I did an 8-day sprint to launch my Build a Ruby Gem email course and documented my progress through this series of blog posts.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Weekend Update Summary

Happy Friday!

This morning I’m feeling well rested and finally on the home stretch. In the middle of the week, the remaining work felt overwhelming at times and I have a feeling that played in to me feeling exhausted.

Part of it was that each lesson has gotten substantially longer than I planned for. I think once I get in to the flow of writing, I tend to document everything for everyone. I don’t think everyone will need this level of detail, but I’d hate to leave it out, only to find that some users were left confused because of the lack thereof.

Here’s how the word count of each lesson shakes out so far:

• Day 1 - 941
• Day 2 - 1067
• Day 3 - 1738
• Day 4 - 868
• Day 5 - 1118

Looking at this now, I’ll probably go back and rework Day 3 to either split out some of the content, or remove it during editing depending on its value.

What I Accomplished Today

This morning I finished Day 5 of the Build a Ruby Gem Email Course. I’m happy with where it left off and can now say there’s only 1 (2 at most) more to write. And even those will be more wrap-up. All the code is finished.

I got in to the flow of writing pretty quickly this morning. I naturally woke up around 6am, so I was probably less in a daze when I started.

Marketing

I was looking forward to writing this section…Yesterday, I opened my inbox and saw this:

That’s my course link in the Ruby Weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a great weekly summary of the Ruby community and has several thousand subscribers. I had a feeling this would yield a significant bump in subscriptions and page views and boy was that true.

Page views were up 153% from the previous day:

And subscriptions for course updates were up 130%:

Herein lies the power of reaching your target audience…

I track conversions to the newsletter in Google Analytics and Ruby Weekly is kind enough to send a lot a campaign identifier with the link. Here are the channels that have converted the best:

30% of all newsletter clicks resulted in newsletter subscriptions…I’ll take it! Not far behind is the campaign I sent to my personal list announcing the email course, and next is links from Twitter. However, what this doesn’t show is that only 7 visitors arrived from Twitter referral links, so while 14% is pretty good, it’s a sample size that’s probably not worth trusting.

While I’ve read plenty about the power of email, I’ve not seen this effect in person until now. With these quick marketing recaps, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. After the course launches, I plan to spend more time with the numbers to get a better feel for what went well, and more so, what I should avoid in future launches.