So I’ve been letting my last experiment run for many months, and while it’s gotten more than 2,000 submissions… It’s pretty much all spam.
I was getting many submissions per day, which seemed great! But when I looked at the submissions, they almost all had throw-away Russian email addresses. Never a good sign.
So I decided to add a Captcha. Submissions plummeted, unsurprisingly.
It’s been about two weeks since I added that, and I have gotten a handful of submissions. However, I ran them through the website cleantalk.org, which identifies spam addresses, and learned that most of these, too, were spam.
It looks like I got maybe on legitimate submission in those two weeks.
I also didn’t have a single person legitimately reach out to me to start hosting, so I think that overall, there was 0% conversion. Not ideal
So I think it’s time to try something new.
New ad content is:
“Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress website? Email me at brian@pagecrafter.com and mention the code #FreeHosting10 for two free months of lightning-fast WordPress hosting. We will even migrate you for free!”
I can’t imagine it will be a whole lot more successful, but we’ll see! We could also make a variation that has a form submission but this seems nice and clean.
Stay tuned.
I haven’t changed it since then, and I’ve gotten one person who signed up this week.
However, I doubt he’ll actually pay later. He just wants the free hosting!