Everything is impossible until someone does it

So your blog is ticking along nicely at 2-3 visitors each day. People don’t stay long. Many have got there by mistake through mistyping the URL, some are not even human and read the content you slaved over purely as a means of helping others consider not reading it when it appears in search results. This is a common complaint and surely the reason behind why many bloggers pack up and go home after a short time, leaving poorly thought through crusts at the arse-end of the internet.

There is a solution, but it is not one that will work for everyone, nor can it be easily defined or described. I am of course talking about viral marketing. This involves tapping into the deepest and most easily amused section of a person’s brain and rummaging around until people feel the need to share their amusement. This has of course been popularised by various videos on YouTube, low quality emails forwarded to the point of exhaustion (think FW:FW:FW etc) and tv programmes like “You’ve Been Framed” who has been doing it for years. Luckily ITV viewers hadn’t got email yet in those days and probably spread word using graffiti or by screaming. Although I think it was never entirely clear whether public clumsiness, freakery from Beadle or poorly scripted obesity was the real draw.

Yesterday I posted about the cake I made based on a Google Analytics dashboard. This was typical of the pointless but gratifying activities I get up to that most people class as “too much time on your hands”, “childish”, or “a bit girlie”. Now somehow this caught a lot of people’s attention because I got many hundred visitors in the 24 hours after it got posted. Although this is brilliant, I am keen to understand what it was exactly about this stunt that caused so many people to look, so that it can be repeated and I I can further extend the reach of this site. Sky News have cottoned onto to this phenomenon of viewer excitement for the strange and regularly accompany their main headlines with scenes of people falling over, people surviving horrific accidents and pets with mildly human traits. They might as well ditch the news altogether, but then we would come fall circle and be back in Beadle territory.

If you correlate cakes with page views, this is the shape of things to expect

Now the cake in question was not overwhelmingly popular in reality….it didn’t even get finished. But then I suppose looking at a picture is far more passive than having to actually operate one’s jaws and eat the cake and most people would rather go for the easy option. I guess that makes sense. The tweet to Avinash over at Google clearly played a big part here, since he emailed out the link to many in Google on all accounts. Good job. Perhaps all I need to do is create some kind of odd looking item vaguely related to a product or service that has plenty of press and then lots of traffic will be guaranteed?

A simple search for “Google Analytics Cake” doesn’t yet return a link to my site, although my tweet does appear fairly high up. Typically, a picture someone else took of the cake ended up top in Google, although I’m not entirely sure why. I guess not many people are likely to search those keywords anyway, so maybe this isn’t too much of a problem. I tried to sneak in a few links into a few other random blogs in reference to comments they made that included both “Google Analytics” and “Cake”….but I doubt this will have much impact. The key is to tap into the brain of a key influencer on the topic and get linked to from somewhere that plenty of people go. Problem is of course, these people are probably allergic to cake.

So I am back to 2-3 visits each day and thats fine by me, at least until I release the next crafty virus of content. The fortune cookie I got yesterday at a chinese restaurant I went to (Review to follow shortly) just said “Everything is impossible until someone does it”. It applies here somehow I think.