Direct Access on Bits du Jour report II
This is the second time Direct Access has been featured on Bits du Jour. Here’s a report of my first Bits du jour experience with the site.
For those who don’t know it, Bits du Jour is a deal of the day website for software. Every day you can get a different software deeply discounted (from 30% to 70%). Bits du Jour keeps 30% of the sale.
I offered Direct Access at 40% and the promotion ended with 40 licenses sold from Bits du jour plus other 9 that were generated directly from my website or my blog.
Bits du jour generate about about 6000–7000 visitors / day.
Here’s how I managed the promotion:
- A couple of days before the event, I announced the discount via email to my customers.
- I displayed a banner on both my website and my blog announcing the promotion a few hours before the promotion started pointing the users directly to my sale page. This helped me to distinguish from the users who got to my homepage, discovered the discount and ordered the software from those purchasing from Bits du Jour (I got the idea from Nick Hebb. I also removed the promotion link from my website a few hours later (which resulted in a couple more sales)
- Watch the comments at Bits du Jour. A couple of users had questions and responding to them, resulted in few other sales.
From what I saw from my weblogs, on the 12th April, I got about 100 visits on my website from Bits du Jour. That means that many people tried the software before or purchased it on impulse without visiting my website. Traffic however, started to rise about a week before, when Ellen Craw (who manages the site) published the list of the new software on her blog. I’m still getting traffic from from it right now.
I think Bits du Jour is a great promotional tool to get the word out and increase the visibility of your product. Ellen writes the copy for you (which you can freely reuse on your website) and she’s a very talented copywriter.
So, my suggestion is to try it, both to find great software at discounted price and to promote yours!
Technorati Tags: bits du jour, direct access, nagarsoft
4 Comments so far
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Andrea, I’m curious why you mentioned the discount on your site? It also sounds like folks who purchased from your site with the discount, cut Bits du Jour out of their take. Hopefully that’s not the case.
I preferred to link directly on my order page from my website as the period in which I displayed the discount banner on my website was longer than the promotion time at BdJ.
If someone got to my website but never visited Bits du Jour, of course BdJ wouldn’t get any commission.
For the way affiliated are managed by Plimus, if I user visits BdJ a cookie is set. I still receive some orders (at full price) with the BdJ affiliate id. So I believe it was fair.
One of the ways I encourage people to use Bits du Jour is as a way to give users a discount without “devaluing” their product. Mentioning the discount on your own site helps people get off the fence and buy something right away, rather than putting it in their file to install and try out sometime. I know not everyone wants to do that, but it seems to work out pretty well for people who do.
[…] posted his experiences, looks like he got a huge increase in users. Another regular describes his experience on Bits du Jour, a similar site that sells software at a discount, rather than giving it […]