Monday, October 6, 2014

The small-scale value of a targeted Reddit link

Last week, I had a sudden spike in visits on this blog after a post thanks to Reddit.

If you have no freaking idea what post I’m talking about, itwas a blog post that discussed the economics of DIY vinyl

Over the last few months, I've been working on hand-drawing 100 sleeves for an upcoming vinyl release by Pantaloon Descendo. After I was done drawing everything, I thought it might be interesting to share the numbers with people because they’re not numbers we typically tend to be privy to. 


(Pantaloon Descendo’s hand-drawn sleeve for "7 inches of bliss")

The post made it all the way to the top of /r/vinyl. Probably because:
1) it was targeted right: it was a blog post about DIY vinyl that I showcased on /r/vinyl, so I reached the proper audience there
2) it provided valuable insight about DIY vinyl production, and
3) it had a good title that hooked people and made them want to click through


I can tell the blog post fared well because of the upvote/downvote ratio, which was over 80%. If 4 out of 5 people liked it, I consider this a success.


Over the course of 3 days, the Reddit post directed roughly 2,400 visitors to the blog.


Initially, I really wasn’t prepared to convert potential visitors into sales; The Mustache Club’s Web site isn’t even fully set up to accommodate sales. 

In order to actually be able to take sales, to improvise and invite people to e-mail me and then proceed to invoice them via PayPal, instead of having the convenience of a Web store. Old school shit. It worked.

The whole thing has been very educational.

What I've learned

The Reddit post directed 2,400 unique visitors to the blog. Out of those 2,400 unique visitors, 8 contacted me saying they were interested in the product. Out of those 8, I managed to convert 6 into a sale.

So, it took 2,400 unique visitors in a highly-targeted context (blog post about producing DIY vinyl record that reached a vinyl-focused group) to make 6 sales.

And, with 6 sales out of 8 leads I have a 75% conversion rate, for which I can only assume that the price ended up being prohibitive ($10 for a 7-inch record is on the higher end of the scale). If a 75% conversion rate of leads into sales is where I'm at, I'd say I'm faring pretty good. 

Overall, it takes me 400 unique visitors with a highly-targeted message to a specific audience to generate one sale. 


Not bad at all. 

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