Many of you have written to me privately indicating that the first monthly Performancing Experiment has been a huge gold-mine of information – advice in action, as one of you put it.
That’s exactly why I decided to start these experiments. I find that unless I see advice in action, I normally don’t act on the advice.
While the experiment is not yet over, and will continue through the end of 2007, I did want to provide an update and offer some reflections:
- As of July 11th, I’m seeing front page Google results on a search for “harry potter and the deathly hallows” (this could change of course, as Google might flip some switch)
- I’m currently conducting an interview with the Global Literacy Project, the charity to which all proceeds from the project are going
- The comments on the Harry Potter blog are starting to go through the roof
- The viral email that I sent out seems to have failed.
- The Harry Potter for charity program is underperforming.
In my estimation, while the blog is still only about 3-4 weeks old, it has established itself as an authority on book 7 in the Harry Potter series.
So what I’ve discovered so far is that it’s much easier to establish oneself as an authority in the SERPS than it is to create a “phenomenon” – the One Million Harry Potter Books for Charity was an attempt to create a phenomenon (1 million books is a lot). So far, we’ve only gotten about 20 books ordered through the site.
The good news is that we still have the entire year of 2007 to generate funds for the charity. Then, we can probably sell the blog and donate all proceeds to charity as well. And I’m also going to be volunteering my services to help the Global Literacy Project setup a blog and promote their website. Even when you don’t “hit it big” there’s still much to gain.
Overall, I’d call this experiment a success. We didn’t create a “phenomenon” but we did learn some valuable lessons and have created an authority website.