The Fiverr experiment

Curious to see if a small investment in advertising could net me far more (read: millions, nay billions!) in returns, I decided to take up an offer on Fiver.

Could just $8 (after conversions and fees) really skyrocket my second hand car loving website Driveanotherday.com into the stratosphere?
There was 15 million possible reasons saying maybe..

Yes for the price of a pretty plain toasted Foccacia I asked a guy via cheap job website Fiverr to promote my car website Driveanotherday.com to his social media audience of supposedly 15 million people for one day.
How he managed to get a number that high is anyone's guess (if it's accurate of course, that's a biiiiig number) but at even a lonely 10% of 1% of his supposed audience taking a look at my site would be a net of 15000 hits at a stupidly low cost of 0.00053 cents a hit.
Which is a damn site lot more than what I'm currently getting :D

With this I expected one of two things to happen - either just enough money to cover my outlay with a couple of cents profit (in which I will deem this a success) or it to bomb horribly. And while I had a sneaky suspicion which way these cards would fall (backed up with some other bloggers experiences) I was happy to throw caution to the wind to give this service the benefit of the doubt. It's only $8 after all and a quick experiment in advertising.

THE PROCESS

Find the service on Fiverr, read the terms and conditions, pay via Paypal or another means and then shoot the job details through to the seller. In this case a link with a basic description of what the site was about (which ultimately ended up being the description he used anyway so the easiest five dollar cut and paste he's ever done)

(If I knew he was going to use my description verboten, I would have made it a bit more creative..)

THEN WHAT?

In my case the promoter sent me a link via email so I could monitor how the traffic was er...trafficking. Virtual proof that people were clicking the link and having a look at what I had to offer (which I could do through the Wordpress site but it's nice to have the validation). So it was a case of sitting back, drinking some beer and planning which Lamborghini I was going to kick off my collection with after my e-cred and adverting dollars came flooding in. And while it was great to see the numbers ramping up every hour, I knew that since it was only a one day promotion the numbers would be finite.
And they did ultimately tap out...at 3744.

While I'm no mathematician nor statistician, surely out of a potential of 15 Million, there would be slightly more than just 0.02% who like cars. But before someone confirms that those figures would be correct for my wonderful niche, note that while this was 3744 new visitors that I never had before...nothing actually happened when they arrived nor after they left.

In layman's terms I've advertised my garage sale and had an impressive 3744 people show up but not of them picked up anything I was selling for a closer look and nobody actually bought anything.

Oh dear.

WHAT IT DID DO

-Well it did well and truly beat my best day of visitors on the site. Previous best was 93 in one day so this horde well and truly smashed that with a new record of 1475.
-Made me 6 cents on the first day in adverting fees. Mind you there's been plenty of days previously where I've made 6 cents without paying for advertising, so go figure...
-Made me 17 cents on the second day. Which I could also get if just one of them clicked one of the ads on the site.
-Made a total of 23 cents during the time of my new arrivals.
-Possibly changed a few things in my audience metrics in Analytics (But I can always run reports without those two days to get a better picture of my audiences likes and dislikes)
-Added a couple of skyscrapers to my site stats for the week:

WHAT IT DIDN'T DO

-Incredibly few of my new visitors made it past the main page. They turned up, looked around, didn't click on anything and then left. So I got traffic but it was fairly useless other than boosting up my visitor stats for the day.
-No ad clicks, nothing bought on Amazon.
-No flow on effect after they two big days. Numbers have returned to normal.
-No real return on investment.

SO I'M CALLING IT...

WOULD I USE FIVERR AGAIN?

Sure - he did what I paid him to do which was promote my blog, it's just the numbers felt far short of what I'd be happy with and the result was only a temporary boost in traffic with nothing else coming as part of it. I might re-run this experiment another day with a different service (ie a different seller and not 15 million people on Facebook) but for $8 it was worth taking the punt just to see what happened. (Thank god I didn't purchase any of the add ons!)

DID YOU FIVERR?

Did you do something similar to promote your blog? Did it work? (There was one guy in the comments on the sellers page that said he got traffic of 150K through the guy I was using...I wonder what his page was about?) Or have you found a better way to invite 3744 to your place to hang around longer than a free beer? Let me know!