Getting your product actually seen

We just finally finished our summer-long project, the Micromite Companion minicomputer and after moving a couple dozen units and making sure we had any potential show-stopping issues shaken out, we’ve opened up sales on Tindie.

We’ve had a feature on Hackaday, an Instructable for those who want to build their own, and naturally we’ve used Twitter and forum announcements to get the word out. I’m no fan of Facebook, so I’m really hoping that ISN’T the answer.

We were seen for almost 24 hours on Tindie’s New Products page, but I see we’ve become buried under an avalanche of new PCBs.

Would others care to share their thoughts and perhaps some of their secrets to getting the attention of potential buyers?

Jeff

I think we all ask this question to ourselves all the time. As much as I love Tindie we can attribute very few of our sales to traffic generated by people casually browsing Tindie. In other words you certainly can’t rely on Tindie as your only source of advertising.

We have tried paid ads to larger sites such as reddit and google. We have also been seen on HackADay and have tried the Instructables. I even put our products on ebay just so google would list them in their product ads.

From what I can tell from our stats 99% of our sales come from google old fashion google searches. So in my opinion/experience getting your name out there on all of the niche blogs and having articles written about your product on major sites will ultimately boost your rankings in google and lead to sales.

HackADay is not niche enough IMO. With HaD you’ll see a surge in traffic for a few days and then it’s gone. What you want to see if a steady growth in traffic to your product page. If I go to google and type in Atari Punk Console Kit or True Random Number Generator then I’m almost certainly in the market for a kit and I’m likely ready to buy. If I’m on HaD and I click a link to a product then I’m probably just curious at the time.

I’d actually agree with all of these sentiments. At this point, we have 3k products, and getting noticed is becoming more difficult. We’ve tried to make that easier by posting new products on the Twitter feed. However with so many new products coming on (like you saw today), that becomes an avalanche and people get tired and zone out.

Getting more traction from your own network, and social media can only help.

By and lack of answers, I’d guess that everyone else is also “fighting the good fight”.

Since my first post, I’ve setup a product FACEBOOK page, (Bleh!) and have been working to crack into the Reddit crowd. (tough group sometimes)

Yeah I’ve been fighting that good fight for a couple years now.

Hackaday did help me, very early in the Tindie history, when I launched eeZee Propeller. Otherwise, I don’t get any coverage from them.

I haven’t checked lately but most of my traffic has been from my own already established blog. My popular pages are the ones where I’m providing really useful answers/solutions. I basically advertise on my own site to Tindie. I get some action from Twitter, but I only have 1200 followers and probably most of those don’t care a whit about what I’m selling. Facebook is useless. Google+ is even more useless.

There’s something to be said for building up a following. OpenMV Cam is an example. It’s been in work for awhile and had coverage from several big blogs (HaD and others), I’ve covered it several times on my blog, I’ve tweeted, etc. The interest has grown, we’ve set up a google group, I’m finally making them available for beta testing firmware and advertising on my blog. The interest is a trickle, but we are building up to a funding campaign. Where twitter has worked best so far is when I spend a lot of time on it, engaging with lots of folks, and also tweet numerous times about the same product (OpenMV)

Advertising has never been worth it for my low cost, thin margin stuff. Spend lots of money on Adwords or Reddit and get some clicks, and hardly any purchases. Might work better for higher cost devices like yours.

I’ve contemplating using Instructables as a way to showcase my stuff… but that seems smarmy somehow.

I’ve also thought about contacting various well-read blogs and letting them review the device(s).

@bot_thoughts good ideas - and I agree on Instructables. People that have used Instructables for documentation, and then link to the Tindie page have done well (only a few so far, but looks promising).

I’ll probably include this in the next email newsletter, but this thread also seems like a good place to include it. Here is a graph of our sales since launch in June 2012. Overall the marketplace is very healthy. As we think about the next year, figuring out was for an individual seller to grow their business, is definitely one of the challenges on our plate.

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WOAH! 8-O

Stand back for the holidays. Looks like it is going to be epic! I have noticed a distinct uptick in sales in the last few weeks.

It’s worth noting that there are natural lulls, I think.

And I should’ve also made it more clear that I’ve been fighting the good fight and winning. I’m doing ok. Not ready to quit my day job but as a side gig it’s absolutely awesome.

We too have seen a peak in sales this month.

Thanks to everyone for being transparent for this discussion. I’ve certainly picked up some information from this thread that validates my experience. We are about to start testing Adwords so it’s nice to hear other experience. We have already tried reddit and their CPM of $0.75 is just too high IMO to be worth it for a little guy like us with a very niche product.

Honestly I wouldn’t try Adwords… the people in this thread are your audience and I doubt any of us have ever clicked on a Google ad.

I think the main things to me would be -

• Blogging
• Instructables
• Seeding in forums

It’s ultimately a matter of momentum. If you can get the momentum going, that gets you on to the Featured section, and in front of more natural traffic. The ones that get to the front page, and stay there are ultimately because they are getting sales. As a reminder, the ranking is by ($ earned/page views) / time.

The only reason I’m trying Adwords is because they do allow me to target specific sites. So I’m not leaving it up to chance with a limited keyword campaign. I’ll be targeting all the sites that would typically blog about our types of products. I still don’t have high hopes for conversions to sales but I figure it can’t hurt to spend a little cash.

In the end it’s about building trust.

The theory I have here is that the more people see you the more they feel like they know you. The people who see our ads may not have any use for a Random Number Generator ever in their life. But when it comes time to buy their nephew a holiday gift they may search for a DIY Soldering Kit and stumble across our Atari Punk Console Kit. Hopefully at that time they will think to themselves “I know this ubld.it company and I trust they have quality kits”