Experiment: Mayan+Twitter=Profit?

[DennisD]

I was struck with inspiration, and I designed a T-Shirt just now in photoshop, and uploaded it to my Zazzle store.



Tomorrow's the ideal time to promote this T-Shirt, and so I'm going to do it via social networks starting at midnight (10 mins). Twitter gave me $100 in free ad credits, and I've only used about $1.50 from it. I'm going to use $80 worth of ad credits to promote this tweet: https://twitter.com/DennisDuty/status/281985352858759168 (EDIT: I decided to reduce this to $40, and use the $40 for the next day, which would be a big day for this 'i survived' type deal.)

I survived the Mayan Apocalypse and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt! I survived the Mayan Apocalypse Shirt from Zazzle.com RT if you survived!

The tweet is designed to have some sort of viral element to it "RT if you survived" as a reason to share. Additionally the T-Shirt by itself I think is pretty funny and warrants sharing by itself. I will only have to pay for the initial clicks by each person. Hopefully it will spread and people will retweet by themselves. Ideally this would be tweeted out by my CherryCards twitter account, but the ad credits are for @DennisDuty.

I used a free font for the Mayan symbols along the top and bottom. I purchased a package of 8 photoshop-styles to stylize the text ($5). I only used one of the text styles and get to use it in future video and graphical work. I designed, exported, and uploaded the shirt myself. Originally this looked a LOT cooler and was in black, but there were some issues with the glow not rendering properly on the shirt so I canned it and switched it to white.

The shirt costs the customer $25. I make a $7.55 royalty off of each shirt. I also get a 15% affiliate commission (I'm using my own affiliate code) plus a volume bonus if I sell enough. I'm mentally rounding the value of each sale to $10. If I can sell 9 shirts from this I profit $5 (assuming I count the free twitter credits as actual 'expenses')

If I can sell 209 units I make $2005. This is my goal, but I'd really like to sell the 9 to break even. Hopefully enough people will be caught in the craze that I will sell some. There are other gag T-shirts out there but they look cheap (somebody used zazzle/cafepresses default font and put no work into unique design).

I'll report back and let you know how it goes.

Edit: Oh yes, if you'd like to help don't hesitate to RT it It might cloud the experiment... but asking contacts for a RT is a regular practice in SMM. https://twitter.com/DennisDuty/status/281985352858759168

 

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[Likwid24]

Awesome. Good Luck. You never know. I remember the guy who made a nice chunk of change when they killed Bin Laden. I think it was 100k in 3 days.

 

[Newbie]

Wow. Great idea!

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk 2

 

[DennisD]

So last night, about 30 minutes into it, I see that I've already spent $10. I decide to pause the ad campaign until this morning.

I didn't want to waste any clicks until people actually DID feel like survivors.

I can already see some heavy flaws with twitter advertising. I will probably avoid this form of advertising until it's a bit more refined.. it's difficult for me to see an application for it.

It's SO untargeted and I can't see it being very profitable for very many people. You can't target demographics, for instance. Twitter randomly throws your tweet out there and if somebody clicks on it out of curiosity you pay. I can't see me using this for my marketing consulting, for instance. I'd really want to target business owners within a certain geographical location, and I'd end up targeting everybody and paying $0.50-$2 for every curiosity click I got.

I'm doing the math here.. and profiting using twitter really depends on your ability to generate viral content. If I'm focusing on just clicks here (and not retweets) with a budget of $80 and each click costing me around 50 cents... I'm only doing to get around 180 clicks. To break even with these shirts, I need a 5.6% conversion rate. Pretty high for a novelty shirt.

However if this thing takes off and is retweeted like I planned... I won't need such a high conversion rate.

 

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[johnp]

Cool idea, seems like a nice way to make some extra cash. We had a tornado where I am back in 1997 and I still see people wearing shirts "I survived the tornado of '97 haha.

It's SO untargeted and I can't see it being very profitable for very many people. You can't target demographics, for instance.

This is why I am avoiding Twitter Ads. It's way too untargeted. I would much rather use Google, Bing, Facebook, and Linkedin to create ads.

This is one area where twitter really screwed up ( I think). If I remember correctly, then twitter does not really make any attempt to collect major details of its users such as interests, skills, degree levels, college majors if users attended school, etc.. I know that they collect birthday and location. In my opinion, it's all about the data. The more data you collect the more you know about your users and the more revenue streams you can open up.

But then again, maybe twitter is going to take a different approach. It could just be v.1 of their ad platform. I think it would be interesting if they create demographics based on the hashtags that people tweet, although that approach will probably be way too inaccurate. Or they could stream ads to the hashtags to make the ads more accurate. Idk, I guess they have a lot of directions to go in. But yea, I can't see any reason (other than free money) to use Twitter for their PPC ads or w/e they call it.

 

[cmckay]

SNAP! Great idea on the shirt, and actioned the idea too,...Bravo! Seems like you're pretty tuned in with regards to putting pieces together.

 

[Toao]

I like the idea Good luck with it.

 

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[cdrag]

very cool idea - try to add hashtags to the tweet as well

 

[DennisD]

So I spent the first $40 and only got 2 retweets. I can tell this isn't going to take off. The clicks are just too expensive unless you go viral from it. This doesn't mean I'm done with twitter advertising just yet.. it means I need to figure out the best way to leverage it.



The fact that I'm both selling a product AND asking for a retweet in what everybody clearly sees as a SPONSORED ad is BS. They can tell I'm just some tool trying to be 'hip' to make money.

I need to follow the process of how I'd get something to go viral WITHOUT worrying about selling a product.

Because my window of opportunity is closed, I'm going to drop the T-Shirt idea and instead create a video: "KFC's Offensive Television Ad".

I'm going to review a recent blunder made by KFC. I will fill the thing with easy to digest jokes, and as the marketing expert examine some real opportunities that exist. I think something like this is a LOT less 'pitchy' and a lot more likely to go viral. The money will come back around to me not in immediate direct sales... but through exposure and subscribers. Subscribers that will hopefully promote me for FREE the next time I release a similar video.

I've already recorded the VO. I should be done with animation by tomorrow.

 

[Stu_Hefner]

Twitter is hopeless for advertising for the purpose of sales. Mostof thr traffic is from mobile phones, and I dont know if the conversion from those devices lead to sales (i assume not). It might generate some leads if the site is mobile optimized.

Great idea though, I can see it going viral if the right people promote it. I use twitter for personal uses, and I know that most business type advertising and spam just goes unnoticed people are just there to write attention seeking teeets, look popular and read what other popular people are writing. Had I seen this earlier I wouldve passed ig on to some big 50k/100k follower accounts

 

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[DennisD]

Ok.. now I will see if I can use twitter to popularize a new video I'm releasing. I have like 50 bucks in twitter ad credit remaining, I will spend it on promoting this tweet.

"REALLY?! KFCs Offensive TV Ad Campaign: http://youtu.be/bvaxNvtrGes"

This is the video I created for it:
[video=youtube_share;bvaxNvtrGes]http://youtu.be/bvaxNvtrGes[/video]

(I'll be talking more about the video itself on my other thread: My Entrepreneur Cartoons I'll just be discussing the effects of my twitter campaign here.)

I'll let you know how it goes! Hopefully I can gain some youtube subscribers, and some twitter followers. If you want to play along at home, feel free to retweet this tweet: https://twitter.com/DennisDuty/status/287001500067188736

 

[infinitus]

I LOVE this fun entrepreneurial experiment type of thinking, and want to see more

why not go on fiverr and pay some hot girls to wear it or find something you could turn viral and keep going with