Marketing Add-on-Con ’09 (What Worked)

Posted by menro on Feb 8, 2010 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

The big difference between producing Add-on-Con 08 vs. 09 was the amount of knowledge I gained from the 08 event. I was able to use this knowledge to help our small team focus on things that would produce the greatest amount of awareness.

The first thing we did differently was integrate more tools for data collection:

1. Eventbrite for ticket sales
2. EventVue’s javascript widget
3. Woopra real time analytics
   1. (Woopra was used to see how SEO and SEM activities were doing in real time, I became addicted.)
   2. Page views
   3. Referrer
   4. Geography
4. Google Analytics
   1. Page views
   2. Bounce rates
   3. Search terms
   4. Referrer

The second thing we did differently was introduce a viral game on the home page that allowed people interested in the conference to promote the event in a fun interactive manner. The game had over 500 unique plays and more than 2500 total plays, which generated 325 unique posts to Twitter.

The things that did not work:

• EventVues Javascript widget
  • I worked with Josh and Rob from EventVue on a new widget they were testing. The widget allowed visitors of Add-on-Con.com to see who else was attending and then offer anyone, in there social network, a discount.
  • The service was getting some clicks, but no ticket sales and I started to get nervous so I turned it off, once off I started getting ticket sales. I turned it on again, sales stopped. Turned it off, reported my findings and Rob and Josh decided to not to turn it back on.
• Event listings:
  • Mashable 28 visits no sales
  • ReadWrite web 32 visits 1 sale
• Ads on LinkedIn generated 0 visits

VC blogs ’08 vs ’09

1. Our favorite VC bloggers were kind enough to write a post in 08 and 09, thank you:
   1. Brad Feld’s blog generated 9 sales in ’08 and 4 sales on 11 referrals in ’09
   2. Fred Wilson’s blog generated 15 sales in 08 and 0 sales on 39 referrals  in ’09
   3. Bijan Sabet’s Blog generated 9 sales in 08 and 1 sale on 5 referrals in ’09

Thank you for sponsoring and or talking about Add-on-Con ’09, it made a big a difference in the success of the ’09 event. The blogs that drove the most traffic in ’09:

1. Techcrunch.com did a great job driving traffic and sales in 08 and 09.
2. Blog.chromium.org / referrals 317
3. Developer.yahoo.com / referrals 237
4. stevesouders.com referrals 84
5. tech-wd.com referrals 74
6. thereister.o.uk referrals 55
7. thenextweb.com referals 30

The biggest surprises on traffic came from these sites or add-ons:

• Developer.yahoo.com
• Getglue.com
• meebo.com

Thanks for paying attention.