{"id":73,"date":"2006-08-19T09:23:15","date_gmt":"2006-08-19T01:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/2006\/08\/19\/viral-internet-marketing-fedexfurniturecom\/"},"modified":"2006-08-21T14:00:47","modified_gmt":"2006-08-21T06:00:47","slug":"viral-internet-marketing-fedexfurniturecom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/internet-marketing\/viral-internet-marketing-fedexfurniturecom\/","title":{"rendered":"Viral Internet Marketing: fedexfurniture.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"FedExfurniture.com\" href=\"http:\/\/www.fedexfurniture.com\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\"><img title=\"FedEx Furniture\" alt=\"FedEx Furniture\" src=\"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/images\/fedexfurniture.jpg\" align=\"right\" \/><\/a>Credit to Gwen for pointing this site out on her site: <a title=\"GwendolynTan.com\" href=\"http:\/\/gwendolyntan.com\/content\/view\/166\/1\/\" target=\"_blank\">GwendolynTan.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look at the elements of this site:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>An intriguing story<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Jose&#8217;s friends moved to Seattle and did not have a job. Although they managed to get housing, they didn&#8217;t have furniture. They decided to <strong>built furniture<\/strong> using <strong>Federal Express shipping boxes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Some time later, Jose moved to Arizona and faced the same problem. He decided to follow their example building his own furniture, which now includes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>desk<\/li>\n<li>bed<\/li>\n<li>couch<\/li>\n<li>dining table<\/li>\n<li>chairs<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Whether you&#8217;re curious about how they did it, or just wondering if they&#8217;re plain crazy, you&#8217;ll be drawn to their site.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How sticky is their site?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Very<\/strong>. Even though they don&#8217;t have a technorati account, there are <strong><a title=\"FedexFurniture.com\" href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/search\/fedexfurniture.com\" target=\"_blank\">91 links to their fedexfurniture.com<\/a><\/strong>. (now 92 after counting this post!)<\/p>\n<p>Their <strong>Google PageRank (PR)<\/strong> is a <strong>mighty 6<\/strong>. (anything above a 4 means the Google Spiders crawl your site very regularly). Their <strong>Alexa ranking<\/strong> is also a <strong>respectable 439,637<\/strong> (as of Aug 19,2006).<\/p>\n<p>What helps is that lots of traffic has been generated from links from several high authority sources like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Digg<\/li>\n<li>Livedoor (a large Japanese portal)<\/li>\n<li>USA Today<\/li>\n<li>Wired<\/li>\n<li>TechCrunch<\/li>\n<li>Boing Boing<\/li>\n<li>The Seattle Times<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Controversy, controversy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The biggest element of their publicity likely has been the frenzy whipped up by FedDex. Look at the <a title=\"FedEx legal letters\" href=\"http:\/\/cyberlaw.stanford.edu\/archives\/FedExLetter.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">legal letters<\/a> they&#8217;ve sent to poor Jose.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s better publicity than anything you could buy at Google AdWords.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Where&#8217;s the money?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>To monetize their traffic, Jose and company could consider revenue streams such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Google Adsense<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Leveraging off their PR ranking to sell <strong>backlinks <\/strong>to other sites<\/li>\n<li><strong>Affiliate marketing <\/strong>to monetize their incoming traffic<\/li>\n<li>Do <strong>promotions <\/strong>for other companies like furniture or deliveries companies (can you imagine UPS or Ikea advertising on their site?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Credit to Gwen for pointing this site out on her site: GwendolynTan.com. Let&#8217;s look at the elements of this site: An intriguing story Jose&#8217;s friends moved to Seattle and did not have a job. Although they managed to get housing, they didn&#8217;t have furniture. They decided to built furniture using Federal Express shipping boxes. Some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,30],"tags":[100,1781,1766,101,1771],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}