A marketing analysis of using guerilla tactics to boost page hits, wrapping up 'Attempting to Artificially Inflate My Page Hits For No Particular Reason' week.
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Astroturfing campaigns work on the crowd mind. If a person thinks that a lot of other people believe something, they are more receptive to the idea. It's the "Everyone else is doing it" approach to marketing.
Astroturfing strives for verisimilitude, and is most effective when the message is one that actually resonates with people. It is very difficult to do well, and if it fails it will create blow-back because there's nothing people hate more than discovering they're being manipulated. This is true of marketing in general, but more so with astroturfing.
Astroturfing is Wal-Mart creating and funding 'Working Families for Wal-Mart' to appear as if actual Wal-Mart families had joined together in a grassroots campaign to support the company; guerilla marketing is Office Max's dancing elves.
Well, maybe the Office Max example isn't that great; it was the only project that went viral out of twenty that they tried. Guerilla marketing is best when it's low-budget and outside the mainstream. That's why it's called guerilla. Office Max may have been better served plowing all that cash into a more traditional marketing campaign.
Since my page launched almost a week ago I've tried various guerilla tactics to see how they would affect page hits. I have discovered some amusing and useful information along the way.
First, let me apologize now to the Linux folks over at Slashdot who showed up to see great design and instead saw a semi-broken page. I was aware of the issue before launch. I made my wife switch to Ubuntu a few years ago, and she's sill kind of mad that the site doesn't work on her computer. This site is using Flash in a slightly unconventional way, and since Flash on Linux doesn't do transparent backgrounds yet, that big black box you see covering the content (while not intentional) wasn't a big enough bug to warrant fixing immediately. Normally a web site will see maybe one out of a hundred hits from a Linux box. Unless that site advertised itself in a sig on Slashdot, hotbed of Linux users.
I don't know how many people read the comments I posted with my website in the sig, but I only got a handful of hits from it, and most people didn't stick around very long. If people just graze your site, then they really aren't interested in what you're selling anyway. It's not as useful to target your campaign to an audience who doesn't need your product.
Getting a Daily Deviant on deviantART.com was by far the largest number of hits, mostly localized to one day. There are still one or two hits a day coming in, though. Coolhomepages.com, on the other hand, has been sending a larger but steadier stream of hits through; Ian's site still gets between 2 and 20 hits per day, and the initial two-day spike for both sites was around 100 hits per day. These hits are more likely to stick around and check things out, but it's too early to say if they'll buy web design or not.
My loyal eight readers will note that there are new Digg and Reddit buttons on the site. Later I'll be adding Fark and some Buzz thing from Yahoo. I'm collecting them like stickers. I submitted a story to Digg to see how it worked, and predictably, nobody cared. I'm more of a Slashdot guy anyway.
These hit-inflating tests aren't really astroturfing, since at no point do I misrepresent what I'm doing. If I were to sprinkle the web address in forums pretending that I had no connection to the site then it would be astroturfing. Submitting your own blog to Digg is getting close. Posting on a forum with your site in your signature is guerilla marketing.
One thing I learned is that outside of the home page my web page gets about one click before people will wander off, unless there's a good reason for them to stay after clicking. This makes sense from a marketing standpoint: you need an obvious call to action. In my case, most people check out Ian's site, which is what I want them to do.
Be honest, now: do those Digg and Reddit buttons make my blog look fat?
