The Power of Creative Thinking

Remember that bizarre singing Google Pagerank video I created recently?

Did you think, “that was kinda funny Dean, but what was the point?”.

If so, read on…

This is an exclusive, behind the scenes look at my first attempt at combining powerful creative mindset techniques with video technology.

Ok, so for those of you who haven’t a clue what I am talking about, you can view the google pagerank spoof video here: singing pagerank

I posted the video on a Monday, and mentioned it via Twitter, where at the time, I had approx 850 followers.

Here is a small sample of the results:

Even famous Google engineer Matt Cutts heard about it.

Even the big names got in on the joke:

So what effect did this have on traffic?

It was a quiet week on my blog, traffic was down, but regardless, you can see the results here:

The thing to note here was that traffic went from around 800 pageviews in a day to over 4,000, which is quite a jump.

But the thing that really excited me was the backlinks the video received:

In total, there were over 200 sites linking the the video in the first few days alone.

Here is a tiny sample:

The value of these 200+ one-way backlinks, many of which contained terms like “google” & “pagerank” is phenomenol. Even at just $50 per link, that is over $1,000 in value in links alone. There are new links being added daily still.

But the value doesn’t stop there…

After approx 6 hours, I added an aweber opt-in form.

It wasn’t very pretty, and the copy was almost non-existent, but within 48 hours I had received 126 submissions and 103 double opt-in subscribers.

Again, not a HUGE number, but bear in mind that thus far, this experiment had used approx 8 minutes of my time.

So the ROI in time and money was impressive.

The Secondary Page Experiment

I did however notice that since adding the email opt-in form, the buzz died down.

So I created a second page, this one had no advertising text, no email forms, no ads whatsoever, I wanted to test if the lack of ads would make it difference.

IT DID!!!!

The test page was getting MORE traffic within 36 hours, to date, it has received over 5 times as much traffic, and almost double the amount of backlinks.

This confirmed a theory that I have had since day one: People don’t feel cool about promoting salesey content to their friends.

The page was picked up by some authority websites:

The site was also discussed in numerous languages, strangely, in Holland and France it was more popular than in English language sites.

It even did well on a Spanish Digg site.

What You Can Learn From This

There are loads of things you can take from this, here are a few:

Injecting personality into your marketing, website, and brand is becoming more and more powerful. Watch out for personality marketing in 2009. You heard it here first.

Agressive advertising and self-promotion will kill any chances of going viral. If you want to include ads, add them AFTER your content has gone global. NOT before.

You CAN monetize novelty content, you just need to be smart and moresubtle than usual.

Never underestimate the value of hundreds of one-way links from all over the globe. They will reap benefits for years and years to come. In fact, my rankings across the board have been boosted in Google already.

When my buddy Nick James heard about this, he asked Barry and I to speak at an event in London last week. So the was a nice side-benefit of buzz success.

Creative text is great, but creative VIDEO is the new powerhouse.

In 2009, video is likely to be a very popular factor in buzz marketing. I want to take the time to thank my good friend Perry Lawrence A.K.A Mr Video for helping turn my wacky idea into reality.

If you want to learn the EXACT creative thinking and creative mindset techniques I used to create this, and many other successful ideas, and learn how to make million dollar ideas over and over again. Make sure you are subscribed to my free newsletter in the top right of this page.

Dean