My first effort at marketing

Show Bootstrapped
#1

Ive been avoiding doing “content” marketing for ages - its just not something I feel is fun.

So two nights ago I finally got started and wrote my first “article” for my upcoming client proposal software. Since im targetting freelancers and designers I chose an easy to write first post about a little notebook organization hack. ( the moleskine angle )

If I was lucky I’d probably get 3 readers - my gran, my mum and my best mate Kev.

I posted it on reddit 2 days ago where it just hung. Move forward today and it has 3000 upvotes on reddit with 200 comments and ive had 160,000 visits in 24 hours.

Heres what i woke up to this morning on google analytics.

And its still going strong.

I’m absolutely flabbergasted. Ive been sat watching analytics go crazy for hours so I just need to tell someone. Someone who gets how this normally doesnt happen hence why im here.

In terms of results I got a few emails (maybe 10) for early access in the beginning, but as its been picked up on twitter, Im finding more freelancer types are coming to the site and I’m getting a lot more - maybe 100 so far. So small compared to the traffic but I’m hoping it will grow as it propogates through twitter. It was briefly on the front page of hacker news (enough to still get some snarky comments) and its still strong on Designer news.

The blog post with its inexcusable link baity name is “A little known hack from Japan to organize your notebook”

Is there anything I should be doing to capitalize on this?

I’m going to go and sit down on the couch now.

3 Likes
#2

People love organizational hacks. Also, it’s a nifty idea!

1 Like
#3

Cheers Ian. To be honest a little bit of me died inside when I chose that buzz wordy title. That said the second option was “Growth hack your molekskine” so maybe not so bad after all.

1 Like
#4

Very cool.

I was going to say something about “molehacks,” but I looked and apparently that’s already a thing (should’ve known). Have you already explored posting to other communities interested in that specific topic?

Enjoy the ride!

#5

I have found there is no correlation between posts I thought would get lots of traffic and posts which did. It is very random.

Also traffic from Reddit et al, tends to be very shallow. Often with a near 100% bounce rate.

But congrats. It is a good start!

2 Likes
#6

I never knew about “molehacks”. Ill start exploring. It actually just got picked up by lifehacker so perhaps it will organically find its way in to the hands of those communities.

#7

Congratulations! Hope this doesn’t set your expectations too high. :smile:

#8

Thanks Andy,

Yes I’m pretty sure the best traffic came from Designer News which was only a fraction of the total hits. Reddit delivered a whopping 80 times more but obviously delivered a mixed crowd to my site.

#9

Awesome job - as you said, a first time post rarely does this well. The title certainly “worked” and I think the topic, plus the detailed photos made it a valuable / unique resource.

How to optimize?

You have the newsletter signup already, which is good. I would add a specific bonus incentive – related to this post – for subscribing.

Something like, you’ve read this article about notebook hacks, now download the actual template I use to organize mine… Or something like that.

Lately, I’ve been including these pieces of bonus content to most of my recent posts and I’ve seen 5-10x opt-in rate.

#10

Thanks Corey - yeah I’m actually wondering what on earth im going to provide my email list as my second post - hard to compete with the first.

#11

That’s a great idea - thanks CasJam.

How do you wire this all up with your newsletter service provider? If you have several posts all offering unique “bait” to get visitors signed up on one master list you’d presumably need several responses including the unique rewards to be sent out.

Im not sure if my provider mailchimp can do that. I’ll have to check out mailchimps docs and see if it’s possible. What are you using by the way to do this?

Or have I misunderstood your system?

#12

You can use Drip to add a tag to each subscriber. The tag will be what “bait” they subscribed to. And then you can segment your subscribers by tag and send them targeted emails based on the “bait” they subscribed to.

I’ve been using Drip for a few months now and am doing something similar, and it’s working out great.

#13

Saw someone with 19K followers tweet your link today.

#14

@paulyoder thanks for the drip tip. Im itching to start subscribing to drip but I need to get my email series written up first.

@steve awesome. Actually I just noticed it’s now in Buffers suggestion tab so Ill probably be getting tweeted a bit more of the next few days.

#15

You can do this using mailchimp autoresponders. However I found it was tricky to get existing subscribers to receive the bonus content autoresponder.

So last week I moved to http://getdrip.com, which is much better at handling this type of thing.

I know LeadPages also has features designed for this purpose (bonus opt-ins) and you can use LP in conjunction with mailchimp.