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 recently experienced this with BizNetTravel, a business blog I help a client publish on the travel sector. In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s quite a good blog that gets too little recognition and traffic for the effort I and Adrants’s Steve Hall put into it. The other day I wrote a post about a funny service called ScooterMan (click the link for details). As an afterthought, I added a picture of a woman in a bikini with a scooter (that I actually stole from someone else’s site who linked to my post). As another afterthought, I submitted the link to CollegeHumor.
I didn’t check the logs for a couple of days, but CollegeHumor published the link. Fark then picked up the link from CollegeHumor and also pointed to BizNetTravel.
KA-BOOM!!!
A site that normally gets a few hundred visitors (on a good day) suddenly got nearly 10,000 visitors on a Sunday. It’s slowed down since, naturally, but we’re still way over normal in the residual traffic. The link has also gotten picked up by many other smaller funny link sites.
Just thought I’d share that happy technique. 🙂
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. What’s the demographics of Fark’s readership?
Comment by Olivier Travers — August 24, 2004 @ 3:36 pm
That’s a fair point. In the case of BizNetTravel, the immediate result is that we have not converted a lot of traffic. But I take a more nuanced view.
For one thing, we responded by putting together a few special offer travel packages targeted to the 20-something set that I suppose is Fark and CollegeHumor’s mainstay, cheap three-day trips to London and Las Vegas.
Also, I’m not sure that older folks don’t also read Fark. I do, and I’m…let’s just say a good bit older than you, Olivier. Besides, folks in their 20s also travel — to college, home to Thanksgiving, on spring break, on Europe in the summer. They’re not an insignificant demographic for us.
Lastly, as a blog we can benefit from the exposure among bloggers, who are certainly among Fark’s audience. It started with a link from CollegeHumor, spread to Fark and now we have links also from LinkSwarm.com, NotWorkSafe.com, DrinkALot.com, and other smaller sites. Granted, those domain names may sound a bit flaky, but it all goes to exposure, which at this point we need. And none of them can hurt our Google rank.
True, if you’re selling B2B products, this may not be your best strategy, but for a travel agent, I will take the traffic.
Comment by Rick Bruner — August 24, 2004 @ 4:52 pm
So your advice is really not only to try to trigger such a farking, but to be ready to channel it to a relevant marketing offer. I wasn’t expecting less from an old seasoned fart like you!
Comment by Olivier Travers — August 29, 2004 @ 3:01 am
In order to do the Fark thing, first one must be sure to have sufficient bandwidth so they don’t become Farked. Total Farkers revel in their ability to quickly overload a site, then the regular Farkers bitch and moan that they never got to see whatever the source of the post was before it crashed.
We all recently learned that Drew gets paid for some of these listings as well… so it wouldn’t hurt to open up your wallet. There are a lot of funny people over there to compete with if you’re going to rely on the organic way.
And it’s difficult to figure out what Fark’s demos are. They’re young, poor, old, successful… but they all drink beer and visit soft porn sites.
Yeah, OLD Farker here.
Comment by RichW — August 29, 2004 @ 11:49 pm
Nice idea, Rick. Thanks for this one, and all your posts.
Comment by Steve Tobin — August 30, 2004 @ 7:36 pm
Hey, not all of us Farkers are swilling and, well, you know. I doubt getting Farked would do our site much good, since we’re pretty specialized, but it might be worth a shot–though it probably would crash our site if we suddenly got a huge spike in traffic.
Thanks to Rich W. for pointing me toward this blog–great insights, Rick! I look forward to reading it regularly.
Comment by Sue Pelletier — September 1, 2004 @ 9:53 am
Heh. Thanks, Rick, that was brilliant! I submitted to collegehumor.com a day or two ago and first noticed a few stragglers trickling in this afternoon to a brand new blog that had maybe 80 hits so far this month. And most of those were probably me.
In the last few hours, 1267 people have stopped by. After reading the comments above I hastily pasted up a special offer for visitors from collegehumor.com and attached a link to the post they were coming in on.
Don’t know how much biz it will generate yet, but I can’t wait to find out. Great idea, and I owe you one!
Comment by johntunger — April 18, 2005 @ 11:56 pm
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
Trackback by john t. unger studio — April 23, 2005 @ 10:09 am
“… but they all drink beer and visit soft porn sites.”
not all of us farkers drink. but yes, every last one of us visits soft porn sites. Thought i should clear that up.
Comment by superfreeq — April 4, 2006 @ 7:01 pm