Bootstrapping Laserfit Clothing

Weird Web Traffic

This one has got me baffled. Over the Christmas period the web traffic to the Laserfit website would spike incredibly over a 4-5 day period. This traffic was coming from websites like myspace and various chat/dating websites located in either the USA or Europe.

I was intrigued by this but could not track back what could be triggering this avalanche as the links would try to get me to join. Now if it had been just a small blip my curiosity would not have got the better of me, but the traffic would move from an average of 150 unique visitors a day to over 1,000 and then taper off over the next few days.

For the life of me I still can't think of what on the Laserfit site would trigger someone to put a link on one of these sites, and then whats more for readers to want to follow that link.

It has now happened about 4 times from different chat sites. I can't see that it is doing any harm but my curiosity is still peaked???

Back to Normal - After a Quiet Time

Well it has been a while since the last post. What we have learned in that time is that the suit business goes really, really quiet from November until February. I guess that this is to be expected as people are in holiday mode and here in Australia we are in the middle of summer.

Ultimate Service is our Goal

My suit arrived today and I am very happy with it.
Thank you for your excellent service.

best wishes Terry

Positive Feedback

The suit is terrific. Very well made and the fabric is great. I will certainly recommend your company to my colleagues and family. Eventually I'll buy another suit for myself.

Tony R

Outback Customers

G'day Alex & Team,

I 'd like to thank you and your team for a great fitting and stylish suit.

I was apprehensive at first, with online measuring and ordering.

I didn't think we could convey the necessary measurements accurately enough to you,  to produce a quality garment. I needn't  have worried.

Your tailors interpreted my fitting perfectly!

A great job,and I look forward with confidence to placing further orders with you.

Thanks Alex!

Tony

We Aim for Positive Feedback

This firm is very friendly and efficient.
Terry

Awesome suit and great customer service, would recommend.

Tony

Word of Mouth Starts with Happy Customers

FANTASTIC, I have referred these guy's to at least 10 of my contemporaries

Peter

W/E September 25 2005

Had one of our quietest weeks on the site for some time. Don't quite know what to put it down to, but perhaps the football fever gripping the country can be blamed.

Thing that we have done this week include putting our first image ad on the Google network.

This is a variation on one of the campaigns that we intended to do as a postcard drop but postponed.

I noticed that the ad has not yet been served up to any site and am not sure what that means or why it is happening. Have dropped a line to Googles help desk to see if they can shed any news on the problem.

We also started to do some sponsored search on the  Sensis network this week. So we now have representation on all of the major search engines serving Australia.

Now we need to do some serious search engine optimization. I have noticed that we do not rank very highly on the organic search results on many of our key words.

Next week we expect delivery of a number of suits and also the first trial samples of our tailor made shirt program. The fabrics have been sourced and the designs of the cut have been finalized, now all we need to do is to do the quality control run and then it is a matter of running some up to our clients sizes that we have on file to check out the fit profile.

So next week looks like it is going to be busy with back of house duties.

Alex

W/E September 18

The last few weeks have seen increased activity on our site. I decided that we were not getting sufficient clicks from the USA so I decided that I would take them off the Google Adwords campaign and just focus on Australia and New Zealand. I guessed that I would lose at least 40% of the traffic, but what the heck if it was not converting into sales so what...

To my surprise what happened was that since I was not competing for key words in the USA market, the position of our ads increased on the Australian and New Zealand listings.

So what happened is that I did not lose the 40% but less than 20% but what was more important was that the visitors to the eBay store continued to increase.

Check out our graph

I also had a long chat with Alan Stewart from the The Marketers podcast and he gave me some tips on how to structure some of my Google Adwords campaigns a bit better.

I now have six variants of ad on the campaign and I am split testing them to see what works the best.

We have had some great feedback from customers on our suits over the last few weeks and I have started to add them to the testimonial section of the blog.

There are a number of suits in the production pipeline at the moment so business is starting to motor along.

The shirt and cuff link program are looking like they will begin to bear some fruit within the next two months or so. We shall receive our first test samples within the next week. Am looking forward to getting this off the ground.

Alex

More Happy Customers

Yahoo, got the suit, fits like a glove, that's a bit disturbing when I was looking for pants and a jacket? only joking I am so pleased with the results. I have already given the company name and eBay site to about ten of my mates.

Peter