Feedback please on my "Mini-Muse!"

[gaberoonie]

Hi everyone! My first post here. I found the book a month ago and I knew it was for me. Luckily 90% of the "elimination" was possible instantly because of my unusual work situation (work from home anyway). I'll spare you my life story this time :-D but I wanted to get feedback on my first muse. I'm planning 3. The first is short term and the goal is to generate fairly immediate cashflow. Nothing over the top, but something modest and consistent. I'll describe it here and I'd like feedback and ideas. I have a "team" of people on this including volunteers.

Here is the site: http://www.lvlupwow.com

Some points:

*The URL is right. You're correct to question it, but it's insider jargon known VERY well by warcraft gamers. It's very well researched and we went through 3 domain names before settling on this.
*Speaking of which, there is a lot of "gamerspeak" here. I personally don't play the game, but I trust my sources who are gamers and have verified everything.
*The market here is "discerning" players who are looking to level up fast and are willing to part with some cash to learn how, but do their "homework" before buying.
*The goal is for 10% of visitors to the site to decide to purchase a leveling guide within 90 seconds of reading a review.

I've outsourced SEO campaigns and I'm doing onpage optimization myself according to the feedback I get.

Thoughts please! :-D

[gaberoonie]

rawr! bunch of peeks but no critiques? :(

feedback pleeeez! :D

[Frank]

I'm not your demographic so my critique is limited to the site itself.

I like the site presentation overall. However, it is pretty hard to read with all the dim writing and dark colors. You can have the greatest copy but if no one can read it you're wasting your time.

[DaveinHackensack]

The Atlantic has a blogger named Ta-Nehisi Coates (http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/) who is a big WoW player. Also, every weekday, he posts an open thread where you can leave whatever comment you want on his site. Go there Monday and post a description of your site and a link to it, and ask for feedback. Or e-mail TNC directly.

Good luck.

[edo]

Cool. I like how you incorporate keywords in your blog post. I noticed your latest post, polling for the fastest class. It would be a good idea to link a twitter account to your blog. For instance, "which is the fastest characters to level in wow? post your reply at <website>"

[gaberoonie]

Thank you for the feedback!!! We do have a twitter account. How would I go about "linking" this?

Thanks again and please anyone else who has any feedback at all, please help! This is my very first effort at this and I consider this a test case before launching at least two way more ambitious muses.

[gaberoonie]

Oh, scratch my last question. I just realiized it was a dumb one! All you meant to do was to tweet the question and link to the blog... will do!

Thanx again pals :-D

[Sukie]

10% is kind of a high conversion rate, I think. Tim mentions in the book the average is 1-3%.

I'm no expert, of course, but definitely track your numbers and find out if 10% is truly reasonable.

[liam75005]

The conversion rate goal is not necessarily unrealistic. It depends how targeted is your traffic. On my muse website I averaged a 17% conversion rate for 2 weeks and I am still consistent with it.

It really depends how well you manage to get targeted traffic and how well your product responds to a need of the market.

About the webppage I like the design but I couldn't tell which product was sold, is it an affiliate webpage ?

[gaberoonie]

Thanks so much for the replies!!!

Re: Product being sold: "Warcraft Leveling Guide." http://www.lvlupwow.com/zygor Premise here is that Warcraft players shell out $15/month anyway to play the game so they are used to spending $$ online and don't mind paying a little more to improve their game. Selling this as affiliate. How did I come up with this idea? Intensive market research. All I knew was I wanted to sell something related to 3D interactive environments, this is what I arrived at by doing my homework (and subsequently collaborating with huge WoW fans).

Re: Conversion rate. I aimed for 10% because frankly that is what I got in my first week of sales.

Here's my latest quandry:

No major changes to the site aside from additional posting, promotions, and aesthetic improvements (readability and matching the look/feel of the game).

BUT....

Sales ground to a complete halt even as traffic/clicks went through the roof. Literally, I'm getting 10 times as much traffic and clicks on the affiliate links, but absolutely zero sales. Not even any order form impressions.

I'm totally stumped. My only theory is that either:

1) Sales of digital goods tend to drop off around XMas time

or

2) I've made a serious mistake along the way, and lost my target market. Could have been on-page or off-page, or both.

Any troubleshooting tips?

[kamakiri]

Your goal of 10% is way out of line. On a very good month you can expect less than 2%. You are talking about 'clicks' that really means nothing to us. Where are they coming from? Are they coming from a PPC campaign with the words "wow guide", "power leveling", "pwn mobs", or what ever you are using?

Not to be harsh, but your blog posts suck. You aren't offering anything informative. You must know of Tobold's blog. He has an awesome MMORPG blog. Gamers are smart, and have seen a thousand wow gold selling sites with the same content and the exact same tag on every post. If you are tagging every post with "wow level up" it becomes meaningless.

Was there a lot of thought in this post:
i recomend going to either Loch Modan, Wetlands, or Redridge Mountains to kill some beasts. They also got some fun elite quests that take like 1hr and 30min at redridge mountains so i recomend going there the most.Nope. Stuff like this drives people away from your site. Meaningless gibberish. Kill some beasts. Duh! Do some quests. Duh! Gamers who read that inane stuff will not come back. The expect that your posts are representative of the book, and that kind of meaningless useless information makes them think the book is full of it. (also, try using spell check, it really kills your credibility misspelling every day words, 'recomend' is not 133t 5p34k)

Now in to the idea. The sheer volume of wow and other MMORPG e-books out there proves that there is a market for them. It is a very fickle market though. Those books tend to be up on bit torrent file sharing sites within minutes of being written. The only things that counts is content, and that is being upgraded nearly daily. Last year's power lvling book is more useful as a paperweight than a useful tool to level your 'toon.

It is a labor intensive muse. You have to constantly come up with good information and revisions. Good job with getting it up, but be assured, you have a challenge if you keep up with it.

[gaberoonie]

To clarify, my questions:

1) Is it possible that sales of digital goods sharply decline just prior to xmas?

2) How can I troubleshoot my strategy to figure out why sales declined from 10% to 0% literally overnight?

In response to the above poster, not to get in a debate but:

*10% conversion and more IS possible. In fact, I've pulled it off before, with the very site that is the topic of this thread. The entrepreneur in me won't take no for an answer on that one :p

*As for the posts "sucking," I certainly can't argue with you in the case of many of the posts on this site. Fact is, they're written by real gamers, and they elicit responses from real gamers. (That said, the bloggers HAVE written some higher quality posts which I think they deserve credit for.) I'd say that gamers with the sophistication you describe are NOT are target market.

I know that some gamers are very sophisticated and discerning. Plenty of them frankly are not, and are willing to engage in conversation with other gamers without regards to spell check use. As you can probably tell from my writing here, I'm not part of this site's demographic. It's most likely that the sophisticated gamers you talk about would have no interest in leveling guides. I've done my "homework."

[kamakiri]

I think you are missing my point entirely. Looking over your 'blog' again there are barely any comments. My estimate would be 20-30 hits a day? Probably that ball park.

Compare your site to the multitude of better wow blogs out there. The now defunct woweconomist.com for example. You can google for others.

making excuses that the posts were written by gamers is no reason not to use spell check. Your argument just doesn't fly. Garbage in - garbage out is the old saying. 5 Minutes of proof reading would solve that problem. It is low hanging fruit. Stop making excuses and just do it!

10% Conversion is not sustainable. You proved nothing. Calculate the sales rate over the life of the blog. Looks much worse doesn't it? Stop and listen to a few suggestions before getting your hopes set on an unattainable goal. Tim tells you this, I tell you this, and googling your question will give the same answers. We all want to think we are special cases, but sadly we aren't.

Your idea that the less discerning gamers don't buy books is also flawed. It is exactly those who are always looking to achieve the maximum efficiency in training their stats. Whatever homework you did, wasn't enough. You can debate if you like, but a better stance would be to read what I wrote, and actually make some positive changes. Either the reason for your lack of sales are the clear and logical ones that I mention, or they are mystery rules that allow you to sustain 10% conversions and make your customers happy with shoddy writing.

[gaberoonie]

Kamakiri,

Thanks for your responses. Know that I've passed these on to the bloggers and am using them to troubleshoot.

Re: "Compare your site to the multitude of better wow blogs out there. The now defunct woweconomist.com for example. You can google for others."

Check. We've done this. Hundreds of sites. This includes the multitude of far WORSE blogs. We've settled on the tone and approach we're taking for this one and it's a solid niche.

Re: Spell check. We took several days reading a "multitude" of forums and blogs. The language, slang, acronyms, and yes, misspellings, were characteristics of many blogs. Allowing this lent a feel of authenticity. My next muse (which I'll post here) is VERY different from this one; the grammar and spelling must be impeccable.

Just to be clear also, this blog is NOT designed to attract repeat visits or regular readers. Our goal is to make that conversion in one visit. We are targeting people who have decided to buy a guide and just want to read one review before deciding.

We are not directly "selling" the product, so this is not a pitch page. The amateurish (and I say that proudly because that was the intent) posts are recommendations from "fellow gamers," that's why they are not written in the style. Authenticity is our goal (which may make it inauthentic, but I think "real gamers" as the bloggers was the right way to go).

Re: conversion rate. Ironic that you invoke Tim when encouraging me to lower my sights :p The world might be divided into those who believe and who don't believe in double-digit conversion rates, apparently we're in opposite camps. Time will tell, perhaps you're right in my case and I can only expect 2% or less. But more is definitely possible.

Again, thank you for your feedback. Really. I think you're wrong about the niche we've chosen, and I base this not on gut feeling but on hard data. But there's a lot of gold in what you say. It's not that I'm not listening, I've listened and heeded everyone on this forum including your posts. I've forwarded your messages on to the bloggers. Understandably they are a bit insulted, but life's tough, I tell them. If you're serious, you need to be willing to change direction when things get rough.

[winvest]

I would suggest using a wordpress template that is better designed. The one you are using looks dated Circa (1999) There are tons of free templates out there that are perfect for your muse. here's a link to some free wordpress themes. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/

[gaberoonie]

Thanks!

1999? Really? I knew it was outdated, but I thought more like 2002-3 :-D

That's now added to my to-do list.

[winvest]

No problem. good luck!!!