Buzz Marketing - Live and Uncensored
****UPDATE**** - Since publishing this article, the Devil story has reached the Digg.com homepage and has had almost 15,000 unique visitors today thus far
Yesterday I had a phone call from a client who said: “Dean, Self improvement seems really popular, can you do a self improvement article for my site and make it a global viral and buzz success?”
Sure, I thought, I will walk on water while I am it.
But I like a challenge, so I agreed.
It is now approx 18 hours later, and the buzz article has been created.
What I am going to do today is not only show you my thinking behind creating this article, but also, I will show you in real time, the progress of the article, and whether it becomes a viral success or yet another blog post for the Internet scrap heap.
My Buzz Self Improvement Article
Let’s start by showing you the buzz, self improvement article I created: self improvement advice from the devil
I will explain my thoughts behind the concept and the buzz angle in a moment. But first I want to show the article in action, live, as we speak: Digg Article - 100 Diggs thus far
Before I show you some of the stats and where it has started spreading to, I would like to talk a little behind my thinking for the article itself.
The Concept
There were two things that struck me when I was given this assignment:
1) There are zillions of self improvement articles already clogging the net
2) They are pretty much all the same
So I wanted to use these two factors to create some buzz, and to help give me article an angle.
So I did this by starting my article with the following introduction:
“The Internet is full of self improvement advice. You can’t browse a blog these days without someone telling you how you should be living your life.
Well it is about time we shook things up a little…
Allow me to introduce to you: Self Improvement Advice from the Devil”
In these few short lines I have already made the reader angry about the fact that there are so many crappy self help tips on the net. If the reader agrees, then we have invoked emotion, and that emotion is anger (possibly the most powerful viral emotion).
So now I have got an emotion with the intro, I can lead to the content itself.
The Content
There are already thousands of 10+ page articles on self improvement. We don’t need another, and I don’t fancy spending all afternoon writing one. It is better to work smart and not hard, so I went through my notes for the past two years and found a section that I call “Inspirational Stuff”. Essentially this is a few pages of quotes that inspire or amuse me.
I gathered all the quotes that were different from the norm, and I made a few tweaks and bang, 6 minutes later I had my content.
Easy hey?!?
Content Formatting
Content formatting is basically the way you display your content. We all know that huge chunks of text all crammed together look awful, and will basically lose the attention of the reader. So sites like Johncow.com use a decent sized font, a lot of white spacing and colourful images to help the content formatting.
Personally, I also like to do shorter paragraphs than the norm, this helps make the content more skimmable.
Anyway, unfortunately for me, I know from first hand experience the theme at Retired at 21 is a bit of a bitch! It doesn’t align images very well, the font is not great, and it all looks a bit of a mess.
So all I could do was add one small image to the content. Luckily I found a good image that matched the theme of the blog, and was amusing/unique enough to stand out.
Digg.com
The article was submitted to Digg a few hours later. The added bonus was that it was submitted by “SuperNova17″, who is one of the top 5 users of Digg.
As we speak it is now 19 hours since it was submitted, and the article has 101 digg votes.
Digg Traffic
The vast majority of Digg traffic comes from getting on the main page, but my stats show that I am getting an average of 31 Digg referrals per hour (from the past 19 hours).
Also, the article is currently in the “Offtopic - Hot News” section. So that helps give it a boost.
Sowing the Seed Crappy Analogy
With viral marketing you are essentially sowing a seed. You want to make that seed as unique and strong as possible, and then you have to hope that some wind comes and spreads your seed.
Luckily my seed has been blown to numerous sites already.
Stumbleupon Success - as you can see, it has been a huge hit at Stumbleupon.
Mixx Success - It also has started to do well at Mixx.
In fact, it even got onto the main buzz page at Stumbleupon at one point.
Statistics Thus Far
Personally I doubt it will hit the Digg main page. But I don’t want you to think that it is a case of all or nothing, here are the stats for today since midnight:
What I want you to focus on here are two sets of numbers:
Average per day = 179 (not a huge amount, but it is still a small blog)
Today = 11,184 (That was from one hour ago)
Summary
The purpose of this LIVE case study was to show you the effects as they happen. So many people wait until something is successful and then edit out the rubbish parts, I want to show you all of it, warts and all. I don’t know if it is brave, or stupid, but it is certainly different, and that is the message I always try and portray: there are millions of blogs and sites on the net, you have to find an angle to give your content the buzz factor.
I will let you all know if anything big happens with this article. I hope you have enjoyed this insight into a live viral experiment.
Note
I previously published a three part buzz marketing guide to Johncow.com, I have since had some fancy designers turn it into a PDF package and make it look all fancy and bright 
If you would like a free copy of the case study, and would like first beta notification of my “Web Traffic Orgasm” book, then you can get this for free here: Web Traffic Orgasm Free Case Study
By Dean Hunt - If you would like Dean to guest blog at your blog or website, then contact him at: deanhunt08@gmail.com
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
[...] You can see the full post with screenshots here: Buzz Marketing live and uncensored [...]
Interesting read Dean, and very impressive results might i add!
Thanks Neil. Much appreciated.
I am sure it will give people an insight into how this sort of thing works. Also, it is live and un-edited, so anything can happen.
Dean
Great work Dean
You are the worlds best Buzz Marketer.
Proven Fact!
Dean is amazing at buzz marketing! A jedi in disguise!
Well, I must say, quite impresive.
Some great information and effort put into this to inform others… Excellent!
Regards,
Scott.
Nice to see it live in the flesh. Content/Presentation/Timing are all key. How did you get it submitted by SuperNova17 ?
[...] Dean politely pointed out a post that has more information on how to write a post that gets Buzz & Viral success. It is a live demo of how it is doing and it just launched. The article is funny and the [...]
It has just hit the DIGG homepage guys.
As far as I know, this is the first EVER social media case study done BEFORE the outcome was known.
For info, I sent my newsletter the info last night, and at the time there were 28 diggs. So it is really exciting to see it live as opposed to one week later.
I am taking screenshots like a mad man so that I can show you all what happens during a global buzz success.
Yay for front page, keep digging people
amazing experiment! i really want to learn this buzz marketing thing. you’re a genius!
Its That Time Of The Year Competition, Week 2!
Wow, a week goes fast doesn’t it? We now have a winner of week 1, the $10 and 1 Month Free PR3 Backlink…Congratulations to Angel of World Of Angel. Okay, so it is not an xbox but hey, keep entering, you might get lucky. Also it is nice to s…
Hey Cow, write an article for me! Thanks buddy.
Good work
[...] Over at JohnCow.com, I saw a great display of buzz marketing. It wasn’t by the Cow however, but by a guest blogger, Dean Hunt. In under 24 hours, he took the topic of self-improvement, and churned out an article that made the front page of Digg. He was then good enough to chart his progress. [...]
Hi Dean,
Great concept and execution. This shows being unique is highly HIGHLY underrated.
nice work cow - I bet now you are getting tons of email saying to do a guest post article for all these other sites - btw would you want to do done for me
Ian,
Yes, I have been getting emails asking to do guest posts. Things are hectic at the moment, but keep sending your emails and I will get back to you.
Dean
Wow!! I was looking at the comments and who they are from. There are a ton of people here from many different areas. I’m suprised at this; more than I probably should be though.
It’s now at 582 DIGGS!!!!!
Wow, you are getting avery impressive amount of Digg traffic.
Excellent work cow, keep up the excellent work.
This is just out of curiosity, but would it be possible to get a rough estimate at the end of this as to the Digg views to RSS Subscriber conversion ratio?
You have copied some “bumperstickers” from the internet, packaged them nicely and hit the digg. As weird as it might seem, this combination of non-unique content was received well by the diggers. Yet another proof that he shouldn’t bother writing unique articles, if we can just throw some “mottos” that are funny.
I am not picking up on you. What you did was excellent and it proved a good idea. My diplease was to actually go read that article and find some lines that made me laugh years ago .. The maketing strategy .. pure genius. The content …
Congrats on your DIGG front page MILK MAN
-Mike
This is great. I loved your article, short and concise. It’s really hard, you know, to get a buzz like this. We all want to make a buzz from all our articles but, the truth is, we should pick very carefully which articles we want to digg.
Very interesting. I have downloaded the free ebook. Let’s see how this can help me to increase traffic.
[...] pika Com, a je kmalu prerasel okvire zabavljaštva :) - JohnCow pika Com. Gre pa še za eno posre?eno zgodbico sicer gostujo?ega bloggerja, ki je spravil svojo objavo na prvo stran Digg-a. _blogorolaHonType = ‘p09w’; [...]
Nice, looks like 850 diggs now
[...] Recently I showed you the net’s first ever Live Buzz Experiment. [...]
Impressive results - I have followed Dean’s blog for a few weeks now and I must say the results he saw in this experiment are no fluke.
Now after sitting on the sidelines watching and learning I have decided to try a buzz article myself - following all the tips I have learned from Dean and this experiment. Here is the article 7 reasons why you will never make money online
thanks for posting the experiment and helping us all learn.
Chris