You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

The idea, build up hype and expectations and then um deliver!
The reality build some hype dash some expectations and deliver more then most people expected. That was the feedback from our recent sale.

But just to take you back, the premise was simple:

Take one blog post packed with juicy info, take interested users money and deliver the info. To build urgency and hype we introduced a Fire Sale.

So what actually is a Fire sale?

Put simply its a price increasing system, where by the price is dictated by the time, so for the first few hours/days the price is x and then it increases. Often its not just time but volume so the price is for the first 10 items sold or the first 5 hours for example.

How did we do?

I would call it a success, from concept to the event was a little over 10 hours so the time frame was pretty short. The post was already half written, but was heavily expanded, the inclusion of some free software to which I owned the resale rights and the mailing lists were I think on balance a good idea. Cost wise and this is minus my time remember was entirely on promotion, two were run campaigns a Google Adwords Campaign and a StumbleUpon Sponsor Ads both were approved in record time and a big thank you to both companies after several emails were needed to get the landing page sorted. So total costs was about $40 I placed $30 in the StumbleUpon ads but in the end used just $14, the rest went on Google Adwords.

Revenue return: 14 people bought at $10 while a further 3 have bought at $20 so after basic costs you are looking at $160 return.

Remember this doesn’t take into account my own time, even so I would consider it a success if only because I have learnt a lot.

Traffic Sources

I have already discussed some traffic sources but the breakdown is as follows;

• StumbleUpon (prior to Ad) – 96(1)
• StumbleUpon (Ad driven) – 194 (4)
• Google Adwords – 189 conversions (7)
• WickedFire (buy/sale thread) – 12 (1)
• Digital Point (buy/sale thread) – 6(0)
• Other (Word of Mouth, direct to site) – 30(4)

The number in brackets is the number of attributed sales, This means the page converted at about 3% which is remarkable given how awful it was.

The Good, the bad and the plain ugly

The Good
Ok I’m going to say the content was the good, interesting subject hopefully of use to people but clearly not something we cover very often. The good is really people will pay for information if you give them a compelling reason to. Several people who bought the article are also on our Mac Book Pro Challenge judging by their email addresses, and so its nice to see perhaps it was loyal readers who were maybe less interested in the article but were looking to help the site out that pushed the figure up. Ultimately the good is it made a profit, and proved the concept.

The bad
The Firesale was badly organised, for starters it meant I had to stay up well into the night to change the prices. There was no mechanism in place to truly check time stamps and my half hearted attempt at a referral scheme was pathetic. From StumbleUpon side of things the sponsored ads attracted a few thumbs down mainly due to the wording of the landing page.

The just plain ugly
Never ever ever use a blog post as a landing page, don’t change your wording on the fly and proof read everything. These are simple lessons to be learnt. The landing page was by the biggest issue, when I originally envisioned the idea, the plan was for a separate landing page, introducing the article with an opening snippet, the bonuses and Firesale information but due to time constraints I didn’t finish the page. Because the original post was designed to whip people into some sort of hyped frenzy it emphasised the time more so then the product.
Ultimately the landing page failed because of this.

StumbleUpon does not accept time sensitive offers, which meant I had to reword the post to reflect and emphasise the fact you could purchase access after the post. This of course meant I was editing the post on the fly and spelling errors and some nasty grammar snuck in. A couple of negative comments appeared to my shame and slightly against my better judgement I did not publish them.

The information was not time sensitive and ultimately the Firesale detracted from the sale of the articles. In that respect I should have simply published and set a price.

Lessons Learnt

So what have I learnt;

• Always have a landing page
• Don’t change such pages
• Time sensitive offers are hard to get pass StumbleUpon (great fantastic and lovely staff)
• Fire Sales are not really suitable unless you have a time sensitive information or limited access
• Plan, prepare, check before you start your campaigns
• Automate as much as possible

Will we be doing it again, I think so at least in part, we need to automate everything on the purchase side but that should not be an issue. From the purchase point of view the Fire Sale aspect will I think be dropped and instead focus on offering premium content at good prices. What will not be happening is the site becoming into an article or ebook bazaar, the vast majority of posts will be free and hopefully of the usual high (one hopes) standard you come to expect.

Have you attempted to sell posts and articles? Did you have much success?