Website Promotion, Froogle vs Viral

12:49.52 - Friday 25th March 2005   (Link to This Entry)

The other day I had a moan about how long it was taking Froogle to process a feed I'd done for one of my clients. Well I don't know if someone was listening (especially after I sent them a bitch-slap letter) but the feed went live the day after - yay! Well the visitors are trickling in - a whole eleven people since the feed went live. I'm sure this will pick up after I have a look at the whole Froogle business and tweak things a little.

More interesting, however, is the spread of a special item I included in the database. The idea was to create something viral that would spread via word of mouth, and so far it seems working. I won't link to the item here, since it's still early days and I'm genuinely interested in seeing how far this thing can go on it's own.

So far it has sent far more visitors to the website than the Froogle feed - over 1,300 so far. It's slowly spready over on LiveJournal and various other blogs, but a large number of hits are coming without referrer values indicating that it's being passed around via Email as well. The occasional Yahoo and Hotmail referrer confirms this is the case.

It also crops up in Froogle's results if you know what to search for - whoops.