Daring Did
Where Keith gets to see what it's like in the show
Not too long ago, i and a few of my compatriots got together to sponsor the Daring Fireball rss feed. I can assure you that my post sponsorship wrap-up is coming in better late than it would have never, but i do apologize for that late part. The executive summary is that it was very valuable, and i'm really glad that i did it. As for the details...read on.
What i wanted
I had these goals in mind when i put this program together:- Get more people to hear about MercuryMover
- Make contact with (and become more known by) other indie Mac Developers
- Make contact with (and become more known by) John Gruber of Daring Fireball
- Make some money
What i got
1)I got some very decent traffic (thousands of visitors, up from my usual tens of visitors). This is not quite as good as i would have hoped, since Daring Fireball has a readership in the millions and an RSS subscribership of over 50,000; but as my dad would have said: it's better than a sharp stick in the eye. Even better, at least one of those visitors not only bought MercuryMover, but he gave me a really nice review on his blog.2)I put out a call for volunteers to join me in this unique sponsorship (usually, there is only one company sponsoring the feed, not four) on the MacSB yahoo group as well as on my blog. The response was pretty terrific so i definitely feel like i made a splash with other developers. Even better, i have a really nice rapport with some of the other participants who did this with me and i'm grateful to count them as my colleagues.
3)Gruber and I had a fair amount of dialog as we worked out the details of how this sponsorship would work given that it was slightly unique. He was very pleasant to work with and i always felt like our effort was in really good hands. Unfortunately, i can't really say that i (or my app, or my outfit) really made an impression on him. Hopefully my next app will catch his (and the other cool bloggers) eye(s) a little more.
4)For a little company like mine, this was a pretty expensive sponsorship. Not only did i make money on it, but i had my best day ever; the kind of day, that if i had this many sales every day, i could quit my job and devote my working self fully to Helium Foot. If anything, this was actually the most powerful part of the experience: tasting what it's like to be that successful.
What i learned
Marketing is important! Traffic and sales had been pretty flat and this provided a really nice boost.Web sites are still better sources of traffic than RSS feeds. I got more than twice as many referrals from daringfireball.net than i did from the Daring Fireball rss feed.
Position matters. During the week of the sponsorship, i compared notes with David Sinclair of Dejal Software (the guy listed first in the sponsorship). His traffic was much higher than mine. My original thought that, due to the primacy/recency effect, the last spot was probably the second most valuable, was likely erroneous.
You get what you pay for (and sometimes you pay more). When i solicited for volunteers to join the sponsorship, i specifically priced the the top slot higher. Part of the reason for doing so was that i wanted the guy in the top spot (which we've seen is definitely more valuable) to subsidize everyone else just a tad. The top spot was $20 more and was probably worth much more than that. Also, since i collected the fee from each of the participants (via paypal) in order to pass it along to Daring Fireball, i had to pay the processing fees. This resulted in my paying slightly more than $290 but i still got the last spot.