Colnect is gaining some great traction. August 2009 had very good results. Below is a report from Google Analytics tracking usage of Colnect:
During August 2009, Colnect has been visited by over 40,000 people watching more than 1,800,000 pages Colnect. This is a traffic growth of nearly 30% and 20% respectively compared to the previous month.
In addition, the number of registered members on Colnect grew by
10.6% on August, reaching 5,651 members on September 1st.
Why is Colnect Growing?
Colnect's website, its main product, has been constantly improving. Responding to demands by collectors, the system is becoming easier and more functional to use. Some annoying bugs have been fixed as well. This encourages "word of mouth" viral spreading. Yes, it's a bit of a pat on the back but we know there's still a lot of work ahead.
Since the
winning of the Startup2.0 competition, media attention has helped the growth as well.
Some non-professional SEO has helped as well. Colnect contains a lot of original content and should be favored by search engines, given that they are properly presented with it. As the content of Colnect's catalogs is constantly growing, search engines have more Colnect pages to index.
But not all efforts were productive. These two paths followed with high hopes for incoming traffic yielded poor results: the
ads on TechCrunch (Colnect's prize of the Startup2.0 competition) and Colnect's
Twitter activity. Both brought a meager amount of incoming traffic with a relatively very high bounce rate, i.e users watching a single page and leaving.
Future Plans
Many planned product improvements will provide useful additional features and an overall better user experience. Many direct requests from collectors enjoying Colnect, usually the more "addicted" members, help us decide where we should be heading next.