
The Connection Between Viral Events, Traffic, and Sales - saddington
http://blog.desk.pm/viral/
======
prawn
There was a fairly prominent comment in the Hacker News discussion of the
original submission that was critical of the product and saying it lacked a
very basic, essential feature. I wonder if that deterred many from buying? I
know it stood out to me, and a friend who read the same discussion mentioned
it in conversation too. Here it is:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8948414)

The recent Lockitron discussion was quite damning and negative - I imagine
that overwhelmingly negative feedback might have limited any sales from HN
readers too. That discussion was here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953457)

~~~
CPLX
I am one of the people who bought the product this week after reading about it
on HN and I like it at lot.

I did see that comment but I ignored it, at least in part because it seemed to
be sort of templated "hipster dislike" complaints, like about how it's trendy
and other people are doing similar things, etc, and not a specific or
understandable critique of how the product did/didn't live up to his hopes
when purchasing it.

~~~
saddington
I really do appreciate this. I'm working hard, as best as I can, to iterate on
the releases. As I mentioned in that previous comment, i've gotten a lot of
grace from users who joined me on this small journey as an indie developer.

it's fun, rewarding, and i'm learning a ton.

each version will get better and i'm quite thankful it's not a sole echo
chamber where i'm justifying my own beliefs with... myself.

:)

------
cantbecool
This is a definite. Traffic always increases sales of a product if the traffic
is focused. Evidence suggests this since people shell out significant sums of
money for Adwords for specific keyword terms.

As an anecdotal example I used $100 Adwords voucher to drive traffic to my
movie torrent meta-search engine
[https://moviemagnet.net](https://moviemagnet.net) on specific keywords:
'movie torrents', 'torrents', and 'movie downloads'. The most successful
visitors by bounce rate and time on the site was for the most focused keyword,
'movie torrents' by a significant margin.

I'd love to see some white papers on the affiliation between sales and focused
marketing to tech-savvy consumers, not just casual internet users.

~~~
josephjrobison
Only because I'm not aware if there are Adsense vouchers, do you mean Adsense
or Adwords?

~~~
cantbecool
Thanks for pointing that out, brother. I always get confused between the two
services.

------
DanielBMarkham
My favorite description regarding the effect of getting on the front page of
HN was from a guy who ran mom and pop site. He said it was like running a
small country store and having a busload full of old cantankerous seniors come
in, criticize all the merchandise, complain about the free stuff, and then
leave without purchasing anything. There was a lot of bustle and noise, but
that was about it.

~~~
saddington
I suppose this is what happened to me... A lot of "noise" (it was fun!) but
not many sales.

------
davidw
Depends entirely on the product! I've had LiberWriter on the front page. 0
sales. Because it's the kind of thing that HN readers can do themselves. My
guess is that patio11's bingo card thing is pretty similar, despite having
been widely covered here.

~~~
saddington
Fascinating! Do you have retrospectives that I could read so that I might
learn from your experiences? Thanks for sharing!

~~~
davidw
I think I pretty much summed it up, above! HN links to my site, 0 sales. I
wasn't disappointed; it's pretty clear that HN is very different from my
target market.

~~~
saddington
It's good you had the right perspective... I gave myself a little legroom
emotionally and just prepped myself for nothing to happen.

------
lucb1e
I'm not every surprised that pageviews don't directly correlate with sales.
People come to Hacker News, and thereby your blog, to read something
interesting, not to see an ad for your product let alone buy it. If your blog
post is written in a way that shows people the value of your innovative
product, it _might_ turn into a sale. But that's not what we're here for.

For the record, I never heard of Desk, but now I have. And if I'd seen your
earlier blog post I guess I would have too. Now if I am googling for whatever
Desk does (I have no idea) and I find a few products among which Desk, then I
am much more likely to go "Oh that was this thing on hacker news" and buy that
instead of your competitors. Why? Because I know most products on HN are open
source products or small startups with hard working people behind it, and
that's something I value and trust rather than any random other search result.
Not direct sales perhaps, but publicity is worth something too.

~~~
saddington
You know what's kinda sad... Is that I wasn't thinking about sales when I
wrote the post... But after I was like... Doh! I wondered if I had missed an
opportunity.

But your perspective is a really healthy one. Publicity is good.

~~~
eli
This is the basic idea of a branding campaign. Lexus buys ads on the web where
their target demographic hangs out just so people get used to seeing the logo
next to things they enjoy. They don't really expect anyone to click on the
banner let alone click on the banner and immediately buy a car.

~~~
saddington
I read a report once via a big university (I.e. Harvard, Stanford), that spend
like this is to remind current customers of the value of their investment, NOT
to get new ones...!

------
cvs268
In terms of SEO it does wonders to the pagerank. The page continues to be
placed on the first page of search results for few weeks after the viral
influx of visitors.

The key is to ensure that relevant keywords are part of the anchor text i.e.
the "Title" submitted to HN.

~~~
saddington
Do you think my title(s) were "good"? What do you think could be done better
as you review my posts and submissions? I don't often post...

~~~
cvs268
Would you want your page to be in the results of a search query containing
any/all the words in the title?

If yes, then the title is good.

Also, following the massive influx of visitors on "D-day" a secondary influx
of visitors often follows. This is from mentions on twitter/fb/G+.

Combined together thats a LOT of eyeballs. The key is to be relevant when
posting content on HN. As long as you share something that people find
interesting, everyone wins.

~~~
saddington
Appreciate your advice. I'm going to continue to noodle on this for a bit.

------
pbnjay
If anything this just goes to say that "Going Viral" in the wrong market isn't
worth it - you have to know your market! I'm sure the publicity will be good
in the long-term, hard-to-measure sense, but targeting the right market will
be more beneficial to short term sales.

~~~
saddington
I couldn't say this any better... "viral" is so context-driven these days!

It's a great publicity piece, for sure, but it doesn't always impact the
business... which is very clear now in my own experience!

------
benologist

        "If I were to connect raw traffic figures with sales 
        directly it would have equated with something around 
        ~$25,000 in net revenue."
    

If success was as easy as writing content for HN we could all just skip to
being millionaires.

~~~
gk1
I think you're overestimating the likelihood of making it to the frontpage...
And underestimating the work involved in writing _good_ content.

~~~
benologist
Is "effort" the best metric to measure success with?

~~~
gk1
I don't understand what you mean. What are you referring to?

~~~
benologist
HN being hard to reach doesn't compensate for the 25x difference in value
against their ideal customers.

Reaching HN is a recipe - write, submit, and master getting 2 or 3 early
upvotes. There's no unknown steps, there's no mystery, the best time of day to
submit has been documented 100 times along with the words you should use and
the topics you should write about.

Reaching your ideal customers is much harder because you don't have meticulous
instructions that read "just add labor".

------
nicky0
I disagree that a developer's blog of this kind is important. I believe it is
a distraction.

Sure, with a bit of effort and luck you can find yourself being discussed on
HN for a day. But your time would be better spend improving the product
itself.

Indie dev "business stats" blogging is more about trying to gain recognition,
show off a little bit, and validate your part in the perceived community. For
a first time indie, I can see how attractive it is to get into the HN glare.
But ultimately it's an ego thing. It has little relation to the actual
business.

If you do have a blog it should be about something important to the users of
the product. Topics relevant to the product itself, and its development. Not
the business and the marketing.

------
weisser
Getting on the front page of Hacker News doesn't really qualify as going viral
unless the conversation spreads outwards in some significant way.

~~~
saddington
This is a good perspective and you're probably right... for what its worth, it
was the most significant traffic day EVER... but, i think semantically you're
comment here is more accurate.

All tell you though... it "FELT" like a viral event for me!

------
known
Google announced that 56.1% of ads served on the internet are never even “in
view”—defined as being on screen for one second or more

[http://qz.com/307204/google-admits-that-advertisers-
wasted-t...](http://qz.com/307204/google-admits-that-advertisers-wasted-their-
money-on-more-than-half-of-internet-ads/)

------
ssharp
Sales? Maybe not directly but what about new links generated?

~~~
saddington
Now that's a great point. There were a bunch of back-links... I will do my
research and see how this impacts sales on the long-run. GREAT point and one I
didn't think about initiatially... yikes...

------
arenaninja
I missed the previous post, but I've been looking for something to help me
write... Then I went to the homepage and saw "...exclusively for OS X". I
noped out of that tab as soon as I could

------
UnethicalHacks
Can we please stop calling 35k pageviews in one day as "viral"? that's pretty
low traffic by any reasonable standard.

~~~
saddington
Context is king, as many people say... That figure is pretty huge considering
I average 250 pvs (on a good day)! But it's a good reminder that this is still
pretty small in comparison to really big viral experiences. Thanks for that.

