt, some juicy gossip, or words of support you can now easily get in touch. It’s really about becoming store ‘2.0’ (yes, I winced as I wrote it too); there is a genuine attempt here to allow readers to shape the fate of things.
Those following the project my be quick to point out that I’m entering my third week and I’ve only sold one shirt. That is an absolute accurate observation and something that I’d be a bit frustrated about if I wasn’t aware of Jennifer Laycock’s T-Shirt Experiment (pdf link). Both in her experience and here there is a definitely exponential ramping affect that happens/will happen. I still firmly believe that I’m on that path as opposed to a depressing linear line hovering around zero. I just haven’t hit that separation, or inflection, point yet. Considering that we’re now beyond the midpoint for the month this following week will be focused on getting to the upward swing of the curve.
Day 13 – September 16
Total Spent: $38.95
Available Products: 45
Shirts Sold: 1
Shirt Revenue: $5.59
Visits: 223
Pageviews: 473
Day 14 – September 17
Total Spent: $38.95
Available Products: 45
Shirts Sold: 1
Shirt Revenue: $5.59
Ad Revenue: $0.72
Total Revenue: $6.31
Visits: 184
Pageviews: 271