Colnect advertising on TechCrunch

Do you want to know how effective advertising on TechCrunch is?

A few months ago, Colnect has won the Startup2.0 competition in Spain. The prize chosen was an advertisement space on TechCrunch, a world known technology blog.

Though it took way too long time (most of which was not my fault), the following ad is now finally displayed:



It will run for a week (started 2 days ago) and I will report how many clicks on it were made. This information may be interesting for those considering advertising on TechCrunch, as it's seemingly quite expensive in comparison to Google's AdWords.

Colnect has sitelinks on Google

Google sitelinks are links shown under some sites in a search results page.

Colnect now finally has sitelinks as the following image shows:



To see how it looks now, simply Google: Colnect.

They are supposed to be somewhat helpful in convincing users to click on one of your results and so that's good news for Colnect. I'd like to accredit it to some recent SEO efforts I've made but the truth is one never really knows...

The odd thing is how these links are chosen by Google's "automatic" process. The words chosen for quicklinks are "Stamps", "Phonecards", "Countries" and "Monedas".
The first two seem a perfect choice as they frequently appear on Colnect and are really a part of what the site is all about. The last two are quite a weird twist of Google's algorithm as "Countries" actually refers to the Banknote catalog - countries list on Colnect and the second one goes to the Spanish version of the coins page, rather than the English one.

Any tips on how their "automatic" algorithm works and how I could optimize for it would be appreciated. Until then, I am, as most, at the mercy of the Google gods.

Collectors on Colnect - over 5,000

Colnect Colnect has passed the mark of 5,000 registered collectors. This is an increase of over 45% from 5 months ago. Considering the lack of true marketing efforts, it is an impressive achievement.

How do collectors learn about Colnect?

As Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection and semi-automatically manage swaps with other collectors from around the world, it's the collectors' own interest to have their collector friends join the site. Why would a collector go through the swap and wish lists of another collector manually when a match to his own lists can be done with a click?

So what's next?

Colnect will expand to more collectible fields as requests come from existing members of the community. There are currently already 5 categories (stamps, coins, paper money, phone cards and bottle caps) and a few more are now being worked on by collectors.
Additional services, most of which were requested by the community, are being implemented and will soon be announced.

Happy collecting :)