Micro Publishing | 4 Point Font

Catching Up

2010-11-08T23:31:12Z

Traffic and Analytics

We average 4.3 visitors per day. The average time on HopSafari is 3 minutes. The bounce rate is 65%. We average 2.26 pageviews per visit.

Not bad, considering.

Book Sales

Wow, we're in the second week of November and so far two books have sold. The first copy of Crafting Beer with (512) Brewing Company was purchased by a craft brewer I recently met.

One copy of Conquering Your Engineering Internship: Planning, Getting, And Making The Most Of An Internship Or Co-Op was snagged by someone I don't know. I hope he or she will have an awesome internship.

Selling two books in two weeks doesn't add up to much, but it does make me happy. How cool is it that a brewer bought a copy of Crafting Beer? He must really like the photos since he already knows how beer is made.

Tweaks and Improvements

I modified the website for Conquering Your Engineering Internship to look a little cleaner, feature a testimonial, and to add an email list signup (which gives you access to a sample chapter). The site currently has an a-b test running, so you'll see different content depending on chance.

I also cleaned up the main Moving Average Inc. site. I rewrote lots of text and simplified the design. I also removed references to products that I'm going to drop (a collection of scary stories I collected through Mechanical Turk, a book about real estate values written before the bubble burst, and a guide to Quicksilver for the Mac).

Finally, a few Hop Safari tweaks. I made a mailing list for the site. You can sign up at the top of each page. Also, I removed some of the widget clutter I had along the side of every page, and added a testimonial for the Crafting Beer book.

The Future

I learned a few SEO ideas from Dustin Woodard at the Beer Bloggers Conference, so I'll be doing a few tweaks on all my sites to improve my google rankings. I also need to work on those other ideas that I haven't gotten to yet...

Thursday of Doom

2010-09-10T15:54:02Z

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.

Two Days of Hermine

2010-09-09T15:18:42Z

There was lots of water, but no damage from Tropical Storm Hermine's reign at Moving Average Inc. World Headquarters. We saw lots of flooding in Austin, and Barton Springs Pool and a few roads turned into deadly rapids, so we lucked out.

Twitter

HopSafari is up to 9 followers. We're creeping up.

Traffic

HopSafari.com welcomed 3 visitors on Tuesday, and 10 visitors Wednesday. I think that the Hot Sauce Festival video had something to do with that.

Sales

Still 0 sales, so we're flat. I think we need to grow that number.

Personality

Jennie says I need more personality. Hopefully she means I need to show more personality. By thunder, I need to work on that!

Ideas

I'm a little behind on taking action on my ideas. Here are a few that I've done nothing with:

offering prints or posters of gorgeous beer-related stuff
offering training or services around self-publishing
conversion form for an email list
registering as an Amazon author
a video tour of Crafting Beer with (512) Brewing Company

A Long Weekend

2010-09-07T16:15:46Z

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

2010-09-03T15:52:26Z

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) Brewing CompanyCrafting 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

2010-09-01T15:25:37Z

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

2010-08-31T15:50:31Z

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.

Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society

2010-08-30T15:34:58Z

Someone YouTube calls "Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society" has claimed copyright ownership of the music in my (512) Brewing Company Second Anniversary video. In theory, this work is in the public domain. I got it from Musopen, a repository of recordings of compositions in the public domain (both the compositions and recordings are in the public domain, since there is separate copyright for the performance and actual sheet music).

According to Musopen, the music I'm using is Holst's march from Suite No. 1 in E-flat. Holst has been dead for something like 75 years, and the work was published in 1909, which would put the composition is in the public domain. The recording I'm using was supposedly recorded by the United States Marine Band, so it shouldn't be copyright protected.

So, am I accidentally using a copyrighted recording (and Musopen made a mistake about the origins of the music)? Or am I dealing with a copyright troll?

Website Grader

2010-08-28T17:14:15Z

Website Grader

At last year's Business of Software Conference, Dharmesh Shah suggested using his free Website Grader to get feedback on a website. The results are pretty interesting.

First of all, HopSafari scored in the top 12% of all websites they have graded. I can do better!

There was a minor glitch with Website grader. It couldn't find our blog or the RSS feeds for those blogs. I'm not sure if that is my fault or an issue with Website grader.

Some issues with Hop Safari:

Missing image ALT text
no del.icio.us bookmarks
no twitter account associated with the domain
no google buzz account
no conversion form (a form for collecting email addresses)
missing metadata

Things I've fixed so far:

added metadata
started another twitter account
Changed the wording of the page title to have page descriptions before the page name (from Mr. Shah's BoS presentation)

Traffic

Over the weekend I welcomed 4 website visitors on Saturday, none on Sunday. Not great, but Hop Safari is only a few days old.

Events

I volunteered at (512) Brewing Company's second anniversary party this weekend. I took the opportunity to put a proof copy of Crafting Beer with (512) Brewing Company on their T-shirt table with some QR codes for Hop Safari and the book on Amazon. I suspect the event accounted for the 4 website visitors on Saturday.

I didn't work at the t-shirt table, but the few folks I talked to really liked the book. One person wanted to buy the proof copy on the spot, but I declined (until my delivery arrives, it is sadly the only copy I have). I wish the book delivery had arrived on time!

I was hoping that the event would generate tons of hits to HopSafari, but that didn't seem to be the case. Would I have sold some copies if I had some to sell? Probably. Having something for them to take home (a bookmark, bizcard, etc.) might have helped too.

I took some video for the event. Be sure to check it out on the Hop Safari beer blog.

Goodreads

2010-08-27T13:11:24Z

Traffic

HopSafari earned 8 views yesterday, down from 12 views on Wednesday. This represents almost twice the average daily traffic for http://www.movingavg.com over the past year. With all the interesting content I should get from the Great American Beer Festival, I suspect raising traffic levels shouldn't be too difficult.

There are no changes in book sales today. I don't think sales are recorded until a book ships, so that makes sense. No changes in the affiliate clicks either, which I suspect are updated at least on a daily basis.

Goodreads

I requested to join the author's program on Goodreads this morning. The program is free, which seems like a great price. Most of my friends on Goodreads read novels, so I'm not sure if they will have much impact on my numbers. That will be interesting.

I only became aware of the Goodreads author program because Scott Sigler invited me to favorite him on goodreads. Scott is definitely a role model for me -- I've been following his career since he first started offering his readings of Earth Core online for free. His books and his marketing is great.

Unfortunately, I don't write SF horror fiction, so I probably can't just rip off Scott's techniques wholesale. I probably can't give myself a cool title like "future dark overlord". I probably can't even call my readers Junkies. That seems like a terrible injustice. Don't you agree?