Filed Under: SEO
What do you get when combining the brainpower and creativity of me and QuadZilla, a client hungry for success and thousands of dollars worth of Apple gear? An amazed client that will love you forever!
Crestock Stock Photos is an up and coming star in the micro stock photography business. They started out about a year and a half ago as a very ambitious project launched from a city about as far north in Norway as you can get - they are in fact the northernmost agency in the business.
Sponsored by Innovation Norway and a couple of other solid investors, they started building their image library, slowly but surely - as opposed to many of their other competitors; Their focus was never to get the most images as quickly as possible - but to get the very best.
Everything they do, they do with being best in mind, and if that means it’ll take a lot longer time to get an acceptable ammount of images in their database, then so be it.
They now have well over 45,000 exceptionally high quality images and are ready to start selling them.
A Viral Idea
I came up with the idea of a Photoshop competition, cause their main target audience are designers. It would give the target audience the chance to use their images and their site as well as getting a lot of sign-ups.
But since I had never done anything on this scale before, I knew I could need some help.
I emailed a few guys that I knew could handle something like this, such as Rand Fishkin, Andy Hagans and Todd Mailcoat. I ended up with QuadZilla at SEO Black Hat cause I knew him pretty well already, and I knew what he’s capable of.
Mind you, this project had nothing to do with Black Hat techniques - it was all about being incredible and exceptional.
So the two of us start working on refining my plan, and ended up with a 4 week progressive Photoshop competition.
Main purpose:
- Branding
- Sign-ups
- and last but not least: Links.
Now, as QuadZilla pointed out, my plan had several good points in it, but what was lacking was the one thing that would make this exceptionally remarkable.
The one thing that would make every single designer and Mac fan-boy go Ga-Ga:
Enter The Prizes
- Week 1: iPod nano 2GB & iPod 30GB
- Week 2: MacBook
- Week 3: MacBook Pro
- Week 4: Mac Pro with DUAL 30″ Cinema HD LCDs
See where we’re going at? Good.
But there’s one more thing missing: The seeders - and boy did we get seeders.
In addition to the link from Apple.com and the judges from About.com, 456Bereastreet, Mac Addict Magazine and 9Rules.com, you can view the full list of judges right here.
That, dear readers, is some serious link juice.
Crestock.com got 200,000 unique users from the contest, went on Digg, doubled their average daily traffic after the contest, got over 5000 new customers and increased their organic search engine traffic by 1258% - in one month!
And from an interview on their site: In the micropayment sector we’re an outsider in a market completely dominated by big north-american companies, but that’s a position I find both useful and challenging, says Crestock CEO Geir Are Jensen.
He is happy to see the dramatical growth in downloads from Crestock, 70 percent month by month in 2006.
What are the plans for the new year?
- They are many, no doubt, and as usual we prefer to present the news moments before launching, due to the crazy competitivness in this business.
But we promise to stay on our toes, and deliver new and better features and solutions both for photographers and customers regulary.
This, together with an aggressive and innovative market strategy, will hopefully secure another bright year for Crestock.
Let’s just say that I just signed the biggest contract in the history of our company yesterday - and that is why you need to amaze your clients.
That and the fact that 2007 is going to be a lot of fun for me - Amaze your clients and it’ll be a lot ot fun for you too;)
Viral Marketing tips: Social Strategies & Supporting Tactics for Viral Campaigns
Sverre Sjøthun
5 Comments so far
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Nice work bro. I created an entry for the contest after hearing about it on 456Bereastreet. I spent the whole time participating thinking “man what a nice viral campaign” - and I could not be happier to hear it came from you and Quad. Nice work guys. FYI, my piece was The Chained Down Butterfly Man.
Agian man, nice work. I’m sure we’ll tackle some fun projects together!
By Nomadishere on 01.22.07 7:02 pm | Permalink
Hi Sverre
Great job with the viral campaign! I’m looking to put together some case studies of successful viral campaigns, and this one sounds ideal - it sounds like you lined everything up just nicely.
Best,
Paul Hancox
http://www.trafficpersonalizer.com
By Paul Hancox on 06.10.07 12:59 am | Permalink
Thanks Paul. But since then, I’ve some some even better stuff. Email me if you’re interested at sverre AT dwpg.com
By Sverre Sjøthun on 06.10.07 7:28 am | Permalink
The 50 Most Popular Web Design Blog Posts, Resources & Cheat Sheets of 2007…
The past year has been an amazing period for those wishing to learn the ropes of design, whether you’re a noob just getting into the game or a seasoned designer or programmer. As we enter 2008, let’s take a look back at some of the most popular artic…
By CRE:SOURCE on 01.09.08 2:47 pm | Permalink
Congratulation Sverre, been nice working with you the last two months, I have learnt alot about SEO and the SEO community. 
By Michael Johansen on 02.12.08 4:33 pm | Permalink
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