Sometimes I read these sales letters for all of these internet marketing products (including my own) and I wonder how in the world these product authors became such instant successes. After all, the part of their story that you always hear about is the amazing profit part, right?
The truth is usually that these people fail a lot. Just like Thomas Edison did. Just like Michael Jordan did. Just like I do. (Don’t you love the not-so-subtle comparison between me, great marketers and Thomas Edison?) 🙂
So, I thought it would be fun to tell you about a failed experiment of mine.
Michelle McPherson, Me and Chicken Coops.
Back in May, I mentioned that I was playing around with Automatic Article Submitter. In that article, I mentioned that I was lurking on Michelle’s blog and decided to try a crazy experiment about Chicken Coops. Here is what I wrote:
About the same time I was playing with this software, I was also lurking around Michelle McPherson’s blog reading about chicken coops. I liked that video so much that I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to test Automated Article Submitter.
So, I did some quick keyword research (I’m talking about like 5 minutes worth) and grabbed the domain www.buildmychickencoop.com.
OK — I know you are laughing. I can hear you. Yes, I have a chicken coop blog. No, I do not know anything about chickens. Just hang on for a minute.
I asked one of the awesome guys that writes for me to write some quick Chicken Coop articles, and I threw up a WordPress blog. I then asked another VA to install Automatic Article Submitter (AAS) and submit some articles to directories.
Well, it’s been many months since that post. So I thought you might want to hear about the less-than-spectacular results.
Article Marketing Was A Success
As far as getting traffic to websites, Article Marketing is a success. No surprise there.
In fact, some traffic continues to come in due to article marketing. There is no SE Traffic to speak of (I really did not set it up for that). The end result is that I sent 3500 visitors to this site and got about 378 hops. That is about 11% conversion. Not bad.
Unfortunately, there were only 9 order form impressions and no sales. This is completely unexpected since the product has a gravity of 69. Not sure what is up with that.
Well, live and learn.
Below are some stats screen shots for the record.
Love to hear what you think about all of this….here are some theories on why this “failed”. What do you think:
- Maybe the product sales page actually stinks and the gravity number is “misleading”
- Maybe this article marketing traffic is not “buying traffic”
- Maybe 378 visitors to the sales page is not enough to understand the real picture
- Maybe this was all an evil plot by Michelle to distract me 🙂
Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Of course the bottom line is always to fail quickly and learn from your failures. Not sure what to learn here yet…
Regards,
Mark
