Looking at my visitor stats I am amazed how many people are surfing RentVine with mobile devices like the Iphone, Danger, Andriod and Palm. Perhaps I need to work on a mobile version of the site soon. Yes, some thing else to add to my do-to list.

So I got this great idea in the beginning of the summer that I would create some amazing tools for property managers to use and give them away for free in hopes to build traffic to my new rental site PickRent.com.

I created what I thought was a really cool web site template for property managers and a new mapping widget which took me about a month to build in my part time summer schedule.

But then I had a problem, I created this neat cool free stuff but no one knows about it, so then I came up with brilliant idea #2 to start an email marketing campaign directed towards property managers. Sounded simple enough, just let them know about it and they will come and use it since it is free. I thought I could convert perhaps 7-10% of the people.

So as a test, I gathered over 215 email addresses for property managers which was a pain in the butt and took way too much time, and then I created an email below:

I created the email in such a way that I could record what links people clicked on to see what they were interested in.

Here are the results.

• Out of the 215 emails, about 15 came back undeliverable (I knew that would happen)
• Only 7 people clicked on one or more links (that was depressing!)
• Most only clicked on only one link
• Most people seemed interested in the video I did with Marc Cunningham (which was not really the purpose of the email campaign – note to self; don’t do that again)
• Only two people were interested in my rental scam quiz
• Only two were interested in my rental scammer blacklist
• Three people were interested in my web site template
• Not one person clicked on my mapping widget which I thought was so cool and guessed tons of people would use.
• 0% conversion!

I thought I would get a lot of people opting out of the newsletter since I provided a quick one click unsubscribe link, but not one person did. Odd.

Yep, I would call this email campaign a failure. I bet I got a little bit of branding out of it but not much more than that.

Anyone know how else I can get the word out on my free tools that I thought were super cool?

When you look at your analytics data on your site it is hard to see what your visitor’s intent is.

But if you have a search box on your site (in my case on my blog on the right side) you can actually see what their intent is.

As you can see from above I have a disconnect on my site. People come to my blog looking for cities like Bismark North Dakota but since they are searching only within my blog they get returned no results and then move off my site.

What I need to go is install Google search on my site to have them search the entire site instead of just the blog.

I will work on that later. To learn more please watch these videos.

As you can see since I changed my blogging style and posting less often (and on other places) my traffic numbers for this blog have slipped.

File this one under shameful promotion: Day after day the past couple of weeks I keep hitting new traffic records. I am getting more and more traffic from Google. Perhaps it is because I got rid of the subdomains on this site back in October of last year.

I get a lot of traffic to my Denver page because I out rank everyone in the search engines.

I was looking at some of that data for the past month and thought it would be fun to see who is looking to move to Denver. The chart above is for search for houses for rent in Denver (not Colorado in general).

No suprise a lot of people from California want to move here because it costs less, Texas because it is not as hot and humid, and I have no idea why people want to leave Florida.

I came from Kansas 10 years ago, so I understand the need for Kansas people wanting to move to Denver. There are wonder people in Kansas but without the mountains it gets boring if you like to do outdoor stuff.

January must of been a stellar month for people searching for rentals because Feb took a slight hit and all the major sites are down in traffic.

Hotpads took a big jump in January – however I am thinking of taking them off the list since they are now displaying homes for sale.

Rentals had a very good month, actually better than last years peak month July.

RentalHomesPlus had a very good month as well.

RentalsOnline.com doubled their traffic – I gotta go check out why.