How My Side Project Generated Sales and 66,000 Unique Vistors in 1 Month

(Originally published on March 31, 2012)

At the end of February, I launched a side project, Loft Resumes, with a friend of mine, Emory Cash. Our tagline is “Style-Conscious Resumes for the Standout Job Seeker.” As you can tell from the Google Analytics screenshot below, from the time that we first tweeted about it on February 21st to mid-day March 31st, we’ve received over 81,000 visits (over 66,000 of them uniques,) and over 209,000 page views. We’re pleased. We’re even more pleased that it’s generated enough sales that we’re working like crazy every day to fulfill them.

Here’s how we’ve gotten our traffic and where our sales have come from:

1st Week after Launch:

I work out of CoWork Greenville, an incredibly supportive environment of ridiculously talented web folks. They helped by tweeting about our launch on the Tuesday of our first week. Some folks in the office have a good many influential followers, so that helped. I also submitted our site to a good many CSS design awards sites. Because of the great job that Emory did on designing the site, it was accepted to a bunch of them. So, we had a decent amount of traffic from these two things in the first week but we didn’t see a single sale so I was getting a little worried.

2nd Week after Launch:

The previous week, I had emailed a writer at Fast Company Design that wrote about one of my other businesses, Bellstrike. She published her article on Monday of the second week after our launch. We saw a lot of traffic from that article and a lot of orders (our biggest (non-Fab.com) day yet is still the day after that article — we sold 8. A lot of people tweeted and Facebook-ed about us from that article. The comments on the blog post were kind of brutal (and continue to be on some other blogs.) That’s when we realized this business was kind of polarizing — people either love it or hate it. We also launched a Google Adwords PPC campaign this week. To date, it’s produced some sales but it’s costed us more than the revenue it has brought in so we’ll evaluate that as time moves on.

3rd Week after Launch:

The week before, I spent a day reaching out to the bloggers that showed up on the first page of Google search results for the term “creative resumes.” The majority of them agreed to write about it. I also provided the incentive of offering a giveaway for a few free resumes to their readers. I think that helped. This sustained our traffic (though not in huge amounts) until things really picked up. Orders leveled off but were still coming in steady every day.

4th Week after Launch:

This week was more of the same. Some of the people that I contacted about blog posts were posting this week. It kept our traffic steady and orders coming in everyday.

5th Week after Launch:

In our second week after launch, I contacted Fab.com. They ended up wanting to run a sale. That sale hit on a Sunday — the start of our fifth week. The sale lasted for 72 hours, and while it didn’t sell out, we still sold more resumes through Fab than we had sold in total up to that point. There were some great residual effects from the Fab sale too. A lot of bloggers saw it on Fab and ended up writing about it. We got a lot of traffic from A Cup of Jo, Thrillist, Swiss-Miss, and others. That’s what generated the big spike in traffic.

The Future

Our sales have definitetely been up after the Fab sale and the PR hit. We’ve seen a good bit of traffic from people pinning our resume designs on Pinterest and also from people sharing us on Facebook. However we see a few challenges ahead:

1) Maintaining regular PR. We feel like we’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to contacting career advice bloggers, design bloggers, and other traditional journalistic outlets. We’ll be reaching out to more bloggers in the future.

2) Finding a source for regular sales leads. We’ve developed a referral system that anyone can use but we’re especially interested in partnering with resume writers. We figure that they’ve got a captive audience who are generally our primary target audience and are obviously willing to pay for resume services. Hopefully we’ll be able to develop relationships with resume writers and career counselors that can generate consistent referrals.

3) Trying out additional sales channels. Maybe Google Adwords will end up working out for us and maybe it won’t. We’re also considering creating a 30–60 second TV commercial and testing it on Google TV Ads. Maybe we’ll try some display ads on targeted sites. We’ve got some other things we’re thinking about but we’re not sure.

As with any business, we’d love to figure out a system to spend $X in promotional costs and get $Y in sales, where Y>(X + our other costs). Right now the only form of promotion that’s working for us is free or nearly free. That’s great, but it’s also unpredictable.

If any of you out there have any suggestions for us, please let me know!

Originally published at blog.doddcaldwell.com.