Day 28 Monday June 15 2009 Tell us What Worked

[PillowThrowDecor]

What worked and what didn't?

[GalleriaLinda]

* where is everyone? *

Just kidding. I think we are all giving a collective sigh of relief for a day or two without assignments, knowing that we need to step up to the plate each day with doing something to promote.

Classified ads - I am intrigued about these as others seem to be successful with them. I have not had any luck there.

Cross promoting - kaboodling, twitter tweets, facebooking fans, etc... seem to be a good strategic effort that will bring in benefits.

icraft product widget - a great selling tool - I even put it on the home page of my web site!

http://www.gallerialinda.com

Indie smiles promotion is a good, learning experience.

Google Analyitics!!!! Helps us know what works!

Business Cards - can't beat a tried and true effort

Editing listings, cloning - I am so glad we can do this without fees - it truly helps our items be seen[/list]What did not work? Frankly, it all worked. If we committed to doing all during the week, we will see benefits.

[Naturliche]

I need to figure out how that analytics works.. lol

I just got an email from indiesmiles with some stats... does anyone know what all that means?  Looks to me like 2 people clicked through to my site from indiesmiles - if i'm understanding that correctly.  Not sure what the impressions means?

[Zs Knees]

Well I'm back in town after a long and strange weekend...

I just wanted to echo everyone's THANK YOUs to Christine for all your hard work, and for taking the initiative to bring us all together! And to admin for your support too!

I have a much better idea now of what I need to do to make progress with my little shop. So much work to do, but it really is fun when we're working on things together-- I enjoyed every bit of it. I'm looking forward to the next group!

See y'all on the forums :wink:

[GalleriaLinda]

Naturliche, about the indie smiles report....

clicks are clicks into your shop
impressions are "eyeballs" or "looks" for the iCraft directory page of all our shops

[Naturliche]

thank you Linda!
now that's making sense!

well, its a small venue, but effective!

[GalleriaLinda]

Just checked my shop views (not item views).

Since Saturday, I have had 46 views to the shop.
3 - Indie Smiles
43 - from email I sent out about discount to about 50-ish people

No sales yet but hopin'!

Each time my items are tweeted (either by me or by twitterfeed), I get 20-30 specific product views. Trish has been awesome in retweeting some of my listings - we are buddying up to RT - now I am getting 50-60 views per items.

Now, unless we can convert views to sales, what good is it? It is all in the numbers. The more people who view your items, the quicker you will get to a sale and is why we need to sprinkle our item/shop links all over the Internet.

That's my story and I am stickin' to it.

Now, off to work with me!

[PillowThrowDecor]

explain retweets...

you send a tweet and then trish copies it, its a forward button or what?

The whole idea of retweeting is that it goes through your group and then through trishs?

Hm... a lot of my followers are your followers because i'm trying to run in your footsteps and having a tough time keeping up!!!

[GalleriaLinda]

Retweets - there is a format:
"RT @username blan blah blah..."

Or you can make a comment before the RT, such as:
"Gorgeous pillows! RT @username blan blah blah"

When you RT, the "RT" goes first, then the @name of the person you are retweeting.

No worries if you have the same folks in your account as mine. If someone picks it up from mine and RTs, someone else may pick it up from your's and RT to a different group.

Yes, it is the value of viral marketing as each account has hundreds of folks. Somewhere in the forum I talked about the viral effect....but I could not find it yet.

[PillowThrowDecor]

Ok... I get it now.

Obviously I don't have many friends yet... online or otherwise.. Probably because I spend too much time playing pillows.

BUT I HAVE A LOT MORE FAIRIES THAN ANYONE I KNOW... You need to have "fairy vision" though...
grin grin

[Trish]

Whew! What an experience that was! Now that it's over, I wish another one was starting!

What worked?
Making myself DO something every day - that was a biggie - and didnt' take the time I thought it would.

The re-tweeting is good - I use www.tweetdeck.com - and it actually has a "re-tweet" button, making it really easy to do. Really increases the people that see the tweet, as we all have different people following us. I have noticed an increase in followers just from that! Linda has been awesome in doing this for me, and I reciprocate. I also re-tweet the ones I see from bootcamp....

I also got the stats thing from Indiesmiles - didn't seem to be a whole lot of activity - but there is still time. I am glad to have gotten hooked back up with Google Analytics - that is a good tool.

Had no luck with craigslist - didn't before, and didn't now. My son has great luck with it (a contractor!!), but around here...nada

Got my $5 business cards - handing them out everywhere I can.

Re-listing and changing up listings - SO glad this can be done without cost....a wonderful thing.

I'm gonna keep it up!! Hoping this will be the day for that BUNCH of sales!!

Trish

[Unique Creations 2 C]

Google Analytics Summary
June 8th to June 14th
June 8th had the most productivity on my site.  I think because I added text & indiesmiles logo on my avatar.  I had 13 visitors that day out of 18 visitors between the time periods of June 8th to June 14th.  The total amount of visits to my site during that period is 43 visits.
The highest visits were on first day of the indiesmiles coupon, then there were a half drop from the first day and stayed consistent for the next two days then a steady decline daily.
I have a higher visitors’ returning rate than new visitors’ rate. Returning Visitors 60% to New Visitors 40%.
Most of my visitors are from United States and Canada approximately 50% from each country.  I had 7 visits from Belgium.  The bounce rate was 100%, probably due to the language barrier.  The result of this inactivity was from one page/view and less than one second per page.
Most of my traffic came from referral sites 56%, direct traffic 37% and replacement engine only 7%.  (Rounded off the percentages).  These impressive stats are all from by boot camp colleagues because of their continuous blogging and tweeting on indiesmiles, byhand.me and twitter produced these positive results for me.  I contributed very little activity to these referral sites.  I mainly involve myself in indiesmiles coupon program.   Thank you to my fellow boot campers!!!
Sadly my average bounce rate is very high 74%, visits to my entire sight between 0 to 10 seconds.  If one page was viewed it was approximately 6 to 7 seconds per page visit.
My exhibit page is the most visited page when entering my site and a lower bounce rate in comparison to entrance from one of my product pages.  That’s good right?!!  Also lower bounce rate on only the products that a visitor was interested in.  5 visits actually spent approximately 10+ minutes on my site.  (Yes, whole minutes  :lol: ) which is 601+ seconds.   This is 11% of all my 43 visits.  It is better than 0% (visits that click in and out).  The most pages visited were eight.  On average 1 to 3 pages viewed by a visitor.  My visitor loyalty of 201 +times is 42% and is a little bit higher than 1 time visits of 40%.
This is my interpretation of my Google analytics statistics.  There are few stats I don’t understand that I did not include in this summary and, when I make any sense of them, I will share them with you.
Thank you, Christine, Admin and all contributors to the boot camp.  Having so many sources available to icraft store owners in one place is very beneficial to all of us.

[PillowThrowDecor]

Bootcamp did wonders in bringing action!  Action brings buyers! Buyers will eventually empty their pockets in our stores!!!

Wow what a comprehensive report.  Thank you ever so much for writing that all out for us.

By the way.. Bootcamp 2 is booked for July 1.  It needs a slightly slower pace though but that will be easier with GA ads we know where we don't need to go with some of our promotions.  Too cool.  I love it!

By the way... I have been watching the http://ALEXA.com  graphs and icraftgifts.com is moving up in the ranks substantially.  I know that Alexa isn't the B-all end-all for statistical measurement but it is a good benchmarking system that offers great encouragement.  Also tells me which sites that I want to see our name on!

Cheers

Christine

[Northern Girl Jewelry]

I could have done more with bootcamp, but considering how much time I had, I think I accomplished some new things.

What worked:
- listing new items - my page views in GA peaked right after a series of days of listing new items

- being more active on facebook - brought views

- posting on my blog - my second, smaller peak on GA right after blog activity

- cross promotions - have referrals from other blogs as well as Kaboodle

- I handed out more business cards during bootcamp that usual, and my GA tells me that the single location with the biggest chunk of visits came from my local area (so perhaps some of them checked out my shop)

- new ideas generated about what I can do to help my shop

- we have begun to build some community among the sellers here at icraft, which will be good for all of us I think



Google Analytics:
- my traffic is 52% direct (so from people already at the icraft site), 34% from referring sites and 14% from replacement engines
    This tells me, I can do a lot more to get my store URL out to potential customers (need to work on this one).

- my bounce rate is 64%, which is higher than I would like (so need to target the right people, so they will visit store, and work on my storefront)

- 43% of my visitors are new

- avg time on site 3 minutes 45 seconds (so although some bounce out after one page, some visitors spend more time in my store)

- avg page visits 3.43

- My biggest surprise from the GA info?  I had a visit from the single Craigslist ad I placed back at the beginning of bootcamp (so around May 19th or 20th), even though the ad would have been quite buried by June 7th, the first day for which I have GA info.  Not only that, but that person visited 16 pages and spent 4 minutes in my shop!  
     So my lesson from this one?  I shouldn't assume my target market won't find me there until I give it a good try.  Now that I have GA, maybe I'll post on Craigslist a few more times and see if I get visits/sales as a result!


Oh, and I had a sale during bootcamp.  The buyer found me through an icraft ad on facebook.  So Admin posted an ad which brought traffic to the site in general, but the buyer found me (and that item) because I had been listing new items regularly and had just relisted that particular item a few days before.  The amount of new items listed on icraft during bootcamp is a positive for all of us I think.  

Julie

P.S. Sorry for the long post!

[PillowThrowDecor]

Wow what a wealth of information!  I really really appreciate you taking the time to do that!

Craigslist is growing at leaps and bounds just like Twitter and Facebook.

Ya done good girl!!!

[Northern Girl Jewelry]

Oh, and I wanted to ad, according to GA, the traffic to my icraft shop is different than the traffic to my etsy shop.  
- For example, 2/3 of my visitors are from Canada, rather than the majority being from the US.  
- In the same period (June 7 to 15th) on etsy my traffic sources are 55% referring, 28% direct, 12% replacement engines and 5% other while here on icraft it is 34% referring, 53% direct, 14% replacement engine.  
- my bounce rate is about the same, but only 10% of my visits to etsy are new (in the 9 days).

I'm happy my traffic is different in my two shops.  I have two shops to help me reach out to different people and will use them differently when I do promotion.  I don't believe it needs to be an either/or situation, but rather it's nice to branch out a little.  

Julie

[PillowThrowDecor]

Two shops two audiences. Tapping into the Canadian market! That is really helpful information.

Keep this good stuff coming!

Do you think it would make any difference as to USD or CAD???

[BeauMonde]

How do I sign up for the new session of bootcamp that starts on July 1st?

I'm looking forward to learning more and doing more ~ can you believe it?

[designsbydebra]

First off I would like to thank Christine for talking me into bootcamp and all her hard work! Thanks to icraft admin too for backing the bootcamp program!
I had two sales as a result of putting ads on Craig's list and Kijije and two inquires that were time consuming.
I have spent more time with Twitter and Facebook and started Kaboodling and Stumbling. I love the idea of cross promotion!
I have been handing out 10% discount cards with each purchase on icraft and etsy with all my shops participating more cross promotion going on. My business cards list all my shops as well and I hand them out at every opportunity.
I got alot out of Derrick's ebook too.
I'm still learning about Google Analytics and my etsy shops have more traffic but icraft is still new and there's not alot of data to compare.
One question how long is the indiesmiles promotion?
I'm definitely interested in joining the next session of bootcamp!
Thanks again Christine and Linda!
Deb
icraftgifts.com/designsbydebra

[mountaindreamers]

My wrist is now 90% still in the brace just to be carefull.

All the bootcamp suggestions were really great, I managed all except the kaboodle , but I know it is there and now will go explore , I still want to visit all the shops signed up but the process is slow as the rate the pages change is really agonizing slow to reload.

I have more on icraft and signed up for an expanded listing amount for the year.

I have two blogs up , one on blogspot http://www.mountaindreamers.blogspot.com and

one at wordpress but still working on sprucing that one up , at least it is a presence out there.

I have handed out cards and feel more confident when people ask me questions about my jewelry and not so shy to point them to the web sites.

Thanks to Christine for alll the good suggestions and sticking in there with some of the stragglers ( me )

thanks Laura  https://icraftgifts.com/mountaindreamers

PS no one ever asked me about the tasty Canadian thing ; )

[Fairy Cardmaker]

Sorry I dropped off on the last day of bootcamp!  It was my first week back to my day job after my vacation and there was lots piled up for me.  I had to bring work home every evening.

I have been checking google analytics.  It started too late in bootcamp to really give me enough info, but I'll keep watching.  My bounce rate is high - 74%.

41% of traffic is direct.  Referring traffic was mostly google, facebook and twitter.  Being as I avoid facebook and twitter like the plague, I have no idea how those views came - maybe from admin!

My own website had only 1 referral.  So, I need to go add that widget to it.

Other referrals came from blogs.  On my Etsy shop, participation in blog contest entries seems to give me good clicks.  Now that I have my own blog, I plan to post my contest entries there.  That should give me organic blog growth - and hopefully store views too!

Most of my traffic is from Canada and the US.  Since there is a larger Canadian audience here, I'm going to try to make a few things slightly more catered to that market now.

What helped from bootcamp:
Well, Kijiji didn't.  What helped the most was motivation!  The notion that people are "checking in on you" motivates me to work. The single biggest view catcher is LISTING something regularly!  Huh, so simple.  Why can't I just do it all the time?!

Second thing that helped, idea sharing: the marketing forum and photography forum.

I made my only two sales during bootcamp: one was for the buy'n'sell party and one is a mysterious blessing.  The person registered that day, purchased, and never left feedback.  So, no knowledge gained from it for me, but a sale is a sale!  I'll take it!

I just wanted to echo everyone's THANK YOUs to Christine for all your hard work, and for taking the initiative to bring us all together! And to admin for your support too!

ME TOO!

[PillowThrowDecor]

I am so glad you got some sales.

Many more will come.

Thanks so much for your kind words.  It has been fun and productive!!! I have been swamped with custom work this week and snooping around for Bootcamp 2 ideas.  Some new stuff on deck!!! so for all you that wnet around the first time there will be some new stuff!!!

Arggggh... I need 48 hours in each day right now.

Yahoo....