KickstarterForum.org

Hi Sal,

I agree with you on the importance of traffic and conversion. I had communicated with one very successful project creator - with several high dollar projects under his belt - about this very matter. He used a PR firm to drive relevant traffic. Additionally, many of his backers are multi KS backers some having backed hundreds of projects. And his projects were very interesting and unique. His conversion rate was 400:1.

I have spoken to others who claim conversion rates varying from 100:1 to 100:5 which is obviously significantly higher than the 400:1 above. All of these figures are hearsay from credible sources. but I tend to believe that 400:1 to be more realistic.

How I would interpret this information is like this:
It takes 400 views for 1 conversion if your project is unique and interesting. The conversion rate is likely much lower for many other projects.

Conversion Rate, Traffic Patterns, Sources of Traffic ... These would be great Poll Questions for the forum.

James

Regarding using a PR firm (which I didn't do), Gamerati is the primary PR company especially for the gaming industry. I have some other products that required an EIC code - an industry code associated with a given publisher to include as part of a products nomenclature for resale. I had to get this code from Gamerati - so I already have an association with them. They contacted me regarding printing maps for one of their customers for an upcoming convention. While on the phone with the rep from Gamerati, I mentioned my Kickstarter, and he offered their PR services asking for 8% if the final backing exceeded $32,000 and 11% if less than that.

While I certainly hope for big funding amounts, realistically, I don't think my project would generate such amounts, really being a small project for a tight marketing niche. I wasn't too eager to part with 8 to 11% of my funding, but it might have proved worthy. At least I was offered the opportunity to use a PR company.

Re: Inflexion

I think we may have spoke to the same person (haha) who communicated a 400:1 conversion rate. I wrote it up here: http://www.crowdcrux.com/kickstarter-su ... -creators/

Agreed that the conversion rates vary.

Re: Michael

You can use link tracking services like Bitly to get an idea of how many people check out your Kickstarter campaign from a given link. This is how I track the effectiveness of my marketing campaigns on CrowdCrux and CrowdfundingPr.org

Yea it can be difficult to take on that kind of cost burden, especially if your margins are already low for the campaign.

inflexionUSA wrote:Hi Louise,

Your work as exemplified in your project was accomplished through studying, learning, artistry ... and looking at the world in a different way. My guess is that very few people on this planet can do what you do. In addition it must qualify as "hard work"

Here is what I think - the future of business requires mastery of social connectivity. This is true as much for small business as for large. This is how you develop an audience, following, client, customer and/or a backer. The future of individuals requires the mastery of social connectivity - this is how you find jobs, dates, groups, friends ...

Kickstarter is hard work. And it's an ever moving target. In my mind it’s importance today is three fold.

1. Master it and you master a way to make money.
2. It enables you to create a following of passionate and interested backers whom you can build upon and turn - into clients.
3. It’s new, it’s the future and your early to the party.

Kickstarter is marketing, sales, promotion and branding all wrapped in one. And that's just one of the reasons why it's hard. It's also an investment, worth making.

Some awesome points here! To me, Kickstarter shrinks the entrepreneurial journey into 30 days. Have a prototype, learn how to market, sell, get people interested, price effectively, get the news coverage, develop a budding customer base, and ultimately raise money.

Sal it truly is a small world.

Based on the data I have, assuming I am interpreting it correctly, I believe my conversion rate seemed higher than 400:1. However, my sampling was quite small (very few views). I would have to believe given a larger data set, i.e. substantially more viewers, my conversion rate would not be nearly as good as 400:1.

I point this out, because Dave's conversion rate must be an outstanding conversion rate. Everything about his product, project, campaign and associated collateral - websites, press, connections is beyond comparison. And then there's Dave. It is like watching a how to paint video by da Vinci.

The table stakes are high - this is your competition.

I've been involved in 3 crowd-funding projects, 2 of them Kickstarter. since 2010.

My previous and ongoing project before the Map Tutorials Guide Kickstarter, is as both a fantasy cartography and a Japanese American. I've played D&D and various RPG game settings in an oriental world. Since I'm a big-time history, culture and folklore buff, I have a thing for feudal Japan (among many others). I wanted to create a more authentic feudal Japan-based fantasy setting combined with Japanese horror, the latter being an untouched genre in tabletop games. I am the concept creator and primary game developer for the Kaidan setting of Japanese Horror, designed using the Pathfinder RPG system.

While I have skills in writing, editing, page layout, graphic design, illustration and cartography, (and some game development and design) giving a huge leg-up for a want-to-be RPG publisher. However, I lacked the actual experience and administrative/marketing know-how to improve the chances of success. Through my freelance cartography/game industry connections, I know of publishers willing to allow a 3rd party (me) publish under their label, for a share in profits. Steven D. Russell of Rite Publishing is such a publisher, and his little company is arguably one of the top five 3PP companies producing material for the Pathfinder system. He has an established audience, something I didn't have.

First Crowd Fund Project
I funded an introductory trilogy of adventure modules set in Kaidan, called the Curse of the Golden Spear, using Rite Publishing's in-house patron system. While the project got funded, it barely made it - mostly because it's a very niche product. This convinced me that if I wanted to try crowd-funding again, I'd need a more popular platform, and Kickstarter seemed the way to go.

Second Crowd Fund Project
Last year, I wanted to release a 200 page soft cover, print book of the Gamemaster's Guide to Kaidan, and a Player's Guide as a stretch goal using Kickstarter this time. I funded it again, under Rite Publishing - so technically it was Steven Russell's project and not mine, but I provided updates through Steve, and am a major part of the design team for the products. Goal was $4,000 and we got $9133 at the end of 45 days. Although successful, there was a long dead period in the middle of that 45 days, and I learned to try a shorter time span on my next Kickstarter.

Third (Current) Crowd Fund Project
[First thing, as of this moment, I'm $9 short of goal (woot) with 23 days left.] This time around am completely on my own as a creator and publisher. As mentioned elsewhere, I was participating in a G+ Map Making for Games community, when all this started - members on that site were asking me to write a tutorials guide and fund it through Kickstarter. So I've done about 2 months of marketing preparation primarily through a 25 Quick & Dirty Map Tutorials G+ community with 444 current members, I've made sure to 'friend' in G+. I spent some time posting maps, map tutorials on various G+ communities, gaining +'s from members on these posts, then 'friending' them, after gathering 100 such friends, I invite them to my G+ community. While I have a longer-in-use Facebook account, I'm finding Google+ much more active and people more willing to participate than on Facebook - at least from my limited experience. Get a Google+ community established a month or so prior to the start of your Kickstarter and build an active community wanting your product, before funding even starts.

Even before the Kickstarter began, one of my G+ members was using one of my posted tutorials with some questions, but getting decent results (somewhat crude) using Photoshop to do the tutorial. He posted his results on his blog site and promoted the concept of the upcoming Kickstarter. Free press is always a good thing.

Having done 2 other crowd-funding projects targeting the tabletop RPG market, I know which websites are the standard sites to post news releases - so I've posted at a dozen such sites. Although through looking at the Kickstarter Dashboard, I see that though I've gotten pledges through most of them, a few stand out as providing better numbers, so I'll look to especially using those in any projects down the road. Still post press releases anywhere that there's a community willing to look.

As stated on my intro thread, I recently got an Email interview with Rob Bodini at Destination RPG blog site, it was posted a few days ago - I don't know what kind of traffic it may drive, but I plan to get a few more blog posts, podcasts, or interviews before it's over. I've got connections for that. So get interviews of your project if you can.

As mentioned in the previous Kickstarter, I found 45 or more days of funding too long a period and the enthusium peters out after the second week and remains pretty dead with a pledge or 2 on most days, and no pledges on others. It really isn't until the last 24 hours that much of your funding is acquired. Kickstarter team even suggests 30 days is optimum for success. On that basis I've chosen a 30 day funding period. Also, regarding funding period, experience tells me that most contributors do so during the work week, especially on Mondays and Fridays - Fridays, especially since for most people, that's pay day. Also many people are paid every 2 weeks on Friday of the 2nd and 4th week of the month. Knowing that, I started my Kickstarter on Friday, August 2nd to Sunday, September 1st. This captures both pay days, and gives me a weekend for last minute straggler pledgers at the end.

Also, as I stated elsewhere on these boards, an awesome, free advertising opportunity fell into my lap a few weeks before the start of the Kickstarter. Gygax Magazine, a new RPG industry print magazine available at various game stores across the world knew of my Gamer Printshop RPG Map POD print shop and contacted me about getting them a quote for 5000 prints of 2 maps for an upcoming box setting product they want to create. Being a digital print shop, 5000 maps of anything was too much volume to grant effective pricing. However, as a member of various print industry organizations, I have access to printing companies that only provide work for other printing companies and not endusers. Through such connections, I was able to broker print bids for all their needs. Just for being able to provide quotes, and not in lieu of payment, but as a bonus Gygax Magazine provided me 2 free, full page, full color ads in their recently released issue #2. Normally a single full page ad costs as much as Kickstarter goal - no way, I nor most project creators could justify such a cost. Since it was free, I couldn't pass it up. I have no idea when nor how much traffic that ad should generate, but it should have some great impact - I hope.

Last point, based on seeming anamolies with my current Kickstarter, the most funded backer tier is not the lowest tier of $15 for the PDFs of all funded guides, but the $25 tier for all PDFs, plus a map object set of objects included in the guide book (less than 100 objects). There's 15 backers at $15 and 31 backers at $25. While I have a print book at $45 backer tier, I offer a larger (250 object) map object set for the print book, PDFs and both map object sets for $70 - I have more backers at $70 than either the $45 and 2 more than the $15 tier.

The only thing I can gather, is that the map object sets add tremendous value to the potential backer benefits. Even though the focus of the Kickstarter is fund guide books, offering additional products closely related to the main product, and asking for more money, thus more backing tiers (that aren't too expensive) will get you positive results.

I'm no where near the end of this Kickstarter, but that's the advice I can give you so far.

If you haven't checked us out, please do: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/543 ... t-of-vanas

We aren't a big box company, we're two guys who work 9 to 5 and are trying to make our dream come true. To your point of garnering a following, we did our best to build a community. We had the website built, we had all of our social media pages made and we told everyone we knew. But, even then we live in a small county of less than 100,000 people (Note: I said county not city. ) the city we live in has less than 15,000 people. So if you think that we know about 1% of the people, that's about 1,000 person out reach.

Then we messaged everyone under the sun about ad sponsorships, interviews, plugs, or whatever else we could get. Out of the hundreds of people we sent messages out to, two places posted about us and a couple Facebook pages dropped our name. After that we decided we NEEDED ad space. We have spent close to $800.

It seems like our effort is going well. For being a company that doesn't have a much of a following (at all) and a completely unknown project we are managing to stay around a 7% conversion rate and have raised almost $15,000 in less than four days! I think that's pretty good.

However it is more than a full time job. Between the two of us it is pretty hard to cover everything going on especially after an eight hour workday. We are essentially pulling 18 to 20 hour days just to keep up with good updates, planned videos, advertising and communication, and replying to comments/messages.

Anyway, my biggest advice would be find the biggest social websites surrounding your market, for us there is Kicktraq (which is huge for boardgames, even though you'd think it would be good for all Kickstarter projects), BoardGameGeek.com, ReaperMinis, and Tabletop Gaming News, not to mention a slew of other forums to post on. Even if your project doesn't get picked up by the people that look at it, their footprint increases your traffic volume which bumps you up on the most popular list. In two days we made $8,5000, but once we broke the top ten most popular on Kickstarter's Tabletop section, we blew up to $13,000 by the end of our third day.

Anyway, I have to get back to writing our next update (it's a big one), so please excuse me. I hope this helps someone or gives you all some insight. Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions I will try and respond.

Sincerely,
Phillip J. Woodward

PlanetDefiant wrote:Anyway, my biggest advice would be find the biggest social websites surrounding your market, for us there is Kicktraq (which is huge for boardgames, even though you'd think it would be good for all Kickstarter projects), BoardGameGeek.com, ReaperMinis, and Tabletop Gaming News, not to mention a slew of other forums to post on.

Speaking of that, my Kickstarter which is a series of RPG/Board game Map Tutorials Guide books, I posted on at Board Game G+ community twice now. When I google my project as "map tutorials kickstarter", I see that I am posted on BoardGameGeek and a number of other board game specific forums, but I didn't post them, as I'm not a member of those sites, or even know about them prior to the search. I mostly work in the RPG industry, but since map making is sometimes a valuable application in board games, my project has some worth to that market.

I thought it interesting you mentioned those sites, seeing I find my project being posted on them.

There are some very good points on this thread and thanks to all of you who posted feedback about my project also.

@inflexionUSA - Yes, there are relatively few people in the world who can do what I do, and even fewer who have turned it into art.

I don't think my product is particularly niche, but the category I am in on Kickstarter "digital art" seems to be. The vast majority (76%) of my pledges have been from my social networking and direct traffic. My video play to backer conversion seems to be 13%. I don't know about page visits and perhaps I will use one of the tracker services to gain more information. I have had a lot of positive feedback, from people in my field and people who have no prior experience/knowledge about my field. Driving the traffic to the page is the most difficult obstacle.

I followed the discussion about getting publishers and gaming sites interested with interest. I have been approaching a few that I think may be relevant to my project with no luck so far. It seems there is not a lot of bloggers crossing over between art and science and those that are, at least the ones I have contacted, don't consider my work to be a proper form of art or focus mostly on their own art.

I have time and there are several other avenues to pursue, but the most successful one is going to people in person and telling them about the project. Not the most efficient way to do things but it is working in a limited fashion. One thing I have noticed is that cross-promotion is rarely reciprocated, which is disappointing. I have done a press release through crowdfundingpr now and will start sending that out today, hopefully this will improve my chances of getting a few blogs to help spread the word.

Paying a PR firm is not something I can afford.

The interesting thing is that I do science outreach and and used to promoting science in general, marketing and PR from that side are becoming more important in science all the time. These are just skills that I need to adapt for this market, a learning curve indeed!

I will keep watching this post and following the excellent suggestions. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, it is very helpful.

drlouisechughes wrote:I don't think my product is particularly niche, but the category I am in on Kickstarter "digital art" seems to be.

I don't know what other category your product best fits, other than digital art, but another point I forgot to mention is that since my Kickstarter project is creating artistic maps for use in games, technically speaking, I could have also used the categories "digital art", "graphics design", or "publishing" since it is a book series I am self-publishing here. However, "Tabletop Games" in my case is my target market, so that's what I selected. Gamers probably wouldn't search through those other categories, and most non-gamers have a very limited use for fictional maps. I think it's far more important to pick a category that fits your target market, than what best describes what your project actually is.