Crazy Project of the Month
Hooray, two readers!
Ok, this one will take the cake for the most bizzare project of the month as far as I’m concerned. This was the most off-the-wall, crazy thing I decided to do on the Internet lately.
A friend of mine is a regular Mr. Fixit. Recently, he whipped out this tool he made – a neat little wooden compass for, you know, drawing circles. It uses an ordinary No. 2 pencil, which would draw on anything. By then, I had a massive “I used to work in construction” flashback, remembering desperately drawing much needed circular shapes with plates, ashtrays, anything round I could find … and, of course, a chunk of string.
The tool was so neatly executed out of scrap wood, I couldn’t resist buying the domain and making a one-pager. It took even less time than my Basement site, a total of about 40 minutes. A quick Photoshop crop-job, some circley artwork in Illustrator, an Irfanview batch resize and sharpen job, two absolutely-positioned div’s, and there you have it:
Wooden Compass, ladies and gentlemen.
For a mere $44.95 you can own a beautiful, handmade, faux-antique, real-antique design, durable, sturdy, blah, blah, carpenter’s compass. Too much, you say? How ’bout fifty bucks for a wrech at Sears? If it’s too much, you can go back to drawing cracked-out-looking circles with a piece of crappy shoelace and a hunk of brick.
Of course, no ads. Strictly sales. I’ll keep you posted. I think it’s totally worth the 40 minutes and $8.00 for the domain name.
You have to keep us updated on your one page – strictly sales site. I’d be curious to see how many sales you can make with it. I often think that having google adsense on a page may deter someone from buying – and then they click away from the site… you get pennies instead of the bigger bucks.
… nice one pager too :)
Comment by Empress — March 28, 2006 @ 9:49 am
Thanks.
It going to be a few months before the compass site is anywhere near a decent rank in Google. I’m sure it is going to be a few more before it cranks out a sale. I don’t discount other, more contextual-based search engines, though.
Google is like a great big high school popularity contest.
Be sure I will post every little detail about it.
Comment by How To Be Poor — March 28, 2006 @ 10:36 am
Nice work!
1) I think your price point might be too high.
2) Good idea not putting ads on the site.
3) How about buying a few keywords on google to point to your site? Set a budget of $0.50 or $1 per day. That would drive traffic and also move you up in rankings on google.
Wes
Comment by Wes — March 28, 2006 @ 10:41 am
Good idea on the AdWords, I’ll look into it. I’ve never done that.
I think charging fifty bucks (shipping included) is not a bad deal for an “eternal” tool that’s completely hand-carved, possibly out of oak (depending on why my friend is willing to use). It takes him about an hour to whip one out … after a few bucks for me, the price is up there.
I suppose it could be $39.95. If I see a bad conversion rate on my stats, I’ll drop the price.
Comment by How To Be Poor — March 28, 2006 @ 11:19 am
A step in the right direction! Perhaps you can try posting an ad on Ebay/Craigslist also.
Comment by Neville — March 28, 2006 @ 11:20 am
Love your blog. I just wanted to point out that you probably meant to say plate in the following sentence…”You’ve used a place (sic), a saucer, a cup …” IMO, I think the price point is high and if your buddy could set up some sort of ‘jig’ I bet he could produce dozens in a very short amount of time. I’d shoot for the good ole, $19.95 price. After all, it works for infomercials right?
Comment by DD — March 28, 2006 @ 6:11 pm
Awesome, thanks – fixed the typo.
I’m getting lots of same advice – lower price. However, I’m going to consider this an experiment inside an experiment. I’ll keep the price for a few weeks and see how many people it turns down.
I just paid $90 for a decent torque wrench for my Benz. You get what you pay for when it comes to tools.
Again, thanks.
Comment by How To Be Poor — March 28, 2006 @ 6:23 pm
I know you’ve already made the background image and all.. but IMO it could be a better one? seems too big somehow..
like, it made the compass looks cheesier than it should be. the other pictures doesn’t show the compass off like that, but the big up-close one on top made me feel that way.
I don’t know, it’s a subjective thing but yeah just my 2c.
Comment by Cap — March 28, 2006 @ 11:01 pm
oh yeah ditto on the torque wrench. I bought this cheesy $25 one on ebay awhile back, and man it’s off like about 5 lbs.ft after awhile. ridiculous.
Comment by Cap — March 28, 2006 @ 11:03 pm
ah geez. not trying to inflate ur comment count but, another IMO thing.. I think it may be better to have the place order button somewhere above the fold or near the top of the page, maybe a smaller “buy now” button *shrug*
Comment by Cap — March 28, 2006 @ 11:07 pm
Image too big – tired of linear perpendicular layouts, wanted something new – besides, it fits into a 800px-wide box. Image too cheesy and psychodelic – well, I was listening to Porcupine Tree :)
Good suggestions, but not changing anything – I want to see if this works the way it is so that later I could write a big post entitled “Kids, any crapsicle you throw on the Internet wil eventually sell!”
Comment by How To Be Poor — March 28, 2006 @ 11:09 pm
Agreed on the smaller button.
Comment by How To Be Poor — March 28, 2006 @ 11:10 pm
You know if you could get them to mention that on some kind of site like uber review you’d be set.
Comment by Mike — March 29, 2006 @ 7:58 am
I like the look of the site – not a bad little wacky idea – i hope it works. Have you sold any yet ?
Ed
Comment by Eddy — April 8, 2006 @ 5:55 am
best buy office chair…
Wow that’s a nice post ….
Trackback by best buy office chair — July 22, 2006 @ 3:18 pm
Did you know that that site was hacked? I clicked on it and no compass, only a nasty note…
Comment by Jackie — August 20, 2006 @ 12:06 pm
…
rival…
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Nutrisystem diet review …
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gmarris…
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Trackback by gmarris — November 23, 2009 @ 8:30 am