This is a quick update from my last post.
Soon after posting my last article I went back to the helpwinmybet.com site and noticed Jim had created a forum to discuss his site. It had only been up about 15 minutes, and it had almost 2000 visits already. Hmmm…. I thought to myself, why not leech off a viral marketing campaign? I posted an article under the heading “Self Promotion” with a backlink to my site. It read:
“Seeing this site has had over 1780 visits in the last 15 minutes, I’m going to take full advantage of it and see how long my link to my website can stay up.
So here it is:
www.digitalfarm.co.za
Go visit it. And congrats Jim!
Minutes later everyone was cottoning on to the idea. Backlinks and self promoters were popping up everywhere. People were loving this free form of advertising.
Everytime I clicked refresh on my site, my traffic was increasing by 10 people. Woohoo! I was clicking refresh like a mad junkie, taking hit by hit. Very sad, but true.
It was time to go home though. I turned my PC off, went home, and dreamt of webstats.
This morning when I got into work I shuffled over to the helpwinmybet.com forum, and noticed my mate, the now very famous, Jim had written me a personal little note:
“ jim note: I’m tempted to let you keep it, but I know then I’ll have millions of people just posting their links and not talking about what’s really important – threesomes “
He’d taken my link off and replaced it with a link back to his site! The traffic from his site to mine had screetched to a stop.
Another post from Jim had been written a little below:
“Actually – Mark Forrester – put your link back on. I’ll leave this thread as a shameless self-promotion thread.”
This is after another 150 or so people had posted a link to their site. Mine was now a needle at the bottom of a very big haystack.
I’m a famous, shameless self-promoter though… for all of 5 minutes.
P.S. If you found my site through Jim’s site please leave a comment!
8 responses
Mmm…clever idea. And a short lived flame! It was probably worth all the hits you got too! Now the trick is to see if you can find some other place and repeat the experiment.
Hm, great idea, leach off a viral marketing campaign that hits it off, only down fall was that your initial flame was put out by Jim in an attempt to keep others from following in your footsteps. Jim’s mistake, rather than getting rid of the whole idea, just changing the back link to his site. Hah, yeah anyhow I skimmed through all the posts just to find your site, as I was quite intrested in seeing the site of the person who started the whole “Shameless self promotion thread”.. Anyhow good idea, and hey I agree with Jam, you should attempt the same on some other viral marketing campaigns, see how long your link stays, and how many hits you get off of it.
Rin I’m glad to see at least one person came from Jim’s site and made the effort to write a comment. Thanks.
Jam, I will defintely keep my eyes open for the next shameless self promotion space.
🙂
I found your site from a side-product of your marketing. Remembering helpwinmybet.com from when I visited a month ago, I wanted to go back and check the progress. Typing in http://www.helpwinmybet.com told me the server was down, so I googled it, and your website it the second or third hit for the google search string “helpwinmybet”. Not what you were going for, but hey, here I am!
Hmm, well I googled my way to here too as that site is offline now from what I can make out and I was hunting about to find out what happened to it. Jim’s site seems to have inspired a clone http://www.helpwinthisbet.com/ but no opportunities for posts and a repeat experiment yet.
How many of these are there out there?
just stumbled across your site while googling helpmewinmybet.
Help Dad win his bet to get his lazy child to mow the lawn.
🙂
Keep checking – when the hits start winding up maybe I will bang a forum up for shameless promoters.
hee hee hee
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