"The guy who started the larger of the two events emailed me several hours after I began posting links, and half-jokingly asked for “royalties”. How could I pass that up? I didn’t know what his privileges were as an event administrator, but I told him he would be subsidized if he could leverage the attendees (200,000+ at that point). He agreed[...]"
I see the above as the most important factor in the huge success! It would be interesting to hear if guynamedloren agrees with this.
Generalizing: One should attempt to achieve exclusiveness in the promoting medium.
Hard to say. I didn't do a whole lot to track the results of his efforts, but it definitely didn't hurt.
I do believe, however, the "sharing" resulted in more traffic than the event (once the project started to gain a bit) for the following reasons:
- More eyeballs on "shares", which are posted to news feeds. If we assume that each person has 100 active facebook friends over the course of 48 hours (easily achievable and realistic), and the link was shared almost 4,000 times, that's 400,000 impressions.
- Events are passive. If you don't make an effort to go out of your way to visit the event page, you will never see the photo/description/comments etc, meaning they are basically non-existent for you.
I can see where it would help a ton to have that link up there. Very interesting write up!
Loren, just out of curiosity, would you be able to say how much you promised him for posting the link and removing the other T-Shirt links? ...or if you promised him a set amount/shirt at all. If that is coming up in another write-up, I can be patient. Thanks for sharing!
To be honest, I had absolutely no idea how the shirts would sell so I didn't make any promises or mention a specific number up front. At the time of the initial email (a few hours in) I had sold a handful of shirts.
I ended up giving him $25 and a free shirt, which he gladly accepted. After all, he did only spend a few minutes uploading a photo and adding the link, so for his effort, I think it was plenty. Like I said before, it's hard to quantify how many sales came as a result of his effort. About 8 hours after I started marketing is when things really picked up and went viral, which I think had little to do with the event itself and more to do with so many "shares". The events were a good launchpad, however. FWIW, my profits for this project (after costs of shirts, shipping, paypal fees etc) were in the low 4-figure range over a couple days. Some were estimating I made upwards of $100,000, which is obviously nowhere near accurate. I am ecstatic with how things turned out, considering it only took a few hours to build and I am now covered for 5 months rent (yea, cheap college apartment).
"The guy who started the larger of the two events emailed me several hours after I began posting links, and half-jokingly asked for “royalties”. How could I pass that up? I didn’t know what his privileges were as an event administrator, but I told him he would be subsidized if he could leverage the attendees (200,000+ at that point). He agreed[...]"
I see the above as the most important factor in the huge success! It would be interesting to hear if guynamedloren agrees with this.
Generalizing: One should attempt to achieve exclusiveness in the promoting medium.