Hi Everyone,
We wanted to share with you the results we’ve seen so far since publishing the Winter Collection. We’re pretty excited about our findings and think you will be as well.
The catalog went live late Saturday night on November 12th and most of this recap was written 11 days later.
*** Catalog Placements ***
One of our goals is to distribute the catalog as widely as possible; maximizing how many people see it. We posted full copies of it on:
-
http://www.stylishhome.com/Community/StylishHome-Current/Winter-Collection-Catalog -
http://www.issuu.com/stylishhome/docs/stylishhome_winter_collection_catalog -
http://www.scribd.com/doc/72725620/Stylish-Home-Winter-Collection-Catalog - And one teammate (
http://taylorcrafts.wordpress.com/) placed it on their blog
- more on that in the special recognition section
*** Outreach ***
Another goal is to promote the catalog as widely as possible. We did a variety of outreach in an effort to have relevant sites and people pick it up, give it coverage and promote:
- Sent email outreach to over 30 top tier décor and design bloggers who tend to like Etsy including Decor8, ApartmentTherapy, YoungHouseLove, SFGirlbyBay, etc. One of these, CentsationalGirl posted it on her Facebook to her 19,110 followers.
- Sent email outreach to 8 Etsy/Artisan resource-type sites, including www.UnanimousCraft.com where we posted a notice and link to the catalog
- Sent email outreach to 50 Twitter users, most with 1,000-2,000 followers, who also all have blogs and also sell on Etsy
- Sent convos to the 122 Etsy sellers featured in the catalog asking them to promote it (23% convoed back and said they had or would promote it)
- Announced the catalog in the team forum
*** Links Garnered ***
Look, links matter. A lot. Today, 87%% of all internet sessions start at a search engine* such as Google and search engines use links extensively to determine which pages are ranked most highly in their search results. There were over 18 billion searches completed at search engines in October 2011**. If your store and listings have lots of links, you’ll get more visitors from search engines. This is why one of our goals is to garner as many links as possible for stores in the catalog. So far:
- Each store in the catalog received 4 links
- Each item featured in the catalog received 4 links
- The catalog on StylishHome received 22 Tweets, including 2 re-Tweets
- The catalog on StylishHome received 22 Facebook shares and 42 Facebook Likes
- The catalog on StylishHome received 2 Stumbles and 1 LinkedIn link
- The catalog on Issuu received 16 Facebook Likes
*** Views & Sales ***
Here’s where the proverbial rubber meets the road – how many people saw the featured items and how many sales resulted:
- Overall, the catalog was viewed by over 1,400 people
- Each listing in the catalog was viewed by a minimum of 700 people (Yea!!!)
- 10% of the featured items in the catalog have been sold as of Sat 11/26 at 2:20PM PST – impossible to know where the sales came from but we believe we had a material impact
Some details on traffic:
- The blog post on StylishHome had 1,046 page views (271 came from Facebook, 18 came from littlebyrdvintage.wordpress.com, 2 came from oppning.blogspot.com)
- The copy on Issuu had 422 “views”
- The copy on Issuu had 7,623 page views. They break it down for each page in the catalog and it looks like over 80% of people looked at all 27 pages. Cool!
- The copy on Issuu had 74 visits from Facebook
- The copy on Scribd had 208 “reads” – they don’t define it, but we believe it is equivalent to a person viewing the catalog
*** Special Recognition ***
We noted earlier that links are important. It is also important to understand that search engines treat documents (such as our pdf catalog) like a web page. They crawl and index all the content and links within the document. By posting the catalog file on your blog, you create links to every seller in the catalog. This *dramatically* increases the links created to sellers versus simply linking to the catalog elsewhere.
One special teammate posted the full pdf catalog on their blog. When a blogger puts the full catalog on their site, like the way
http://taylorcrafts.wordpress.com/ or StylishHome.com did, it creates direct links to EVERY featured seller and EVERY featured item. In this case, Taylor Crafts provided 122 links to stores and another 122 links to items – Wow! They also tweeted and posted on Facebook about the catalog. We all owe Taylor Crafts a high five and thank you for promoting everyone in the catalog! Great job. We’d like to humbly suggest everyone show their team support to Taylor Crafts by liking them on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/TaylorCrafts, following their RSS feed, tweeting about them
http://www.twitter.com/TCEngraving or otherwise promoting them. They really helped everyone.
Overall we are very pleased with the first edition. We managed to get significant social buzz, had terrific team participation, created a lot of links for sellers, got every item viewed by over 700 people and made some sales. We also learned a few things to improve results next time.
Your comments have all been very supportive and we appreciate that a lot. We look forward to your thoughts and feedback and will be reaching out soon regarding future editions.
Best,
Greg and Mike
*Source:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/17/business/la-fi-ct-himi-20110417**Source:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Releases_October_2011_U.S._Sear...
