Divvy My Ride Blog

A recent picture from my visit to the Rocky Mountain National Park near Denver CO.

You see the  Dream Lake sheltered between Flattop Mountain and Hallett Peak. I wish it was sunnier on the memorial day weekend.

Dream lake Rocky Mountain National Park

I should have seen this coming. I have read about it, I might have even taught this to some one but I forgot it for my own site.

I am getting plenty of hits on the site, but the posts are still lacking. Ride posting are the like the fuel in the car, you can have a Ferrari, seat Brat Pitt and Angelina Jolie in it, but without fuel that thing is not going anywhere.

So to figure out what was going wrong, I started monitoring individual pages.
post_ride.php   : # of hits 13x
post_ride1.php : # of hits 1x
post_ride2.php : # of hits 1x
post_ride3.php : # of hits 1x

Right there! Do you see it? It is so easy to loose interest? Only one out of 13 people cared to go from the first link to the second. Forget the third and the fourth link. This is poor design. Entire Post step must happen one one page.

I need to fix this at the earliest. To the carpoolers, we will go a better job of understanding you the next time. Please continue your support.

thanks
mayank

In my two years of stay at Portland OR, I loved the city not because of its beautiful scenery but because of its people. They are polite, (No honks in 2 years), they are friendly (you must ride the MAX to experience this first hand) and the most important for me they are Super Environment Conscious. My Green ethos surely has a origin in the streets of Portland. So no surprises that Oregonians/Portlanders have the most number of hits on my site.

Thanks again folks.

Mayank

Last year I took a marketing class (BUS101) at Stanford Continuing Studies under Kevin Epstein (Stupid Marketing).

If you are in the valley and want to learn marketing as an Entrepreneur, this is one class that you must take.

Anyhow, it was here that I first learnt about Google Ads (the sponsored links that you see on side when you do a Google search).

We were to create a 3 line Ad for a City library. (It was losing readership and wanted to build on the fact that they were free to use)

Kevin laid a lot of emphasis on using the word “Free” in the limited 3 lines space.

Logic: if you are free, mention it to the whole world.

For designing an Ad for Divvymyride.com, I began by searching “carpool” on Google.

I soon realized that almost all of the carpool sites are free to use. (they make money from Ads and nominal commissions).

Since we don’t ask for commissions and don’t even have Ad revenues, I had to take his advice. Still I had my suspicions.

Frankly, I had expected the results :D. My sample size is around 8500.  Have a look at how the Ads are performing.

Google Ad performance

You can see that the Ad that is doing the best (#1) does not mention anything about the site being “free”.

(yes there is a Call for action: “Try a fresh approach to carpooling”)

I have already run many variation of the Ad and consistently, the Ads with words “fresh approach to carpooling” got me a better result.

You would expect “Try Free Carpool” (#3) would have fared better, nope.

(Actually I have my reservations for words like “Green” “Eco Friendly”, they are simply overused on the internet these days)

My Lesson? Look at your competition and then try to differentiate yourself. (I am sure, I learnt that in his class too).

Another thing that I re-learnt: The classic funnel

3000 impressions –> 30 clicks –> 3 users accounts. Paying Google 40-50c per click, I am going to be broke very soon  :D

Best Regards,

-mkg

Hi Folk,

Check of our new Flyer. Comments, suggestions? You can download it here dmr_flyerrev2

Flyer rev 2