I’m spending way too much time in front of my computer…

Tonight, we rented a movie - Untraceable - about some psycho who’s torturing people live on the web. The more hits the site gets, the faster his victim dies. While I was watching, I found myself thinking ‘Wow, what if he had put an ad or two on his site… He would not just be a psycho, he would be a rich psycho…‘

I really need to take some time off…

Anyway, the story illustrated one of the basic laws in marketing: All you need to attract people to your site is an idea that is appealing to many…  It doesn’t have to be a good idea - as long as it’s something people WANT to see.

An example: The release of the iPhone this week created a big hype. While many Belgians are on a waiting list in order to get one, some guys decided to throw an iPhone into a blender to see what would happen. In no-time, their online video received over 60.00 hits. It was all over the news, in the papers, on blogs and forums…  Some people are amused, others are raging - but everybody seems to have an opinion about it.

For any marketer, this is a dream scenario. I know I wish I’d get an idea like that…

It proves once again controversy is an excellent marketing technique.

However, for controversy marketing to work, you’ve got to be very careful. You do want controversy, but you don’t want to offend too many people.  You want them to talk about your site, to share it with others - because they want to share it,
not because you ask them to.

This is an excellent strategy to build a whole lot of backlinks and drive even more traffic to your site. But again… it’s a thin line between creating profitable controversy and just plain killing your biz.

I found an article that discusses the positives and negatives of controversial marketing. You can read it here.