A great Blog Promotion Tip from Rick E. Bruner

I recently had a great experience using a tip from Rick E. Bruner's Business Blog Consulting: More on Promoting Your Blog: Get Farked. I recommend reading the entire post (and comments) at his site, but the technique in a nutshell is thus:

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled Promoting Your Blog with some advice about driving traffic to your blog. Since then, I came up with another really good technique: get Farked.

Here's how you do it:

A) Write a funny post. This step is a doozie, because you may not be funny. Really what you need to do is find some original, offbeat content. Observe something that others haven't about the world (e.g., a wacky business idea someone has put in place, as was my case recently — see below).

    a1) Adding a picture of a scantily clad woman probably helps, as Adrants can attest.

B) Submit the link to your funny, scantily clad post to Fark and/or CollegeHumor. These sites, largely collections of funny links, get absolutely sick traffic.

C) Cross your fingers and hope they accept your submission for publication.

D) If they deem your post worthy and link to it, watch your traffic counter spin like a pin wheel in a hurricane.

I followed Rick's advice last week and gave this a try… It turned out to have some pretty nice side effects in addition to just making the stats spin. Read the extended post entry to get the full dope.

I posted a link at Collegehumor.com to a page on my ArtBuzz blog featuring one of my bottle cap mosaics. I figured anything to do with beer was likely to interest college students. In fact, I'd found the site before when researching other bottle cap art… students had posted a bunch of pictures of various beer cap projects they had done in their dorm or frat.

I wrote up a funny headline and caption and submitted it with a picture. I also submitted a straight link. The picture didn't get picked up, but the link did and went initially to raw.collegehumor.com (a pay subscription version of the site which features more content). A few vistors began to trickle in. After six visitors in a couple hours, I figured it was pretty much a wash and quit checking for the day.

That evening when I checked stats again, I found that 1267 people had been to the blog and the link had been moved to the front, free, page of collegehumor. By the time the traffic began to dwindle, the number had spiked to 22585 in about four days. Not too shabby for a blog that had only been live a couple weeks and had only had 81 visitors. Heck, half of those first 81 hits were probably me clicking entries to get the perma-link address. Not bad at all.

Once I saw that that the link had taken off, I took another bit of advice from Rick's blog and quickly crafted a special offer aimed especially at the college market. Well, as close as I could shoot, anyway. Rick was promoting a travel site and could offer discount fares… I'm selling art, and could really only do my best to make it more affordable to college budgets. About 10% of the kids visited the link, but none of them took bait on buying a berr cap fish at $100 off.

Out of about 22,000 visitors only about a dozen or so actually checked out other pages on the blog, and only one left a comment. None subscribed to the RSS feed, and I have no way to know if any of them emailed the link to a friend, but since I didn't see any webmail addresses in my stats and referrers, I doubt it. One visitor posted a link to the page on a bulletin board at beeradvocate.com. That seemed to be about as much value as I was gonna get. I was initially inclined to agree with one of the commenters at Rick's blog, who asked:

Not that I want to rain on your parade, but what good does that extra traffic for the business? Unless the site is targeting the kind of people likely to read Fark, the traffic is not going to convert.

While the CollegeHumor frenzy was going on, my stats and referrers page was rolling over so quickly that I really didn't have a chance to see where else, if anywhere, visitors were coming in from. I was really only able to assess this once the traffic had died down a bit. And that's when I noticed the real payoff.

The blog had climbed google massively in the four days of increased traffic. I had kind of assumed that google might asign more juice to the single entry that had been getting traffic, but it seems that all the entries in the blog were getting better positioning than expected. For a while there, I managed to hold the top of page one with a number of search terms. For "Rennie Macintosh" my fence inspired by his work was in the top five, but search for "Charles Rennie MacIntosh" and I was  towards the middle of page two. I've never in the past beeen able to get anywhere near the top of google for keywords such as ironwork or mosaic— not only did I not have the traffic, I was competing in a pretty saturated market.

Update: I just checked, and found that not only can google slide you up the list quickly, a site can also expect to slide down just as rapidly. I'm still number one for any combination of folk art and bottle cap, but the other posts are slowly sinking. Which must mean it's time to generate another frenzy. It seems that I might, with luck, be able to combine material that farks well with entries that target more serious buyers searching google for unique products. It's certainly worth experimenting with, so long as anything I post to the link sites is actually of interest to the readers.