Some Recent Experiments – 2 failures, 1 success

Over the last couple weeks I have built a few new sites and ran a few test and thought I would share my results with you. Some have been failures and some have been successes. Hopefully you can learn from what I did wrong and also pick up some tips from what I have done right (and if you are really nice you can give me some other suggestions to try out).

Test 1: Lebron James Jerseys

As most of you probably know Lebron James switched teams. Whenever a superstar player switches teams their jerseys are usually the top selling jersey for the year and Lebron James is sure to make that happen.  Lebron went to the Miami Heat from the Cleveland Cavaliers. I do feel bad for Cleveland fans that they lost a great young superstar but the bottom line is Cleveland didn’t do enough to build a championship team around Lebron. I think Lebron should have shown the Cleveland fans a bit more respect and went about leaving in a different way but whatever… that doesn’t have much to do with this experiment.  (And for the record, I wish he would have gone to New York. Much bigger stage than Miami and he could have built a total empire).

Of course since I do a bunch of stuff with sports jerseys and merchandise already I decided to build a Lebron James site and sell Lebron jerseys. I had thought about this a few months ago but couldn’t think of what domains I wanted to register. I thought about lebronisaknick.com and lebronisabull.com and stuff like that but didn’t really like it. So the day before he announced his signing I registered 5 different Lebron James domains. Two of them were general and 3 were team specific (Heat, Bulls, Knicks).

Since we didn’t really know where he was going I decided to start with one of the generic domains and went with http://www.lebron-jersey.com (totally ugly site). I know you are probably freaking out because of the hypen but in all honesty I don’t really mind them. Some of my best domains are hyphenated.  And especially with quick hitters like this I really don’t mind.

Also, because we didn’t know where he was going I couldn’t really put up any jerseys for sale yet. So I set up this page: http://lebron-jersey.com/what-jersey-will-lebron-wear/ and started collecting email addresses through my Aweber account so I could notify people as soon as the jerseys went on sale (which was pretty much right after the announcement was made).  I bought some PPC traffic fairly cheap (less than 20 cents a click) for keywords like “lebron james jerseys”, “lebron james heat jerseys”, “lebron james knicks jerseys”, “lebron james bulls”, and so on.  Probably about 20-25 keywords total.  I also made the mistake of bidding on “lebron james” but more on that in a minute.

I had it all set up and running about 3PM and was watching the stats fairly closely but then had to run out for a couple hours and I got back home at 8 PM after Lebron had made his announcement.  I looked at all the stats and saw some suprises.

• Total clicks:  1,578 (in just a few hours). 1,413 of those were for the keyword “lebron james”
• Signups to be notified about the jerseys:  29

So we are looking at a 1.8% signup rate.  Not very good at all. I was expecting closer to 10%

When I got home I sent out a couple emails with links where people could buy the jerseys. 16 of the 29 people opened the email and 14 of them clicked on the links.  Out of 1578 people who came to my site only 14 ended up on the merchant.

And after all that I think I saw 3 sales for a whopping commission total of $17.49.  All in all I lost about $350-400 on this. Yeah, there will be some other sales that come in later but for now it is a pretty big failure.

The Verdict: Failure.

Why did this fail? What did I learn?

1. “Lebron James” is way too broad of a keyword.  I thought the ad would keep people who were just looking for news or info about his decision program from clicking but that wasn’t the case.  So that was a bunch of wasted money.
2. Since there were 4 teams involved (Heat, Knicks, Bulls, Cavaliers) maybe only 25% of the people searching for Lebron James jerseys were actually Heat fans who would be the main ones buying a jersey.  That is some more wasted traffic.
3. The jerseys are only available for pre-order and they won’t ship out for at least another week. I think when people see that they would just rather go down to the store (especially if they live in Miami) and get one.
4. I just bid too high.  Should have kept all my bids at .10 and not worried about the “minimum first page bid”.
5. I don’t think people want to sign up to receive information on where to buy something like a jersey. There are some products where that can work but I don’t think this is the market for that sort of thing.

Oh well, I learned from my mistake on this one. I will be much more careful in the future.

Test 2: Lebron James Jerseys #2

Time for the second Lebron James experiment.

This time since I knew Lebron James was with the Miami Heat I set up http://www.lebronjamesheatjerseys.com . Once again it is a pretty simple site with just links to some of the Lebron James jerseys that are available.

Instead of Adwords I decided to try Facebook Ads with this one. I have only done a few Facebook ads and haven’t really spent much time on them but I figured it was a good way to target Miami Heat fans, Lebron James fans, and people who live in the Miami area.  So I set up my ad and it got approved in just a couple minutes.  Soon the stats on Facebook were showing I was getting clicks but I was looking at my access logs and not seeing any traffic.  Then I realized I put in the wrong URL in my ad so a competitor got 40 free clicks. YOU’RE WELCOME!!! 

I got the ad fixed and I was seeing a fairly decent CTR (at least in my limited experience with Facebook ads). 593,396 impressions and 437 clicks for a CTR of .074%.  CPC of 18 cents.  It also turns out that 34% of the people who visited this site clicked on at least one of the links so that means people are going to the merchant which is good.

You can see a heatmap of where people clicked on the site here:

It turned out that most clicks (21%) were on the “I don’t want to read, just take me to the jerseys!” link near the top of the page. That was going to another site of mine but I decided to send it straight to the merchant and see what happens. 

So far the facebook traffic has resulted in zero sales. At least this was only a $70 lesson or so. 

What I learned:

1. People don’t really care to read, they just want to buy when it comes to something like this. I think that is why that “I don’t want to read” link was the most clicked on. Maybe I need to try some links like this on some other sites and see how they convert and how the clicks shake out.
2. People don’t want to order a jersey today that won’t ship for at least a week to ten days. I will probably shut down the traffic until the jerseys are actually ready for sale.

Test #3: Stephen Strasburg Jerseys

Once again, I decided to take a hot market and build a site around it.  When Stephen Strasburg debuted a few weeks back I set up http://www.stephenstrasburgjerseys.com.  This is a more complete site than the other two and I spent quite a bit more time on it so I think it looks pretty decent.

Anyway, I got the site up and running, worked a bit of magic, and within a couple days I ranked #1 for “Stephen Strasburg jerseys” on Google. In the last couple days it dropped to #2 but that is still good enough for me.

I have been adding content fairly regularly and updating pages when needed. Every few days I try to add in any new products that are out there also and I plan to keep this site updated fairly regularly through the baseball season.

As of today this site has received around 1000 visitors from the search engines and other direct links. That traffic has resulted in 17 sales (I think a 1.7% conversion for a site like this is pretty solid) but the main problem is people aren’t buying jerseys. There has only been one sale on an authentic jersy (retail: $234.99) and most of the sales are for the player t-shirts which are $19.99-$22.99.  So the revenue isn’t anything to blow you away. To date this site has made $52.  But that is only in one month. If it can stay around that for the next few months and then do what it should around Christmas I think it will be worth the time to post an update every week or so. And it gives me a chance to write about baseball so that is a plus.

What did I learn

1. Comparing this site to the Lebron James sites it seems worth it to spend a couple extra hours making it a somewhat “real” site
2. Baseball fans don’t buy jerseys as readily as NFL fans. The shirts are much more popular.
3. I need to find some replica jerseys and feature them more on the site. $99.99 for a replica is probably more attractive than $250 for an authentic.
4. Small, targeted sites like this can work. There are hundreds of players I could do this for. 100 sites making $50 a month? Not too bad. 500 sites pulling in that much? Nice.

So there you have it.  2 somewhat failed experiments and 1 mild success. But I will take what I learned from the failures, apply it, and move forward. I know we all have failures and in most ways I welcome failure because I can learn from them and that will make the successes that much bigger. Also a lot of the failure on these two was just my lack of attention to detail and laziness, two things I can overcome. I didn’t necessarily fail because of a lack of knowledge or anything like that.

And I am not giving up on Lebron James jerseys yet either. In a couple months those sites could be drawing some good traffic and bringing in some pretty good money so eventually I am optimistic I can put them into the success category.

Do you have any similar stories to tell? Did you learn anything from my 1700+ words of rambling? Leave a comment and let me know.