Why do I need a blog on Habré: experience Madrobots
Sometimes it seems that he does not need a blog on Habré.
Launching MadRobots, we decided that we would describe here how to build our business, as well as share knowledge about the world of wearable electronics and the Internet of things. Of course, we did not understand what we were subscribed to.
Because blogging is real torture. Especially if you do it in your free time from building your company.
')
Preparing even a seemingly simple post actually takes a lot of time and effort. But it takes more time to discuss it. Sometimes, when a topic is given out, one can be particularly fascinating and debatable, I can spend half a day on comments and communication with readers. Dozens of questions that require an answer accumulate in the work mail during this time.
Podkashivaet and more. If you decide to talk about your business openly, you have to not only brag about success, but also admit defeat. And it is always unpleasant - no matter how we convince each other that only the one who does nothing is not mistaken.
It also happens that in the comments on Madrobots, users and customers come down with criticism. Sometimes even quite fair (unfortunately, it’s not without jambs when building a new business).
In general, sometimes the thought involuntarily comes: is it possible to somehow do without all this? But this minute weakness. She passes. After all, looking back, I can not help but admit that this blog on Habre brought MadRobots enormous benefits, which more than compensate for any sacrifices. Judge for yourself.
We recently launched a joint mega campaign with PayPal . When paying for an order through PayPal, you can get a discount of up to 20% - depending on how much you average per day (data downloaded from popular fitness trackers). This is what should please customers. And we are pleased that, within the framework of this program, the famous payment service also sends information about MadRobots to 3.5 million of its customers in Russia.
The most surprising thing about this is that we were not the initiator of this communication - PayPal managers came to us themselves, proposing to develop and launch some interesting co-branding program. And they found out about us just from the blog - they read our posts, and decided that we could deal with us.
There would be no blog, there would be no this program. The turnovers of the MadRobots niche store are not yet so cosmic that, by some indicators of daily revenue, we are automatically put on the top list of the most desired partners for joint promotion on the Internet.
In February, we took part in the 3dprintexpo exhibition, presenting a 3Doodler and a Form 1 printer on it. Then we wrote a report on Habré , and read our post in Mail.ru and invited MadRobots to participate in the opening of the technopark in Baumanka to present unusual gadgets there. The terms of cooperation were offered quite profitable, and we agreed, at the same time deciding to find out if there was a market for technological shows in Moscow, and also to light up at an event where there were quite a few people who were influencing the development of the Russian technological market. This was our chance to make a good statement about ourselves, and we did not miss it .
See how it looked in 3D models:
And how it happened in practice:
At the event, we even showed a robotic air hockey, assembled from parts for a 3D printer.
We never wrote about him on Habr:
I have long wanted to become a member of the largest Russian CPA-network Admitad . Cost per action is an advancement model on the Internet, in which payment is made for the conversion actions of the user. Large online shopping CPA network bring up to a third of revenue, which amounts to hundreds of millions of rubles. This is undoubtedly a desired tool to drive traffic.
However, a small online store to get into CPA networks is not easy. There is even a market for intermediaries who promise to provide a presence in the network, bypassing the existing rules: their prices start from hundreds of thousands of rubles.
To join Admitad, the store must have at least one hundred orders per day and monthly traffic of at least one hundred thousand unique visitors. At Madrobots, we ship twenty to thirty orders a day, and our monthly traffic is about eighty thousand people. About a year I stubbornly knocked on Admitad, and I politely, but also stubbornly stitched.
One fine I was able to contact directly with the marketing director of this company. It turned out he was reading our blog on Habré, and in his eyes we established ourselves as an interesting company. The magic door opened. We were connected to Admit in two weeks.
Initially, the idea of MadRobots was to bring to Russia the most interesting novelties of Kickstarter. However, at some point, the Russian company Amperka came out to us, which, under the Matreshka brand, produces interesting educational kits in electronics . The creators of "Matryoshka" themselves offered us to sell their goods on the Madrobots website and convinced us that it would perfectly complement our range. It would seem that Amperka has its own website with a variety of support tools and forums. Nevertheless, these kits sell well with us. We ourselves would hardly have guessed to add them to the range. Thank you, Habr - after all, they found out about us in Amperka thanks to the blog.
One of the most promising partnerships is the launch of Madrobots on mobile devices.
I will not deliberately disclose the name of the company, as it remains more than a month before the release.
Recently, we were approached by representatives of one of the major mobile vendors. They have their own store, which is pre-installed on almost a million smartphones that they sell in Russia.
Through this store you can buy cables, charging and other accessories authorized by the manufacturer. Now developers are faced with the task of expanding the range of the store. They thought that the Kickstarter gadgets would be great. Who did they contact? To MadRobots. Are we the only ones selling wearable electronics in Russia? Unfortunately not.
Why do people turn to us? Honestly, I do not know. But I think that the blog simply attracts attention. Shows that behind the showcase of an online store are living people, and (probably) adequate; that these people have some kind of expertise, which they are willing to share with the market. People who contact us already have an idea about who they will have to deal with. And this is not so little. Oddly enough, even error stories and blunders work in plus, increasing our credibility.
We only need to post a new post on Habré, as my mail begins to break off from letters with proposals for business cooperation. Most of them are “raw”, and I have no choice but to politely thank the author. But once or twice a month, there are always proposals that are worth it to even discuss them.
I am sure that you will say here: well, connections, affiliate programs, expansion of the range - this is of course a good thing, but what about the traffic? How are blog views converted to sales? No matter how cynically this question sounded, every person not too far from commerce, he probably worries too.
Well. Let's open the veil. According to our statistics, per month 200,000 people read our blog on Habré (and now also on GeekTimes ). 5-10% of this audience go to the Madrobots website and 1% make orders. But this is not all, there is also an indirect effect: Habr's links are highly indexed by Yandex and Google. It is necessary to write a post about some gadget, as on the site Madrobots after a while happens a surge of traffic from search engines. In general, if we give some discount and make a good review in a blog, then in one day we sometimes sell up to a hundred gadgets.
I think that in addition to the contracts with PayPal and Mail.ru is quite a good bonus. And a decent compensation for the long evenings spent at the laptop, and not with the family or watching the next TBBT series.
Previous parts of the history of Madrobots can be read at the links:
Part 1. As Madrobots was coined.
Part 2. How we tried to trade iPhones and almost went broke on that.
Part 3. How we played big in Vegas and brought a couple of dozen new devices from CES 2014.
Part 4. How we opened the first Madrobots store in the Gorbushka shopping center.
Part 5. The first video review Madrobots.
Part 6. How we decided to open the Madrobots store in the MEGA Belaya Dacha shopping center.
Launching MadRobots, we decided that we would describe here how to build our business, as well as share knowledge about the world of wearable electronics and the Internet of things. Of course, we did not understand what we were subscribed to.
Because blogging is real torture. Especially if you do it in your free time from building your company.
')
Preparing even a seemingly simple post actually takes a lot of time and effort. But it takes more time to discuss it. Sometimes, when a topic is given out, one can be particularly fascinating and debatable, I can spend half a day on comments and communication with readers. Dozens of questions that require an answer accumulate in the work mail during this time.
Podkashivaet and more. If you decide to talk about your business openly, you have to not only brag about success, but also admit defeat. And it is always unpleasant - no matter how we convince each other that only the one who does nothing is not mistaken.
It also happens that in the comments on Madrobots, users and customers come down with criticism. Sometimes even quite fair (unfortunately, it’s not without jambs when building a new business).
Working with negative feedback is extremely useful for the development of the company. But, let's say, it burns a lot of calories.
In general, sometimes the thought involuntarily comes: is it possible to somehow do without all this? But this minute weakness. She passes. After all, looking back, I can not help but admit that this blog on Habre brought MadRobots enormous benefits, which more than compensate for any sacrifices. Judge for yourself.
1. PAYPAL - STEP TALK
We recently launched a joint mega campaign with PayPal . When paying for an order through PayPal, you can get a discount of up to 20% - depending on how much you average per day (data downloaded from popular fitness trackers). This is what should please customers. And we are pleased that, within the framework of this program, the famous payment service also sends information about MadRobots to 3.5 million of its customers in Russia.
The most surprising thing about this is that we were not the initiator of this communication - PayPal managers came to us themselves, proposing to develop and launch some interesting co-branding program. And they found out about us just from the blog - they read our posts, and decided that we could deal with us.
There would be no blog, there would be no this program. The turnovers of the MadRobots niche store are not yet so cosmic that, by some indicators of daily revenue, we are automatically put on the top list of the most desired partners for joint promotion on the Internet.
2. MAIL.RU - TECHNOSHOW
In February, we took part in the 3dprintexpo exhibition, presenting a 3Doodler and a Form 1 printer on it. Then we wrote a report on Habré , and read our post in Mail.ru and invited MadRobots to participate in the opening of the technopark in Baumanka to present unusual gadgets there. The terms of cooperation were offered quite profitable, and we agreed, at the same time deciding to find out if there was a market for technological shows in Moscow, and also to light up at an event where there were quite a few people who were influencing the development of the Russian technological market. This was our chance to make a good statement about ourselves, and we did not miss it .
See how it looked in 3D models:
And how it happened in practice:
At the event, we even showed a robotic air hockey, assembled from parts for a 3D printer.
We never wrote about him on Habr:
3. ADMITAD - WITHOUT CHANCES?
I have long wanted to become a member of the largest Russian CPA-network Admitad . Cost per action is an advancement model on the Internet, in which payment is made for the conversion actions of the user. Large online shopping CPA network bring up to a third of revenue, which amounts to hundreds of millions of rubles. This is undoubtedly a desired tool to drive traffic.
However, a small online store to get into CPA networks is not easy. There is even a market for intermediaries who promise to provide a presence in the network, bypassing the existing rules: their prices start from hundreds of thousands of rubles.
To join Admitad, the store must have at least one hundred orders per day and monthly traffic of at least one hundred thousand unique visitors. At Madrobots, we ship twenty to thirty orders a day, and our monthly traffic is about eighty thousand people. About a year I stubbornly knocked on Admitad, and I politely, but also stubbornly stitched.
One fine I was able to contact directly with the marketing director of this company. It turned out he was reading our blog on Habré, and in his eyes we established ourselves as an interesting company. The magic door opened. We were connected to Admit in two weeks.
4. AMPERKA - A NEW ASSORTMENT
Initially, the idea of MadRobots was to bring to Russia the most interesting novelties of Kickstarter. However, at some point, the Russian company Amperka came out to us, which, under the Matreshka brand, produces interesting educational kits in electronics . The creators of "Matryoshka" themselves offered us to sell their goods on the Madrobots website and convinced us that it would perfectly complement our range. It would seem that Amperka has its own website with a variety of support tools and forums. Nevertheless, these kits sell well with us. We ourselves would hardly have guessed to add them to the range. Thank you, Habr - after all, they found out about us in Amperka thanks to the blog.
5. VENDOR X - MADROBOTS IN TELEPHONE
One of the most promising partnerships is the launch of Madrobots on mobile devices.
I will not deliberately disclose the name of the company, as it remains more than a month before the release.
Recently, we were approached by representatives of one of the major mobile vendors. They have their own store, which is pre-installed on almost a million smartphones that they sell in Russia.
Through this store you can buy cables, charging and other accessories authorized by the manufacturer. Now developers are faced with the task of expanding the range of the store. They thought that the Kickstarter gadgets would be great. Who did they contact? To MadRobots. Are we the only ones selling wearable electronics in Russia? Unfortunately not.
Why do people turn to us? Honestly, I do not know. But I think that the blog simply attracts attention. Shows that behind the showcase of an online store are living people, and (probably) adequate; that these people have some kind of expertise, which they are willing to share with the market. People who contact us already have an idea about who they will have to deal with. And this is not so little. Oddly enough, even error stories and blunders work in plus, increasing our credibility.
We only need to post a new post on Habré, as my mail begins to break off from letters with proposals for business cooperation. Most of them are “raw”, and I have no choice but to politely thank the author. But once or twice a month, there are always proposals that are worth it to even discuss them.
Over the past year, such stories were much more than five - I gave only a few of the most vivid examples. A huge number of doors would have been closed for us, if not for this blog.
I am sure that you will say here: well, connections, affiliate programs, expansion of the range - this is of course a good thing, but what about the traffic? How are blog views converted to sales? No matter how cynically this question sounded, every person not too far from commerce, he probably worries too.
Well. Let's open the veil. According to our statistics, per month 200,000 people read our blog on Habré (and now also on GeekTimes ). 5-10% of this audience go to the Madrobots website and 1% make orders. But this is not all, there is also an indirect effect: Habr's links are highly indexed by Yandex and Google. It is necessary to write a post about some gadget, as on the site Madrobots after a while happens a surge of traffic from search engines. In general, if we give some discount and make a good review in a blog, then in one day we sometimes sell up to a hundred gadgets.
I think that in addition to the contracts with PayPal and Mail.ru is quite a good bonus. And a decent compensation for the long evenings spent at the laptop, and not with the family or watching the next TBBT series.
Previous parts of the history of Madrobots can be read at the links:
Part 1. As Madrobots was coined.
Part 2. How we tried to trade iPhones and almost went broke on that.
Part 3. How we played big in Vegas and brought a couple of dozen new devices from CES 2014.
Part 4. How we opened the first Madrobots store in the Gorbushka shopping center.
Part 5. The first video review Madrobots.
Part 6. How we decided to open the Madrobots store in the MEGA Belaya Dacha shopping center.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/240887/
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