Thanksgiving Sweepstakes – a social Experiment

Facebook AdReaching the milestone of 50 sales in my Etsy shop was reason to celebrate, and give thanks to my audience. So I created a “Thanksgiving Sweepstakes” post on my ExxoPok Facebook page and ran an ad for it. My $30 marketing budget would be spread out over 27 days, until November 30th.

Instructions were simple: just comment on the post, telling me how you currently carry your cell phone.

The results are now in. Facebook congratulated me with a five star rating for exceptional relevance of my campaign – and told me to run another one now.

My boosted post received a total of 591 views, 45 organic, and 546 paid.
There were 55 clicks on the photo recorded.
I got 36 “likes”  for my post, and I gained 2 new followers for my page.

The big surprise for me, though, was that only 4 people actually read and followed my instructions on what to do to win that free ExxoPok – by telling me how they currently carry their phone!

So I decided that all four participants deserved a prize. I messaged them all, telling them that they are winners, and would they please let me know what kind of phone they have, what color of leather they would like, and tell me their address so I can send them their free ExxoPok.

One person responded immediately. With all the information I had asked for, thanking me for my generosity. The second person answered a few hours later, saying what a great idea my ExxoPok was, but giving absolutely no answers to my questions. It took four more messages to find out what phone to make the pouch for, what color leather, and where to mail the finished product. My third winner replied late in the evening, picking a color for the leather, specifying a phone model that doesn’t seem to exist, and giving no address. I haven’t given up on that one yet, still messaging. The fourth person hasn’t responded yet.

In the meantime a new order came in from my Etsy shop, somebody wants an orange left side ExxoPok for his Moto Z2 Play.  I’ll be busy on the weekend, making at least three phone pouches. Life is good.

ExxoPok #67 is special

leather cell phone pouch, belt clip phone holster, ExxoPok phone case, hand made in USA cell phone pouch
ExxoPok #67

My heart skipped a beat today when I received my first order for an ExxoPok cell phone pouch coming in from my own little handmade e-commerce website http://exxopok.karin-web.com

I designed this unique belt clip phone case out of personal necessity in October 2015, when I joined Google Fi and had to somehow attach a big Nexus 5X smartphone to my belt. After making several of those handy pouches with the “angle of dangle” for myself and family, and selling three of them in person, I set up a shop on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/shop/exxopok and actually sold 37 of my ingenious gadgets there by now.

Good business practice is to diversify, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and have multiple sales channels – even if you’re just treating this like a hobby without any aspirations to turn into a “full-time job/income”. Plus it would be a good learning experience for me to get into newer techniques of web-development.

So, in December of 2016, I added the ExxoPok subdomain to my Karin-web.com domain, found and customized a free html5 template that I like, installed the Ecwid e-commerce plugin on it – which is also free if you list no more than 10 items, and worked hard to get the whole thing optimized for Google’s search engine. Being found on the internet is the hardest thing to do. It takes time, and you have to keep “talking” about your stuff, posting on social media, blogging about it, creating link authority for your site.

Today was the big day: one customer ordered an ExxoPok to be made as a gift for Father’s Day! Needless to say that I got to work right away, making sure this pouch is going to be everything I promised it to be.