Web of Success: 15 Years of KidPub.com

KidPub was on the road with a booth at the NJ State Homeschooling Convention a few weekends ago.  Some people hate trade shows, but I’ve always found them a great way to get feedback from your audience. Back in the day I did many shows as Editor of 73 Magazine, then later on with CUSeeMe Networks, and now with my own publishing company.

Here are a few notes for those who are thinking about doing their first show and might be wondering how to maximize their time.

1. Keep the message simple. Are you introducing a new product? Trying to sell an existing one? Both? Don’t confuse the audience…you have about 15 seconds to capture their attention, and if there’s too much information at your booth, they’ll just walk away. Pick the message that you want to drive home, and build your booth around it.

I violated this rule at the NJ show, and it haunted me for two days. We have two lines of business…books and a membership-driven web site. On the first day I tried to talk about both and ended up confusing people. On the second day I let the visitors drive which they wanted to talk about, which worked better, but I could have avoided the issue entirely by just doing one or the other.

2. People will take just about anything that you hand to them.  If you wait for visitors to come to your booth, you’ll miss about 75% of the attendees. It isn’t rude to walk up to a complete stranger and hand them a brochure at a show…they are there to collect information. Standing around behind your table is much too passive, you must get in front of your booth, hand out information, and literally lead people back to your table.

3. ASK FOR THE SALE. Even professional sales people forget this simple advice. You aren’t going to make a sale unless you ask for it. Create urgency by offering a ’show special’ price, and ask visitors point-blank if they want to purchase RIGHT NOW. Again, it isn’t rude…visitors don’t have a lot of time to spend while you go through a long-winded sales pitch. Show them what you’ve got, tell them the price, and ask for the sale. If they decline, hand them a coupon for the special price that they can redeem later.

4. Save money on booth decorations. Here in Boston, you can spend a couple of hundred dollars on a single 6′ x 2.5′ vinyl banner for the back of your booth. Or, you can go to Vista Print and get the same thing for $25. No one is going to remember what your booth looked like when they leave the show…make it look nice, but don’t spend a fortune on decoration just because you like it.

5. Use the 15-foot rule for signage. For some strange reason, even though people go to trade show vendor areas to look at the booths, they will do everything they can to avoid actually visiting your booth. They’ll avoid eye contact with you, walk out of their way to keep outside your zone…it’s really silly but I see it all the time. Because of this, any important message that you want to be seen should be readable from about 15 feet away. The message should be nonthreatening and make the viewer want to come over to see what you are doing.

6. Wear comfortable shoes. Take some time during your pre-show planning to consider what you’ll need to stay comfortable during the show. If you’re a small business it might just be you manning the booth, so take water, simple snacks, paper towels, and maybe a special treat or two, plus comfy shoes. You’re going to be standing for eight or more hours a day for a couple of days.

7. Take plenty of notes. You’ll have lots of great insights and ideas during the show. You’ll completely forget them if you don’t write them down. Just keep a little notebook under the table and jot them down as they come to you…you can process them once you’re home.

8. LISTEN. This is your chance to do invaluable market research. It’s tempting to want to explain everything about you, your company, your product, the weather, and so on, to every visitor that walks into earshot, but avoid the temptation and just listen. You’ll find out whether people understand what you do, or are confused by your messaging, by listening to their questions. You might even start a conversation with, “What do you think we do here?”

I think that this is one of the biggest reasons to do a show…it gets your company in front of thousands of potential customers in a short period of time, and it allows you to observe how they react to your product.

9. Talk to other vendors. You’ll get to know your immediate neighbors pretty well, but make a specific effort to talk to other vendors at the show, even your competitors. Find out what shows they go to, how they are doing at this show, look for opportunities for cooperative marketing, and get your name out there. Be sure to bring a long a stack of your business cards to hand out to these folks. Follow up with the vendors that interested you after the show, even if it’s just a ‘Nice meeting you’ note.

10. Have fun. Shows can be a lot of fun. Take the time to wander a bit and take it all in.

Good luck at the show, especially if it is your first. You’ll have a great time, meet a lot of nice people who are genuinely interested in what you do, and gain valuable insights into your business!

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Fresh, constantly changing content is the lifeblood of many web sites, but generating content can be challenging. The audience at KidPub are voracious readers of books written for teens and tweens, and we’ve turned to Twitter to help drive traffic to our site.

There are about 150 well-known (to teens at least) authors who regularly use Twitter. We use a simple script developed by Kent Brewster to search Twitter for updates from 100 of these authors and display them on a page called YA Tweets. KidPub readers love it…they can catch the latest news from their favorite authors in what feels like a very intimate way. What did Meg Cabot have for breakfast? What’s Maureen Johnson thinking about as she writes her next book? It’s all there in the tweets. You can see our page in action here.

You can easily apply this technique to your own demographic. What is vitally interesting to your audience? Create a search filter for Twitter that reflects what matters to your readers, and display it on your site. Surround the page with links out to your other content, and you have a self-generating, constantly updating traffic attractor.

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Here’s a chart of recent traffic at KidPub. Keeping in mind that our audience is under the age of 15, what day of the week would you expect those peaks to fall on?

You’d think that we would see a nice little peak on Saturday and Sunday, trailing off as the kids went back to school for the week.

You’d be wrong. The peak traffic day for KidPub is Wednesday, and it’s been that way for years. Our lowest traffic day of the week is Saturday. I’ve never quite figured out why this happens, but you can practically set your clock by it. Is it that homework is lighter in the middle of the week? Are the TV shows less enticing? I’ve asked my members in the past bu haven’t come up with anything conclusive.

Because it’s so regular, I plan around it. I tend to send press releases out on Wednesdays so that visitors from the press will see a very active site. I try to do maintenance tasks and upgrades on weekends when I know that traffic will be lighter. It’s the Rhythm of KidPub.

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I’ve written before about Quantcast and how I believe that they are one of the few services producing reliable market data on website performance. One of the features that they offer is a little graphic showing the mix of users of your site. They don’t name it, but it’s a kind of classification graph that splits your traffic among addicts, regulars, and passers-by.

An addict is someone who visits your site at east once each day. Regulars visit at least once each month, and passers-by drop by once and then never show their face again. Here’s an example from KidPub:

The way to read the information is that fewer than 1% are KidPub addicts and represent 4% of all visits.  Fourty four percent of the traffic is from regulars, who represent 20% of all visits. Just over half of the traffic is generated by passers-by, who make up 80% of all visits.

This is extemely useful information that shows that I need to work on converting passer-by into regulars. These numbers are substantiated by the Google Analytics bounce rate number for the home page of about 70% (in other words, 70% of visitors to the site leave after viewing the front page of the site).

In comparison, here’s what Facebook looks like:

Well over half of their visitors are regulars, which is where I’d like KidPub to be, too. Facebook rival Myspace has a similar pattern. These are sites that are capturing and keeping a community of loyal users. Even though KidPub has a dedicated group of users, we need to do a better job of pulling in the passer-by, helping them see that KidPub can be a fun, engaging place to visit again and again.

Data like this can be invaluable in helping you track and understand your traffic and should be the baseline you use to measure work done in this area.

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Back in August, KidPub was ranked around 400,000 by both Compete and Quantcast. We targeted the 100,000 mark back in November when we started doing serious work on building traffic, mainly through SEO and grass-roots marketing. I just looked at today’s Quantcast number…119,146. Last week was 127K or so. We’re getting closer!

Once we hit the 100K mark the hard work begins…gettting KidPub into the top 50K web sites. I know there are ways to ’spoof’ Alexa to get a high ranking, but Quantcast numbers don’t lie, since they are directly measured.

We’re not getting many conversions yet from the Facebook ads, but the exposure is helping a bit, I think. It’s only been three or four days since the FB campaigns started…it needs more time before I can really analyze the results. We’re still watching click-through rates on several ads to figure out which are the best performers.

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