Going Viral - SEO through Modern Marketing Techniques
Friday, 17. April 2009, 08:23:19
Blendtec – Will it Blend? A Successful Viral Campaign.
At work recently I've been working mainly on getting a good solid base of inbound links by joining forums and commenting on relevent blogs. This has proved a good way to start so far as it's really given me an idea of the Work from Home market. It's helped me find our competitors and see what they're doing and how they're doing it.
So we've been building a viral marketing strategy to both promote our product and for possible SEO. We've got to run by our bosses, who may be a little skeptical about the concept so I've ben researching precedents and thought I'd put one here for you to read about. You may have already seen the Will it Blend videos on YouTube. Absolute genius if you ask me, a very simple idea which has proved hugely successful.
Making food blenders a trendy consumable would appear to be a very difficult task. In 2006 Blendtec launched a viral campaign call ‘will it blend’ via YouTube and a new website made specifically for the campaign. The campaign consisted of short viral videos in which Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson poses the question “will it blend” to everyday items from golf balls and pens to remote controls and iPods and uses a Blendtec blender to answer the question. By the end of 2006, sales of Blendtec’s Total Blender were up 43%.
The clips are humorous, sometimes quite dangerous and often tap into current affairs, with the most recent clip asking if the “stimulus” bailout package from the US Government will blend.
The campaign has proved hugely successful. Between the willitblend.com website and the Will it Blend Youtube channel, the videos have exceeded 100 million views worldwide.
The YouTube channel has become incredibly popular: they have 181,789 subscribers, have received 3.5 million channel views and have achieved a staggering Page Rank of 6. This page contains a link to the Blendtec website.
The willitblend.com website also has a PR of 6 and an Alexa ranking of 84,846.
The blendtec.com website has a Google Page Rank of 5, has an impressive Alexa traffic rank of 147,972 and Alexa tracks some 381 inbound linking sites, though Google tracks over 4,500.
The man behind the campaign, George Wright, advises viral campaigners to make their videos fun; if they’re good enough, the buzz will spread by word of mouth online and off.
However, Blendtec have really not fully utilized this exposure for SEO purposes – their site is poorly designed (it's a table-based design for a start!) and badly optimised and they don’t rank particularly well for search terms you would expect them to, such as “buy blender” or “blender sales” or “blender shop”. However, they do appear on page 1 for the highly competitive term “blender”, which one would assume is largely due to the passing of page rank from both the YouTube channel and the willitblend.com website direct to Blendtec.
A brilliant idea that has clearly helped their business, and given their site a healthy PageRank. Difficult to replicate, but that kind of thing is what we're aiming for.
At work recently I've been working mainly on getting a good solid base of inbound links by joining forums and commenting on relevent blogs. This has proved a good way to start so far as it's really given me an idea of the Work from Home market. It's helped me find our competitors and see what they're doing and how they're doing it.
So we've been building a viral marketing strategy to both promote our product and for possible SEO. We've got to run by our bosses, who may be a little skeptical about the concept so I've ben researching precedents and thought I'd put one here for you to read about. You may have already seen the Will it Blend videos on YouTube. Absolute genius if you ask me, a very simple idea which has proved hugely successful.
Making food blenders a trendy consumable would appear to be a very difficult task. In 2006 Blendtec launched a viral campaign call ‘will it blend’ via YouTube and a new website made specifically for the campaign. The campaign consisted of short viral videos in which Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson poses the question “will it blend” to everyday items from golf balls and pens to remote controls and iPods and uses a Blendtec blender to answer the question. By the end of 2006, sales of Blendtec’s Total Blender were up 43%.
The clips are humorous, sometimes quite dangerous and often tap into current affairs, with the most recent clip asking if the “stimulus” bailout package from the US Government will blend.
The campaign has proved hugely successful. Between the willitblend.com website and the Will it Blend Youtube channel, the videos have exceeded 100 million views worldwide.
The YouTube channel has become incredibly popular: they have 181,789 subscribers, have received 3.5 million channel views and have achieved a staggering Page Rank of 6. This page contains a link to the Blendtec website.
The willitblend.com website also has a PR of 6 and an Alexa ranking of 84,846.
The blendtec.com website has a Google Page Rank of 5, has an impressive Alexa traffic rank of 147,972 and Alexa tracks some 381 inbound linking sites, though Google tracks over 4,500.
The man behind the campaign, George Wright, advises viral campaigners to make their videos fun; if they’re good enough, the buzz will spread by word of mouth online and off.
However, Blendtec have really not fully utilized this exposure for SEO purposes – their site is poorly designed (it's a table-based design for a start!) and badly optimised and they don’t rank particularly well for search terms you would expect them to, such as “buy blender” or “blender sales” or “blender shop”. However, they do appear on page 1 for the highly competitive term “blender”, which one would assume is largely due to the passing of page rank from both the YouTube channel and the willitblend.com website direct to Blendtec.
A brilliant idea that has clearly helped their business, and given their site a healthy PageRank. Difficult to replicate, but that kind of thing is what we're aiming for.
WIDGETIZE