It’s an astronomical, gratifying, amazingly large number of people around the globe.
Google Analytics shows that TeaJourney.pub has attracted visitors from 104 countries. Literally, every country in Western Europe where subscribers from UK and Germany lead; seven countries in South America, twelve countries in Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Iran. India is home to the third-largest number of subscribers. There is great support for Tea Journey in Nepal and Paki
stan and Sri Lanka.
There are only four countries in all of Asia where tea lovers have not visited the website… Iceland and the Caribbean Islands are represented. We love island people from the Azores and Madagascar and the Philippines to Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. Frank Miller paved the way in Thailand and Vietnam. A special shout to Kevin Gascoyne and Jeff Fuchs in my beloved Canada. There are now 2000+ paid subscribers and more than 18,000 names on our free newsletter list.
Our launch campaign lasted only 30 days…. that is now 1,500 days ago.
Let me share a quick story: On Thursday during the final week of the Kickstarter campaign Tea Journey was invited to attend a blazingly fast and fun #TwitterParty hosted by @urbanmommies, an online community of mothers founded by Jill Amery. A Twitter Party is a moment-in-time chat room that afforded us an opportunity to share our love for tea and trivia with @urbanmommies. Jill made a special appeal to support our Kickstarter project in the closing days of the campaign.
Together the Tea Journey team generated hundreds of tweets that led to hundreds of re-tweets that encouraged thousands of tea lovers to echo their support — which mushroomed into hundreds of thousands of individual contacts.
That single one-hour event brought us to the attention of almost 300,000 individual members of the @urbanmommies online community and their friends and it generated 5 million impressions globally. It was the GENIUS-INSPIRED work of Jennifer English… executed with precision by the Tea Journey partners, writers, and marketing staff.
Early in the week, Jennifer English sent out a call that mobilized her friends to organize an online contest with prizes for participants. Marketing director Ashley Sostaric-Finkes and her marvelous social media assistant Alexandra Enns joined the stream with the help of contributing editors Nicole Martin, Dan Robertson and Jennifer Quail, and bloggers Rachael Carter and Geoffrey Norman; and contributors Elyse Petersen and tea companies including Seven Cups and A Gift of Tea, Scandalous Tea, and Tea Wagon.
Together we shot a single bright beam in the night typing so fast we got lost in the moment. The resulting surge made Friday our single biggest day for paid subscribers.
Backers contributed more than $10,000 in the last 10 days of May to successfully fund the magazine with more than $128,000 in donations.
For this display of support, I am forever grateful,
Postscript: Four years later our journey continues.
Ron Studd continues: “When reading the magazine articles, I kept thinking ‘this is exactly what I need!’ Even for topics that I may be familiar with, there’s so much effort that went into making the content intuitive and interesting that any level of enthusiast will enjoy. It’s also just nice to know ‘I’m not the only one interested in this!’ ”
