Viral Internet Marketing: fedexfurniture.com August 19, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing case study , trackback
Credit to Gwen for pointing this site out on her site: GwendolynTan.com.
Let’s look at the elements of this site:
- An intriguing story
Jose’s friends moved to Seattle and did not have a job. Although they managed to get housing, they didn’t have furniture. They decided to built furniture using Federal Express shipping boxes.
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:
- desk
- bed
- couch
- dining table
- chairs
Whether you’re curious about how they did it, or just wondering if they’re plain crazy, you’ll be drawn to their site.
How sticky is their site?
Very. Even though they don’t have a technorati account, there are 91 links to their fedexfurniture.com. (now 92 after counting this post!)
Their Google PageRank (PR) is a mighty 6. (anything above a 4 means the Google Spiders crawl your site very regularly). Their Alexa ranking is also a respectable 439,637 (as of Aug 19,2006).
What helps is that lots of traffic has been generated from links from several high authority sources like:
- Digg
- Livedoor (a large Japanese portal)
- USA Today
- Wired
- TechCrunch
- Boing Boing
- The Seattle Times
Controversy, controversy
The biggest element of their publicity likely has been the frenzy whipped up by FedDex. Look at the legal letters they’ve sent to poor Jose.
It’s better publicity than anything you could buy at Google AdWords.
Where’s the money?
To monetize their traffic, Jose and company could consider revenue streams such as:
- Google Adsense
- Leveraging off their PR ranking to sell backlinks to other sites
- Affiliate marketing to monetize their incoming traffic
- Do promotions for other companies like furniture or deliveries companies (can you imagine UPS or Ikea advertising on their site?)
Popularity: 18%
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