He blogs about poems, and he started out with a pathetic 10 readers a day.Within two months, he had a two-book deal with a major publisher.
It’s not easy to attract a lot of traffic—anybody who blogs knows that. Meet Greg Pincus, who used a system of viral marketing to create buzz for his blog, which he launched on Feb. 21 last year.
Greg–a screenwriter, children’s book author, volunteer librarian and a dad–writes poems as a hobby. His blog encouraged readers to submit poems using a series of numbers known as the Fibonacci sequence.
Readers were intrigued. They passed the idea on to their friends, who wrote and submitted their poems. Greg’s blog attracted the attention of Slashdot, a heavily trafficked blog that featured him on April 7 and brought more than 32,000 people to his blog.
Shortly afterward, the New York Times published an article about Greg. That resulted in calls from publishers, including Arthur A. Levine Books at Scholastic.
“Little did I know that a two-book deal would result after only two months,” Greg said.
Blogging expert Denise Wakeman says Greg started blogging the smart way: “He knew he needed traffic to his blog to really leverage the power of online marketing, and he set out to recruit readers through use of a viral gimmick.”
He’ll explained how he did it, and how other bloggers can replicate a viral campaign for their own businesses and blogs, during a telephone seminar Tuesday night called “32,000 Readers and a 2-Book Deal: How to Launch and Profit from a Viral Blogging Campaign.”
Denise and her partner, Patsi Krakoff, who are also known as The Blog Squad, recorded it. If you missed it, it’s available as a CD.
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