The Brand Gap

I was reading a book called Inbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah. I’m a huge Dharmesh fan but I’ll admit that this book is a little light weight for me. Maybe I’m not the intended audience, or maybe it gets into more advanced topics later on. In any case, I’ve put it on hold to start reading The Brand Gap.

I’m about two chapters in so far and this book is fantastic! I’m very glad I picked it up; it’s one of those books that makes me take notes every few paragraphs.

Traffic This Month

It’s been about a month since I’ve launched so I’m reviewing some Bidsketch numbers. I logged into Google Analytics to review the traffic, and I’m at over 11k visits for the month! 🙂

This is due to getting several writeups, and redirecting all of the SixCentral marketing site traffic. I was averaging about 1,200 visits a month before this so I’m very excited about current traffic levels. Of course, a lot of this traffic isn’t sustainable, so I’ll need to work on my SEO to make it sustainable. In the meantime, I’ll take it!

Per-Proposal Plan

Today I had a user (anonymous) post a suggestion about a “per use” payment plan for Bidsketch.

http://bidsketch.uservoice.com/pages/29932-general/suggestions/380184-add-a-per-use-payment-plan-for-those-of-us-who-don-t-usually-use-proposals?ref=title

They state that certain designers just don’t write enough proposals to pay on a monthly basis. This makes sense in a way, a lot of people starting out might not use it all that much.

This would be similar to how MailChimp’s pay-as-you-go plan works. I may try it out in the next couple of weeks 🙂

Inbound Marketing

Just started reading Dharmesh Shah’s new book: Inbound Marketing. I’m at the very start so I don’t have much to report now other than it looks pretty damn good so far.

Finished up Seth Godin’s book called Permission Marketing. It was pretty good, though I could’ve gotten plenty out of it if the book was half the size. Not a big book at all, it’s just that I’m not a big fan of having the same concept repeated to me over and over.

Totally not related: I love my Kindle!! 🙂

Sales Figures at 3 Weeks

Ok so I’ve been live for about 3 weeks now and I have over 250 users on Bidsketch. About 20% of those are paid accounts, most are on the premium plan.

I’ve introduced a Basic plan but I’ve received very fews signups on that plan even though I had people say they were going to sign up.

Currently trying out some A/B testing to see what the difference between 3 plans (Premium, Basic, and Free) vs. 2 plans (Premium and Free) is like. So far the numbers indicate their isn’t much of a difference at all. Not what I expected!

Next up, I’m going to do some A/B testing with the Free plan. Certain SaaS based apps have taken away the free plan (or hidden it). I’d like to see what the impact of this is on sales.

The reason why I’m trying all this stuff out? Sales have slowed dramatically in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been working on a couple of features people have been asking for which might help with that.

My plan to help keep things moving on the sales site:

  • Get a couple of bloggers to write about Bidsketch.
  • A/B test the hell out of the pricing page.
  • Work on ways to convert the free account users.
  • Improve sales website, update videos, etc.

Unfortunately, this isn’t all I’m doing. I have to show activity by releasing new features at least every other week — activity early on is critical.

I’ll follow up in a couple of weeks with an update on what I’ve gained with my efforts 🙂