Thursday of Doom

Traffic

We had 5 unique visitors, but 97 page views yesterday. That seems like a lot of page views per visitor, but I won't complain.

Oh, and at least one of the visitors was a viagra spammer. Advertisement via referral logs? That's new to me.

Sales, Twitter, and Affiliates

No sales, no new twitter followers, and no new affiliates yesterday.

Goodreads

I hooked the Hop Safari Journal up to my Goodreads Author's Page yesterday. Will this generate traffic?

Google Analytics

I finally have Google Analytics hooked up to HopSafari.com. Hopefully it will provide a little more detail about the visitors than the built-in traffic monitoring.

Stuff

I got my Hop Safari shirts from uberprints.com. Everyone will be so jealous!

Ideas

I'm still behind on implementing my list of ideas. 

A Long Weekend

Not much happened on Hop Safari this weekend; I was in Corpus Christi windsurfing. 

Traffic

Friday: 7 visitors

Saturday: 0 visitors

Sunday: 3 visitors

Monday: 5 visitors

I'm happy to see that my huge readership was taking their vacation seriously and not surfing the internet.

Affiliate Clicks

We got our first affiliate click this month over the weekend.

Sales

Still no sales this month.

Twitter

We now have 6 followers!

Trada

Remember that one of my ideas was to try Trada? Well, maybe not. Their signup questionnaire implies a minimum buy of $1000 per month. That's a bit much for me, especially considering that there is no guarantee that any click will lead to a purchase. Unless I can pay per sale, or demonstrably improve my conversion rate (so far 0%), that expense level doesn't make sense for me.

Ten Days of Hop Safari

Traffic

I was disappointed by my unique visit count on Wednesday the first of September. The site only had two visitors for that day. Oddly, the system recorded 70 page views. I have no idea how two people looked at 70 pages.

Happily, the visit count returned to normal on Thursday, with 8 unique visits and 34 page views. Friday is off to a good start with 3 visitors so far.

Referrals

The top referrers for HopSafari.com have been Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, in that order. LinkedIn? Who would have guessed.

Twitter

I still have 5 followers on twitter, but I've been listed in the Beer Wench's Beer Rockstar list. Awesome!

Sales

I still have no sales of Crafting Beer with (512). I'm a little surprised at this point, but the book and the Hop Safari name are still quite young. Clearly I have a lot to learn about sales and marketing. Lucky for me, I like to learn!

Equipment

I just ordered a few pieces of video equipment for GABF, including a better microphone. I have a few ideas for cool content, one of which may have me running around GABF asking people about interesting new beers. How does that sound?

New Marketing Materials

Marketing

I probably should be embarrassed that I'm trying to sell a book of beer brewing photographs without having more than one of those photos on Hop Safari. Rather than feeling silly, I've finally uploaded a small gallery containing photos from the book.

Since Amazon's Crafting Beer with (512) Brewing Company page doesn't yet have the "look inside" feature, my gallery is the only way to get a good idea of what the book is about. I should have made a gallery much earlier in Hop Safari's life.

For those keeping track, making a gallery is exactly what I suggested doing yesterday. Giving myself advice through my own blog may seem weird, but it worked.

Twitter

@HopSafari now has 5 followers. Percentage wise that is a huge increase. Too bad that talking percentages makes no sense when you're talking about 5 people.

If my background was selling widgets instead of programming, I might show a graph extrapolating the follower count for the next five years. "Oh, wow, we'll have 2,332,019 followers in 2011!" The infamous "hockey stick" chart. That would be silly.

On the bright side, the new followers are folks I already respect. Now Hop Safari needs to earn their respect.

Traffic

Yesterday was a good day for traffic by Hop Safari standards. I had 10 (ten!) unique visitors. Even better, Hop Safari earned its first comment. Best of all, it was a comment from the Beer Wench, beer blogger extraordinaire. Thanks Ashley! See you at GABF.

Ideas

Yesterday I was reminded of the service called Trada. This is a service which buys advertisements on your behalf from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You give Trada your price per click, and their community of ad experts keep the difference between your price and what they can get on the ad networks. 

In other words, Trada helps you outsource the work of managing ad campaigns to their community of experts. Having tried to manage an AdWords campaign before, they are probably worth a shot. I need to investigate how their per-conversion service works too.

Progress

Traffic

Yesterday traffic was up to 9 unique visitors. I'm not sure if this jump was motivated by the Monday blues, or by the video from the (512) Brewing Company Open House. Either way, I'll take it. The video, incidentally received 6 views since I launched it.

I'm a little surprised the video didn't generate more interest, but I am just starting to develop HopSafari as a brand. I may need to get a little more creative in my videos too. Maybe it's time for some video education.

Finally, it seems like this blog gets about the same amount of traffic as the Hop Safari Journal blog does. Interesting. I'd love a quick comment about what you like to read here and on the Journal.

Twitter

My HopSafari twitter handle has 3 followers. I'm probably not doing a good job filling it with content or promoting it from this website.

I think I'm reluctant to push it because it is a new brand and I'm skeptical about my ability to keep working it over the long term. I need to remind myself that the blogs will be a bigger challenge than twitter. The blogs should provide content for twitter too.

Sales

Still no sales. My Amazon affiliate click-throughs are up to 6 for the month-to-date ending on August 30th.

I think part of the issue with sales might be that I don't have a clear description of the book: that it is primarily a photo essay and has very little text. I need to get busy and make a photo gallery of the book.

Ideas

I've been toying with the idea of offering photo posters or prints from the book. I'm not sure if that would do better than the book or not.

Also, folks seem interested in self-publishing. Could I build a business around training or materials on how to self-publish?

Could I help people turn text into a nicely formatted PDF suitable for publishing? It seems probable that the technical issues of properly formatting a PDF and getting nice typesetting may stand in the way of a lot of potential self-publishers.