Today I was looking over Adwords and noticed I have received a major increase(10x) in traffic in February to Muse 1’s micro site. Google Analytics has not shown ANY visits to the site which is making me wonder if it is working as it says it is. I have a support ticket into Google to see what they have to say about the fact that Adwords has sent around 50+ visitors, yet Analytics says I have received but 6 (of which 6 of this were me prior to setting up Adwords).
Despite this possible error, I went ahead and decreased my price by about 13% to see if that will drum up some “orders”. I do not have any reason to believe that Analytics is missing all my traffic. Plus users are given an option to submit their info when prompted that I am out of stock and I have received no emails which again leads me to believe the market potential is just not there as I had hoped.
UPDATE: I discovered that the Google Analytics JS code was not even on the micro site. Between the copying and pasting of creating new pages I must have accidentally deleted it! What threw me off what Google’s indicator in Analytics was indicating that it was functioning and tracking traffic. We shall see what our traffic report says by the end of today!
~Nathan Hein
Since my last post I was not able to complete a marketing plan for Muse 2. I was bogged down all weekend with home work, ILR, social commitments, and I even had to go into my full time job on Sunday. At his point I feel lucky I have made it to Monday. Muse 1, I do not believe I have gotten a single inquiry on the purchase page of the micro site. I will likely need to make some tweaks to the site and see if I can drive more(any) business. Otherwise at this point it looks like the retail offerings of Muse 1 are not happening.
This Thursday Amy and I are heading to Silverthorne, Colorado to snowboard with our friends Adam & Julie. This has increased the “to-do” list for the past week as there is a lot of little things to get done before we leave. At my full time job, we are doing midyear reviews which have to be done before I leave Wednesday. With about 20 hours of work left and probably no more than 8 hours of time to complete the work, I am in a bit of a bind. So it will be some late nights at work for me over the next few days leading up to Colorado.
The weekend away should help refresh me and get me back in the groove. The past week I have just been feeling tired, and very behind on work.
~Nathan Hein
As I mentioned yesterday Muse 1 does not appear to being doing so well on traffic. My plan is too let it do its thing for at least 2 weeks before making and adjustments to the site.
Thanks to my key learnings so far with Muse 1, I realized last night that I am trying to plan too much of Muse 2 out prior to testing the market. I am hashing out the details of operating on the idea before identify if there is even a market opportunity. So this weekend I will be putting together a 1 page marketing plan, and in the next 2 weeks get the micro site up and running. My goal is to get this micro site up faster than Muse 1’s site, as I need to make this a faster process.
Oh and I even have some potential ideas for muse 3, and muse 4. It is my intent at this point to get good at this whole game of find the niche market.
~Nathan Hein
With the micro site for Muse 1 up and running I have not been doing too much in regards to my muses. I have been watching Adwords to see how the muse is performing, but I do not believe there is really much to see. Since Day 13 when I finished setting up the site and Adwords, I have created 2 additional ads that Adwords will rotate out with the first one. This will allow me to test what headlines, text drives the most click throughs.
In the world of Port Eighty, Inc., a colleague of mine and I have been working on closing a very large deal with a property management group. The group is looking to build out an online application for managing their properties. My colleague and I have been working on drafting a proposal to present the the group in an effort to close on the the sale.
I am also working on one of my first “collection” cases with Port Eighty, Inc. Seems a design firm I did work for a year ago only wanted to pay have their bill in 2009, and then banking on my lenience wait until 2010 to declare that they do not intend to pay the remaining bill. The collections process is going well, but is time consuming. At this point it looks like they are planning to pay, though I am skeptical of whether it will be in full.
~Nathan Hein
