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. 

Always be ready for a sale - I wasn't

Yesterday, I blogged about the economics of producing a DIY vinyl sleeve for Pantaloon Descendo’s “7 inches of bliss” and posted it on reddit in the /r/vinyl subreddit.

To my surprise, the post did really good and was upvoted way more than I thought it would. That means the post gained traction and went up in visibility on reddit, driving good amounts of traffic to this blog.

To put you in context: before I published the post on DIY vinly sleeve economics, I had 187 pageviews total for this blog. After I posted it on reddit, this is what happened:

You can see a spike. 

That's definitely a spike.

At the moment of writing this current post (24 hours after the article on DIY economics), it had been viewed 2137 times (so far). To a lot of well-established bloggers, this is nothing. But for me, this means worlds. 

It's been viewed way more than any of my previous posts:

In all honesty, when I posted on reddit, I wasn't trying to make a sale. 

My aim was simply to provide information on the mechanics and costs involved; if other people can learn from my experience, I thought it could help them.

However, I was not ready for people to actually be interested in ordering copies. The release date isn’t set for at least another 2 months. I just thought it would be cool to showcase the product and provide some metrics. 

Man, I wasn't ready for that.

In fact, the web store isn’t even ready yet; the simple option of ordering through a few clicks is not even functional yet. 

That’s dumb, I know. I should’ve been ready. I wasn’t.

But then again, surprise customer interest is a good problem to have.

I had to come up with a solution.

I offered interested people to e-mail me at The Mustache Club's email address, which would then allow me to invoice them via PayPal. Thankfully, my PayPal account was already set up.

Or so I thought.

After I created my first PayPal invoice, it asked me to confirm my e-mail address: can't send the invoice yet.

Crap!

I don't have access to my The Mustache Club e-mail account at work; I will have to wait until tonight to confirm my PayPal account. 

Re-crap!

I hate to make people wait.

Re-re-crap!

That will be a valuable lesson: always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always be ready for a sale.

***

As a way to counterbalance the fact that the ordering process was a little bumpy, I decided to mail advance copies to all redditors who order by Friday. Instead of asking customers to wait until it's actually released in 2 months, I thought it would be a nice gesture to send it now.