My dads new web site WillysJeep.com Launches Today

Some of our new graphics, logos and photos for you to view are inserted into this post.

2010-01-28
22:42:51

Hello;

For decades my dad’s  hobby has been collecting and restoring old Willys Jeeps.  He has had a small web site for the jeeps on and off for the past 10 years or so.  Nothing very fancy; Just a small store and at times a small message board.  A little under 3 weeks ago we were talking and we decided to make the site into something useful and fun.  It was a much larger project than my dad envisioned. 
For the last couple weeks I have been putting very much of my time and efforts into getting his new jeep site forum ready and launching it.  It has challenged my technical and marketing skills. It has been draining some days, but has gone well . We officially opened the site today.

Only a few “gliches” – Due to our programmer being unable to complete the code to implement the proper design on time, we didn’t promote the site as much as we otherwise would have.  The site got opened today, with a functional, but less than ideal design.  The resolution to that is underway, and we plan to have the new design in place next week.

I keep learning more and more, and things change so quickly that the things you knew how to do 5 years ago for the web and Internet Marketing are now obsolete.  Here is a quick run down of what My dad and I did so far to promote his new site:

1. Starting about 12 days ago, I put up an http://www.aweber.com form on the site to capture email addresses. I tested several variations of the form and several presentation methods. This was my Pre-launch list. I ened up with about 30 people on this list. I sent out a message to this list at about 5:00 this evening.

2. About 1 week ago, I wrote several blog entries and mentioned the new Jeep Willys site, creating some back links that help the site gain exposure in search engines.  I also spent several hours building some back links with blog commenting.

3. My dad spend several hours directly contacting other business in the industry and speaking to them about our new site.

4. I spent about $12 on adwords. I had not used adwords for quite some time, so I didn’t feel it was worth investing that much in adwords until I had more time to get up to speed and optimize my campaigns. I had some members sign up from the adwords campaign, but my return / conversion wasn’t looking great so I was hesitant to keep going.

5. Very basic, very limited on page SEO, much work still needs to be done here.

7. Make several posts to facebook and several tweets went out.

Over the course of the past 2 weeks we had about 30 people directly sign up for the site.

Here were the results at the end of the launch day today:

I saw a good consistent traffic flow all day. Still have a few hours left to the day, but at this point we have had right about 200 unique visitors to the site today, a site that has only been online just over two weeks.

When looking at traffic analysis, I found we had a nice surprise, the site www.ewillys.com wrote a very nice blog post announcing our launch day.  They sent us almost 100 visitors today.

Over 30 people so far have registered for the site today alone. People have started posting and creating material on the site. Multiple people uploaded photos and started user photo galleries.

Considering the limited amount of marketing that I did, I am quite impressed with our launch day. Getting users to sign up and become engaged in your site is not as easy as one would think. We are also going after a very targeted market here. So in a way that makes it easier, because it is a niche market. However, it means that we have to test, test, test and make sure we get the marketing message just right for that target audience (we have to make sure we really understand what it is they want, and how they want to hear it).

What did I learn from a marketing standpoint?:

1. Creating relationships with bloggers and people who are interested in what you’re doing is a great investment. They can provide valuable back links and directly send lots of traffic to your site.

2. SEO is vital unless you have a massive budget. Remember , even with all the tricks in the book, SEO still takes time, you could wait to for months to see your pages in search engines. Most of the time this happens  much faster, but if you’re in a competitive keyword, your SERP may be very far down on the list for a long time.

3. One on one contacts with people you know can be very valuable or they can be nothing;  it all depends on the person. You just have to give it a shot. Many will be a utter waste of time; in one ear out the other. However, all it takes in that one out of 50 calls to make it all pay off.  A phone call will often greatly improve your odds of starting a meaningful relationship.

4. It is harder than you think to get people to even give up an email address. Targeted audience, great high value offer (had a premium account I offered with many benefits). It was still harder to convert people than I expected. I ended up seeing about a 20% conversion today. (1 in 5 people that visited today created an account).

Once people started to see activity on the site, I think we started to build some social proof, and that goes a very very long way. I have a definite feeling that it will get easier and easier from here on out.  We are doing our very very best make our core (initial) group of users into raving fans. Lots of personal attention, making us very available via, email chat and phone. Special promotions, free physical items shipped to them, etc. We want this core group of members to become raving fans.

So while I am no expert at launching a site, I am pleased with today’s results.  Once our design is ready from the new programmer next week, my dad and I will promote the site more aggressively.

Thanks for taking the time to listen.  The address of the site is http://www.willysjeep.com if your interested in taking a look.

Jamie Dolan

A small gallery of additional photos from the project:

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