Expecting high volume of traffic... ideas please?

[diablo]

I'd actually make the homepage one big hard sell for that product. Loads of big call to action buttons.

Completely agree with this. I would make my home page the sales page for the duration of the TV show and for as many days afterwards as it was converting. You can then revert to your usual homepage.

 

[topcat]

So, it happened this morning, things went fairly well. The worst thing is that I don't think this is going to be a long term boost.

I'll get some traffic screenshots up this evening.

Thanks for all your help and advice.

 

[mally]

Well done, what was the product?

 

[Murray]

So, it happened this morning, things went fairly well. The worst thing is that I don't think this is going to be a long term boost.

I'll get some traffic screenshots up this evening.

Thanks for all your help and advice.

Would be interesting to hear what sort of traffic/sales it sent if you're happy to talk about that.

 

[topcat]

You can watch the item here: http://www.itv.com/thismorning/home-garden/get-together-gadgets-brian-mcfadden

You can see Brian McFadden and Vogue McFadden showing it off.

This is how it was shown on the programme.

We've had a number of sales, the PayPal checkout worked rather well despite looking hideous.

Not sure what else you'd be interested in, but willing to answer most questions

 

[Edwin]

Thanks for sharing. If a similar opportunity were to come up in future, you'd be better off having a single product specific mini site with an easy to remember URL probably, since it looks like the bulk of the enquiries are for the mentioned product only.

See http://www.dualbrella.nl/ for an example (in Dutch, obviously, but you get the idea)

You might want to slap a big "as seen on TV" banner on the umbrella page and on the link going to it.

 

[fish]

A big + to topcat for an open share of the project (thanks!) coupled with good input from other AD members which I'm sure we can all learn from.

A refreshing change of topic on AD

 

[retired_member32]

hope it gave you a good income for Christmas, nice looking site you have and gave me a chuckle looking through the items for sale. I would place a "as seen on television" image on the homepage with probably a youtube vid showing the item featured on the sales page.

Mark

 

[jasman]

Would make a good present for Siamese twins

 

[redbird]

As others have said, many thanks for sharing what you have. An interesting and refreshingly different thread.

I'd be interested in knowing if the increase in sales was only for the umbrella, or whether other items also sold as a result of the increased traffic to the site.

 

[max99x]

thanks for sharing. Interested to know if they contacted you directly or you went to them as to how they found your product?

 

[donton]

+1 to the comments above - a great thread!

We've been negotiating with a popular reality TV show to have our site featured in one of their scenes in the Christmas special. Whether it will happen or not depends on if we can reach a compromise on terms.

Having had various celebs tweet about sites in the past it's definitely worth lining up some robust hosting to deal with the traffic. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a tweet and trying to visit a site, only to find it takes an age to load - or doesn't load at all.

Luckily the site I've had media attention for is a hosted ecommerce site, it has never really slowed down despite being hammered.

Having tried various PR mediums I can safely say TV is probably the best in terms of traffic generation, closely followed by contextual links in media articles. We had a double page spread in a glossy mag earlier this year and it was a major disappointment - obviously it's hard to track traffic from offline publications like a magazine, but we saw barely a 5% traffic increase from the month previous.

 

[Murray]

Thanks for sharing Donton.

My experience with conventional media has been disappointing.

A previous business venture of mine (dresses) was featured in editorial pieces in a lot of womens magazines, like company, look etc as well as some national newspapers.

The result was no noticeable increase in visitors or sales.

The only magazine which did deliver on sales & traffic was HEAT magazine (all though there was a celebrity wearing our dress in that piece so maybe that had a lot to do with it)

I've found online stuff much better, we've had a few minor celebrities like the TOWIE lot on twitter tweet about us and that sent a few thousand people instantly to the site.

Also we gifted popular youtube bloggers dresses (the kind that get 100,000+ views on every video) and that also sent 1000's of visitors during the first couple of days and and some sustained traffic after that.

Pinterest also is great.

Edit> Should mention with the twitter, there was a big difference between them tweeting our link and them retweeting one our tweets. Much bigger traffic sent from first.

 

[donton]

Thanks for sharing Donton.

My experience with conventional media has been disappointing.

A previous business venture of mine (dresses) was featured in editorial pieces in a lot of womens magazines, like company, look etc as well as some national newspapers.

The result was no noticeable increase in visitors or sales.

The only magazine which did deliver on sales & traffic was HEAT magazine (all though there was a celebrity wearing our dress in that piece so maybe that had a lot to do with it)

I've found online stuff much better, we've had a few minor celebrities like the TOWIE lot on twitter tweet about us and that sent a few thousand people instantly to the site.

Also we gifted popular youtube bloggers dresses (the kind that get 100,000+ views on every video) and that also sent 1000's of visitors during the first couple of days and and some sustained traffic after that.

Pinterest also is great.

Hi Murray,

My experience is in a similar fashion niche - but our items have a lower ticket price than the average dress (probably around £5-£8).

For us, as you say, most newspapers and magazines provide pretty poor results. We do find that when newspapers and magazines publish pieces in tandem with their website the results tend to be better. Perhaps people are just too lazy to type out a link they read in a newspaper and they'd rather just click a contextual link?

We've worked with quite a few magazines and newspapers and we've seen some results from them all - some better than others.

We've had a few tweets from the TOWIE lot and it helps that they use the products we sell - so all the young girls wanting to be just like their favourite TOWIE stars buy their stuff from us. It's TOWIE we've been talking to about the Christmas special episode and potentially featuring our site.

I've never done much work with YouTube bloggers (or vloggers), although we're supposed to be working with some semi-celeb with a decent YouTube following in the next few weeks. I'll report back with our results!

Some of the best results we've had are from gifting review products to authority blogs in the beauty/fashion niche. There are probably 15-20 real, UK authority blogs in our niche and we've been featured on most. A £30 bundle of review products can sometimes lead to sales of £3,000+. In terms of traffic some of these blogs send thousands of hits per day until the review post gradually gets buried.

So whilst being plugged on TV is nice and brings plenty of traffic, we've had some of our best results with self-made bloggers. Obviously it takes time to locate suitable bloggers and build relationships with them, but it's well worth it. A lot of people discount blogs as being inferior to newspapers and magazines because they're backed by big corporations and publishers, but the results from independent blogs are just as good, and the hassle involved with getting your products on these blogs is exponentially smaller.

The traffic from independent blogs tends to convert fairly high too, which I guess is down to the social proof aspect.

 

[diablo]

With the information shared in this thread by topcat, Murray, donton, and others, it is one of the best to appear on acorn for a long time.

I've always believed that the combined knowledge of everyone on here is phenomenal, but we tend to all walk our own paths.

Thanks to everyone for sharing!

 

[wonder_lander]

Great thread. Topcat, any update on the longevity of the traffic and whether you got any more media interest following the piece?

 

[Dextron]

Gotta agree - great thread it's really good of you to share the results of this and much appreciated!

 

[topcat]

Sorry I didn't see there were more questions.

Great thread. Topcat, any update on the longevity of the traffic and whether you got any more media interest following the piece?

So the traffic has fallen, but to a level that is far above before we were featured. Unfortunately, no other media coverage, which is a great shame. Would have loved to have got some nice links.

As others have said, many thanks for sharing what you have. An interesting and refreshingly different thread.

I'd be interested in knowing if the increase in sales was only for the umbrella, or whether other items also sold as a result of the increased traffic to the site.

Increased sales across the board, which is great.

thanks for sharing. Interested to know if they contacted you directly or you went to them as to how they found your product?

That contacted us, no idea how they found the product! I think it's to do with the fact that we are the only UK site that features it.

Thanks for sharing Donton.

My experience with conventional media has been disappointing.

A previous business venture of mine (dresses) was featured in editorial pieces in a lot of womens magazines, like company, look etc as well as some national newspapers.

The result was no noticeable increase in visitors or sales.

The only magazine which did deliver on sales & traffic was HEAT magazine (all though there was a celebrity wearing our dress in that piece so maybe that had a lot to do with it)

I've found online stuff much better, we've had a few minor celebrities like the TOWIE lot on twitter tweet about us and that sent a few thousand people instantly to the site.

Also we gifted popular youtube bloggers dresses (the kind that get 100,000+ views on every video) and that also sent 1000's of visitors during the first couple of days and and some sustained traffic after that.

Pinterest also is great.

Edit> Should mention with the twitter, there was a big difference between them tweeting our link and them retweeting one our tweets. Much bigger traffic sent from first.

I think that's something that I'll look at in the new year, reaching out to bloggers. Have you had any experience with Instagram?

With the information shared in this thread by topcat, Murray, donton, and others, it is one of the best to appear on acorn for a long time.

I've always believed that the combined knowledge of everyone on here is phenomenal, but we tend to all walk our own paths.

Thanks to everyone for sharing!

Gotta agree - great thread it's really good of you to share the results of this and much appreciated!

Thanks for the kind words. As I said previously, you guys have provided invaluable advice.

Also, it's so annoying not being able to see organic keywords! So frustrating.

 

[martin-s]

Don't forget you still get search terms in Webmaster tools..

 

[topcat]

Don't forget you still get search terms in Webmaster tools..

Whilst that is true, it'd be nice to be able to compare conversion rates in Analytics as I have a lot of nice goals set up.