Thursday, September 24, 2009

Case Study: Dosh Wallets – Blogger Outreach


Problemo: Dosh Wallets were releasing their second range of wallets but no one knew about it. Online had worked great in the past to build awareness.

Strategy: Get the top male fashion and design sites to write about the new product.

Implementation:
Step 1: Identifying Bloggers
We used Google Blog Search to identify bloggers who had already talked about Modern Designed Wallets (Dosh & competitors). We then used Technorati to find bloggers who were writing on the topic of design and male fashion.

We took this list of thirty potential bloggers and ranked them in terms of importance using Alexa and Technorati. This helped us to clarify who we would offer product to for a review and who we would just inform about the launch.

Step 2: Creating the outreach
We tried to keep the first email to one paragraph. More than a paragraph and the respondent would lose interest. Once we received a response we told them about the product. We also set up an Easter Egg/30% Discount for all the bloggers to tell their readers about. It was hidden in the ‘O’ of Dosh on the website (still live).

Result:
Sales: For the eight weeks that we were involved with the blogger outreach we were able to double the number of online sales of the product.

Traffic: We brought in over 4,000 interested punters from 30+ external linking sites. Including the top International style blogs of Kanye West, Yanko Design, Like Cool and Australian blogs Lost at E Minor and Gizmodo.

SEO: We were also able to get their site to number one in the search results from the strength of all the in-links that we provided through these sites.

Learnings:
Just go for the big boys
When we hit the big blogs we noticed that about four or five other blogs would follow suit and write about the wallets. Which suggests you only need to target the ones at the top to have the biggest effect.

Straight to the point
Our initial email started out with three paragraphs of copy we ended up writing just one paragraph. You also need a direct call to action in the subject header.

6 comments:

Andrew McMillen said...

Awesome post Julian. Very informative and succinct. Thanks!

Matt Burgess said...

Hi Julian,
When you say the SEO benefit was getting them ranking top of the SERPs, for what terms are we talking here? For their brand name, or for more abstract terms?
Thanks,
Matt

Holly@Vivid said...

Really useful, thank you :-)

Simon T Small said...

Hey Julian,

Great post, any chance you can share the subject heading of the email with us?

Nathan Bush said...
This post has been removed by the author.
Nathan Bush said...

Nice work mate - love me a good case study. What were the main conversation points around the product? Was it cool, functional, new? Was this what the client hoped bloggers would talk about?

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