The Aardvark’s Tongue

Over the past few weeks the amount of spam that we have received in our comments has skyrocketed. So much so that in our haste to clean out the thousands of spam comments, we managed to delete all of the good ones as well (so now it appears that nobody has ever commented on anything we have written - wonderful).

While we have Akismet anti-spam installed, it wasn’t working properly.  We kept getting the message that Akismet could not find the server and register the api key. Turns out that we needed to amend our php.ini file and turn fopen on, and open a port to Akismet’s IP address. It was oddly difficult to find this information.

So now we have made the changes, our API key is registered and now all we have to do is sit back and see if this sucker really works.

Today we installed All-in-One-SEO on the blog. Sure, partially because it makes sense if we ever want to achieve some visibility, but also because we like the name of the developer Uberdose
Serious about Search Engine Optimization? Drop by Newfangled.

So, it looks as if things have leveled off. Now 5 weeks in for every un-subscriber there is one new subscriber. Sales are at 4% of the newsletter subscriber base - which is better than anticipated (if only slightly). Web site traffic has also leveled off. There is a peak after every newsletter then it tapers off daily until the next one. It is time to move to new tactics but thankfully nobody’s career is riding on the sales of the book so we can go about changes in our leisure time if necessary.

Faced with the cold hard reality of the actual newsletter - the actual humor from the book - the sickness that is this twisted publication the unsubscribe rate has risen to 3.6%. Does that make us sad? No actually, it’s better than anticipated.

We began with just under 800 friends and acquaintances on the mailing list. We were anticipating an unsubscribe rate of something more like 20 to 25%. Plus we have picked up a few subscribers to the newsletter along the way so we are at 98% of our original numbers.

Book sales are slow (10 books) but hey, the email newsletter is still the only form of marketing, and it has only gone out twice.

So the stats:

• 800 subscribers to start
• 29 people dropped off the list (3.6%)
• 14 new subscribers (2%)
• 10 book sales (one sale for every 100 subscribers)

And we are only 2 weeks in. Not a landslide by any means, but not too shabby either.

Oh, and our bad…on the newsletter we have forgotten to add that it is powered by poMMo (which is awesome). That omission will be remedied in the next mailing.

From the initial newsletter mailing announcing our intentions and inviting people to unsubscribe we have had only a 1.4% unsubscribe rate. Very low indeed. Plus we actually picked up a few new subscribers in the process .4% giving us a net 1% unsubscribe.

We will see if we fare as well once people have a chance to read tonight’s newsletter with the actual book content. Here’s hoping.

So the launch of the website, via the newsletter, got off to a herkey-jerkey start today. While I don’t have very many people in my personal database apparently I sent out emails at too brisk a pace for my web-host - so they shut me down. Waaaaat? Lesson learned - spoke to the host and learned the rules. Let’s hope the rest of the campaign is a bit more successful.

Lots of excited emails from friends and acquaintances however. I think we are all looking forward to this experiment.