Delegate Report and Ideas for Marketing BitShares in a new way.

Hello BitShares!

This report comes a little late as I have been very busy both at work and with BitShares.

Some very exciting stuff is coming out soon as we create real products that solves real problem in the world. I truly believe that the current price is not representative of the immense creativity at work in the background.

Let’s begin our report with the Referral Score Card

As you can see here BitSharesMine.com as brought in 18 new registrations simply by providing a useful service. (Congratulations!) I communicated with nethyb to start a relationship so that we can help with their marketing when the pool is ready to scale up.

What this tells me is that marketing services and products such as the mining pools and mobile wallet will be the way to grow our system more than simply shouting “BitShares” to the Bitcoiners.

An Interesting Product

I got in touch with @elmato & @pablo from Argentina who have been working on a wallet that can receive bitcoin and hold BitAssets. They are ready to release it to the Remittance market of Argentina (especially foreign students of universities) within the next week or so.

They did a meetup at the Bitcoin Embassy for BitShares and gave away BitUSD on the 19th. To help them out, I create a Facebook Campaign to increase attendance to their meetup…and it worked! We’ve added at least 23 RSVP in the last 48h before the event started using Fb Ads alone. On site, they were guided through the process of creating an account and funding their wallet. We are also exploring the possibility of using radio ads on university campus.

Meetup Funnels?

What my tests this week told me is that pure online conversions for BitShares are expensive at the moment. ($20 each at least) I think the reason is that we are expecting people to jump, by themselves, through a lot of hoops.

Very few people have the determination to go through all of them by themselves.

This is why meetup groups are so interesting as a conversion mechanism. For $40 CAD, I was able to add at least 20 people to a meetup where they are passively be guided through the process of opening an account, register it, etc.

This is a way better ROI than what I was previously doing. What is also does is connect people face to face and local networks BitSharers.

Meetup groups can be about BitShares but it can also be about “How to do Remittances using CryptoCurrencies” and plug them into @elmato’s and @pablo’s wallet.

I could see meetups happening everyday around the world and my delegate funds going exclusively to fill up those meetups with qualified prospects.

BTER and Cavirtex

The same day I got my second delegate pay, Cavirtex and Bter closed on me. 😦

Now I have to go through the dance of getting a verified account in Canada which is going to delay my ability to fund marketing campaigns for a week or so.

Facebook Page

Added about 1000 fans this week and kept a pace of posting on the page to drive traffic.

Here is the rundown of my facebook expenses this week

Conclusion

My funds will be saved up until I can finally turn my bitusd into fiat for facebook. (I hope they accept crypto one day) I keep organizing weekly mumble to increase to cooperation or teamwork amongs NullStreet Members.

I intend to focus on meetups to get more registrations at a lower cost and also start a local meetup in my tiny community. (1200 resident) while testing different models to generate registrations. I will be helping create bitshares101 funnels in as many language as possible in the coming week.

Let’s Rock This!

Peace

January 25th to February 7th – Delegate Report

Time for a delegate report!

This is my first week on the job as a delegate. My first delegate pay came in on the 1rst of February and thanks to shapeshift.io I was able to quickly get those funds in my account.

1308.1 mBTC -> $359 CAD

Last week of January Report

That week I mostly spend some time into preparing my accounting and my systems before I get my first pay from BitShares. I didn’t have much personal money to spend in Facebook ads. I basically just refocused and looked at my analytics and market research data.

February 1rst to February 7th

I do what I do because I want BitShares to succeed and I am very diligent with the trust and the funds that you are putting into this delegate position.

The Leaderboard for this week

To dates I have added 8 new registrations since the beginning on February.

This week I have ran a test to drive traffic directly to the homepage of the new bitshares.org homepage. I wanted to see how effective the page would be at converting cold traffic from Facebook.

To be truthful, it’s humbling. Spending ~$23 per registration is expensive. It is too early to throw the towel on Facebook Ads but at least I have some kind of benchmark.

Also, I cannot give a precise dollar amount since I have no way to put a conversation pixel in the faucet. All I can do is count the money I spent with the amount of registrations I’ve generated.

Now this is just the beginning and there are a lot of optimization to be do. I will eventually start to spread my wings and explore niches outside of cryptoworld (trading, Tor Network, etc) and outside of Facebook.

But for February, I am sticking to

• Facebook Ads
• Our Fanpage
• Ads leading to the homepage and
• Ads leading to the mobile wallet BitUSD funnel.

I want to build an email list of 1000 subscribers for the wallet and grow our fanpage to 10k.

Wish me luck! 🙂

Expenses to date:

$10 for Mailchimp services
$60 for leadpages
$185 Facebook Ads

Facebook Insights

Please leave your comment below.

Delegate Report – January 18th to January 25th

This week has been an interesting week. It started by doing market research with the “Audience Insights” of Facebook, in an effort of deepening my understanding of the market of cryptocurrencies. You can see those insights in my previous post.

I ran a test ad for the BitUSD Mobile Wallet that will be most likely be release in February.

The targeting for this ad was anyone in Indonesia, Turkey, Argentina, United States and India who liked anything that is related to Bitcoin. It was my first time targeting demographic outside the US. What surprised me wasn’t the conversion rates or the traffic to the BitUSD funnel (Btw, this doesn’t show all visitors and conversions because I deleted all the other pages that didn’t convert as well as the one below.)

What REALLY surprised me was how much they engage with our page:(Click to enlarge)

As you can see, this ad alone added 831 fans to our page in short order. That is usually not enough to impress me. Because it is easy to get a lot of cheap fans who actually don’t engage with your page in countries outside the US. But this time it’s different…they actually like our posts and visit our links!

I try to post twice a day on the page. Whatever news I can get or bytemaster blog posts. We are getting right now between 50 and 100 likes per post…which has great SEO value in itself.

We can also see our competitors and how they are doing on Facebook. We are on track to totally dominate that corner of the internet.

Non Direct Monetary Value of Fans

I proud myself at being good at driving traffic, capturing leads and converting sales through advertising. But I am also deep into Facebook and I have to be focusing on SEO at my job.

Having a lot of Fans that engage has many side benefits.

1. Social Proof – A Page with a lot of fans shows that we are serious players to prospects and investors.
2. SEO – If we get a lot of Likes, Comments and Shares on our content, it will help our rankings.
3. Cheaper Traffic Down the Road – Free traffic to blogposts and it is always less expensive to advertise to fans than non-fans

Stepping into their mind

I know what a lot of people are saying:

Why would you advertise in places like Indonesia, Turkey and India? There is no infrastructure there.

It is a valid argument. We are looking for people who can have access to exchanges to buy bitusd or BTS. At the same time, I can’t resist following the clues and the trends.

In order to get at the bottom of this, I introduce something that can help us understand why they are so interested in the first place: A Survey.

Who knows? There might be a wave 2 of adoption coming from those area, it would be stupid to ignore them.

Here are the early results of our survey:

Question 1: Why are you interested in crypto currencies?

– For their capacity to change our money perception

– Its cool

– Anonymity

– I feel that crypto is better than other money

– Because as far as I can tell – It’s the most efficient way to move (and store) value. Period.

– Cheaper and faster way to send payment. Security and transparency on the network.

– Freedom from centralized institution. And it’s fun!

– For everything it stands for, freedom from control, fair trade, and honesty, not controlled by the corrupt Banksters

– Investment

– Investment and technology

– Speculative Investment

– freedom

– I believe that the crypto currency will be a future currency instead of fiat money

– Freedom, security

– same reason bitshares is

– Investment potential, very interesting new technology, I want to be on the forefront, anti-gov control

– Fast, safe, anonymous money transfer

– because 1bts=500usd so easy!

– I’m interested in crypto as a way out of the current corrupt financial system. Crypto can bring down entire power structures all across the globe, and I’m all for that.

– The security. The ability to transact internationally with low fees.

Question 2: What is the one thing you most want to accomplish with a BitUSD wallet?

repay debt with friends

1/25/2015 8:22 AM

Border less money transfers

1/24/2015 5:53 PM

Anonymity

1/22/2015 5:49 PM

People can send money using email address

1/22/2015 5:17 PM

Ease of use. Personally, I would like the ability to help someone else download and be able to send them some BitUSD within a minute.

1/22/2015 11:39 AM

Protection from theft and privacy.

1/22/2015 11:00 AM

Transfer money with low fees.

1/22/2015 11:00 AM

to be able to easily store my Bitshares, angel shares and BTC on and especially off line, to easily send and receive funds.

1/22/2015 8:52 AM

Help expand the prevalence of alternative currencies

1/22/2015 7:01 AM

quick transfer of money

1/22/2015 5:40 AM

On and Off Ramps to fiat currency and merchant intergration

1/22/2015 5:05 AM

give friends some usd as a gift

1/22/2015 3:51 AM

stability

1/22/2015 12:42 AM

Ease of use when paying. Ease of use for new people to sign up.

1/21/2015 11:51 PM

JUST KEEP IT SIMPLE AND USABLE

1/21/2015 11:18 PM

Online purchases. Cash works just fine in the real world. When traveling this would be an amazing, cheaper, way to make purchases.

1/21/2015 11:17 PM

Buying product easily

1/21/2015 10:56 PM

buy anything

1/21/2015 10:52 PM

It would be cool if it acted like an app – where I could go in and out of BTS and BitUSD, so I can always be maximizing my profit based on market changes.

1/21/2015 7:21 PM

Being able to transact in multiple currencies, ie: USD, CAD, EUR… etc etc..

1/20/2015 9:53 PM

Ease of handling funds

1/20/2015 9:59 AM

Showing it off (educating people).

1/20/2015 3:32 AM

MY CAR!

1/20/2015 2:56 AM

quick and easy mobile payment

1/20/2015 2:15 AM

Privacy

1/20/2015 12:36 AM

payment solution on the fly! easy aesy easy …

1/19/2015 11:57 PM

not sure

1/19/2015 11:21 PM

Demonstrate it to my friends

1/19/2015 9:36 PM

Earn interest.

1/19/2015 9:11 PM

Use it at atm’s around the world to withdraw local currency.

1/19/2015 7:56 PM

send and receive bitusd

1/19/2015 7:26 PM

Security is the most important for me.

1/19/2015 7:14 PM

Be able to easily trade in and out of bitusd.

1/19/2015 6:50 PM

Be able to do point-of-sale transactions

1/19/2015 6:37 PM

Hold my funds securely.

1/19/2015 6:35 PM

Question 3:

One question that I am going to add next week in the survey upgrade will be “Can you purchase or trade cryptocurrencies in your country?“. That will help us find out more about the situation our audience is in.

It is still early to make conclusion about the survey since we only had 35 respondent so far.

100% Delegate Position and Funds Allocation

Thank you to everyone who voted for me.

I recently realized that some people are uneasy having too many 100% delegate position and I want to make sure that you feel comfortable with the work that I am doing.

I didn’t receive any money from my delegate position yet but I will start getting funds on the 1rst of February. Like I said in my proposal, I will spend all of it towards marketing minus what my delegate buddy(toast) needs for maintenance. Here is a breakdown of how I want to allocate those funds in February.

Please leave your comments below, I always appreciate your feedback.

Facebook Marketing Research Report

After Google, Facebook has the most traffic. I am sharing this data because it could be a part of the puzzle to understand who we can be most helpful to.

“Let’s get to the heart of the matter. The power, the force, the overwhelming urge to own that makes advertising work, comes from the market itself, and not from the copy. Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exists in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the copy writer’s task: not to create this mass desire – but to channel and direct it.

Actually, it would be impossible for any one advertiser to spend enough money to actually create this mass desire. He can only exploit it. And he dies when he tried to run against it.”

“Breakthrough Advertising” by Eugene Schwartz.

Here is what the data tells us when we look at the bitcoin/cryptocurrency world through the eye of Facebook. (Pretty much the eye of Sauron these days)

Click to enlarge…

 

Note

There is almost no data available from people in China and Russia…Facebook may be blacklisted in these countries. But anyhow, I cannot target them.

How are our ads performing right now?

Right now, I am getting around $0.10 per click when I:

– Target people who speaks English, who lives in Turkey, Indonesia and India and who fit the psycho-graphics data described above.

But when I do the same targetting for the United-States, I have to pay up to $0.70 per clicks…7 times more!

This asks a hard question. Can we afford to only focus on North America?

Question back to you

What does this data tells you? What kind of insights are you getting from this?

Sincerely,
delegate.rgcrypto

Week 2 – Marketing Report

Stepping into a bigger vision…

Good day BitShares Community! Great things happened this week and I wanted to update on the Traffic Generation Machine Project.

1. BitShares Facebook Page

BitShares Facebook page is now adding more fans(40 this week). I have kept the regiment of posting at least twice a day. The first one is usually a link to someone’s blogpost that I find in the BitShares Tribe newsfeed.

The second one from now on will be quotes of famous people attached to our logo. Like this:

I am still getting a feel of the psychology of our fans and what make them tic. It will get better and better in the future.

2. BitShares 101 Funnel

Bitshares 101 funnel keeps on performing well. Although I do not have the means to bring huge amount of traffic, the conversions from traffic to leads is very high.

I have run many test in different niche and so far the libertarian niche is one of the best we have in term of response.

3. BitUSD Mobile Wallet Funnel

@ElMato is currently working on a BitUSD mobile wallet. To help build some excitement for it, I have decided to create a coming soon page for people to be notified upon release.

The Split Test

The split test for this funnel is between having a counter or not.

Note: No data is currently available for this funnel

The Viral Loop

On the Thank You page of the BitUSD Funnel, I have put a “viral loop” that will help us get our message out there by more people. (Please share if you are testing this funnel it would help get more data on it’s performance)

4. Affiliate Friendly Funnels!

Thank to @akernest and @valzav , BitShares101 Funnel and the BitUSD funnels are now affiliate friendly!

You can now use those 2 links and be credited for new registrations:

http://bitshares.tv/bitshares-101a?r={your_id}

and

http://bitshares.tv/bitusd-mobile-wallet?r={your_id}

There will be no affiliate code in the automatic email follow up so that you keep the fruits of your labor.

(Soon those pages will have their own hosting)

5. My Delegate Position

Since I have a limited budget, this week I couldn’t do as many test as I wish I could have but I am still moving forward with my own money with a budget of around $10 a day.

I now have an even bigger vision for my role and contribution I can provide to BitShares shareholders.

When I become a delegate, I want to focus my efforts toward building an BitShares Affiliate Only website where people can plug in their own email providers to any of the funnels I create.

Also, in this website I want to work with @akernest and @valzav to have a leaderboard to stimulate competition among affiliates.

Finally, once all of those things are in place, I want to put into place a Traffic Coop that would allow any affiliate to leverage my skills(or any other good media buyers) to get done 4 you traffic.

This of course will only make sense once we have a financial incentive for affiliates.

Conclusion

I am excited about BitShares and the amazing work everyone is doing. 2015 is our year.

Sincerely,
RgCrypto

Week 1 – Marketing Report

Hey BitShares Community!

It’s been a week since I started actively creating funnels and driving traffic to promote BitShares. Please read all the way to the end, I need your input on something.

Everything starts with the ads I am currently running on Facebook. (I have stopped Google Ads, they didn’t perform well enough)

Click on the image below to test drive the funnel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next step was to split test my capture pages

My verdict on the winner will be done once I have 100 conversions on each pages. But a 41.92% conversion rate is “out of this world” good. Highest I have ever had in my career.

Traffic is a little bit more expensive in our space ($0.30 to $0.50 per click) but the conversion rates definitely compensate.

As a thank you page, people are directed to the bitshares.org download page.

Email Marketing

Why E-Mail Marketing

Email marketing is king. I would trade 1 email for 100 fans or 100 followers any day of the week. It is a way to create our own source of traffic.

With Emails, we can propagate a message without having to rely on a third party. It also allow us to systematically educate people by bringing them through a logical sequence of information and call to actions.

Expenses:

Ebook 3d Design: $5
Leadpages: $60 per month USD
Mailchimp: $10 per month USD
Facebook Ads: 127.87 USD
Google Adwords: 26.46 CAD

Total: around $230

Comment:

One may say that $230 for 70 leads is a lot but it is the wrong way to look at it. Setting up a new funnel cost money. First in softwares but also you have to fail 90% of the time to find the 10% of advertising that works. (I did 50 test and I have kept only 2 ads that works)

So currently the cost per leads is:

(127.87 + 26.46) / 70 leads
=
$2.20 per leads

This number may seem a lot to you but if I can get a cost per leads of under $2.50, you can say you hit the jackpot.

If 1 out of 5 people end up downloading the client, hypothetically, it means a new user cost $10. (analytics for that are coming soon)

What is the next step?

Direct Marketing 101:

The person who can afford to pay the most to acquire a new customer win the game.

For now, there is no way for me to know if people downloaded the client or invested money into the system…but these analytics are coming.

Once we have that, we can calculate the average lifetime value of a customer. This is the “holy grail” number of direct-marketing.

Example: If we know that “in average” people who go through this funnel put $500 inside BitShares, it means that we can spend up to $500 to acquire a new registered user before we lose money.

Obviously, if we want it to work, it has to be the data from a given funnel…not by taking the market cap divided by the number registered users.

Will I run a Delegate soon?

You now can!

delegate.rgcrypto

Conclusion

The initial budget for testing was provided by the amazing guys on nullstreet. Namely, @gamey, @onceuponatime & @eagleeye

From now on, until I get elected, the ad budget will be paid by me. ($10 a day)

Your donations are greatly appreciated:

1LZQUMT9ZGHALNBVKVnM6MSMRBw8BdjZB4

Delegate Announcement

January 5th 2014
Ucluelet, BC
Renaud Gagne (aka RGCrypto)

Marketing Philosophy:

Advertising should be like a vending machine. You should be able to put money in at the top to get visitors to your site…and PROSPECTS should come out the bottom.

Objectives:

• To dominate the online advertising space in the crypto-currency, investing & finance niches
• Have a sustainable cost per new user. *
• Educate and Motivate users to participate in the BitShares community

Proposal:

Hi, my name is Renaud Gagne. I am a direct-response marketer and a huge fan of BitShares. I’m 29, married and live in a small fishing town on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British-Columbia, Canada. I truly believe that BitShares is the best hope to secure life, liberty and property right now and into the future.

My proposal is simple. I want to run a delegate to create funnels that will constantly test new copy and niches to see which one converts best into downloads.

The Process (3 C’s of Marketing)
Create Traffic – Capture Leads – Convert Sales

I like to run a lot of small test ads ($5 a day each) until I find winners that give me good cost per download. Then…I scale up!

I believe that through this scientific approach of advertising we can dramatically increase the traffic to bitshares.org and whatisbitusd.

I promise that 100% of the delegate money will be used to buy media or to pay for tools to make media work better. (email software, capture page builders, etc.) I repeat, I am going to be working for you for free.

What’s in it for me? Well, I get to use my skills in my favorite ways as a hobby after work. I love watching my analytics grow and get better. (Marketing for the hospitality industry is too slow and bureaucratic)

Also, I am want to transition into the crypto space and to me it seems like a perfect fit.

When the budget gets big enough that I have to quit my job at the marketing firm, I will ask permission to the community to do so in a formal matter, until then it will be me split-testing like a madman every night.

Every first of the month, you will be able to see my marketing report on this blog. Make sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed so that you don’t miss any of my reports.

Traffic Domination Roadmap

1. Google Search Network
2. Banners Ads on all the major bitcoin news related sites
3. Facebook & Twitter

Not only should the cost per acquisition be predictable, the money spent on advertising has to be used to create the most important marketing asset on the World Wide Web: an email list.

Believe it or not, email is still the King of online media. Constant communication is key to building a community.

I will be making sure that we capture as many e-mail addresses as possible so we  can guide people through the maze of BitShare information and get them to understand and use BitAssets in the shortest amount of time possible.

I want to thank everyone of the Community Forum and Nullstreet to do their best to make Bitshares, in 2015, a wild success.

Short Term Projects

Bitshares 101 Funnels:

Click Here to Experience the Funnel (visit multiple time and delete your cookies to see split testing)

WhatIsBitUSD?

This is Amazing work from NullStreet. I will work at bringing massive traffic to this page and to improve conversions as we split test. Visit the whatisbitusd.com

Accountability

Every month, along with my analytics you will get a copy of my bills to prove that I have use the money only to buy traffic and means to increase conversions (design, email software, etc.)

Thank you for your vote!

(RGCRYPTO)