{"id":15480,"date":"2020-11-09T21:39:43","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T21:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediashower.com\/blog\/?p=15480"},"modified":"2020-12-08T19:39:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T19:39:13","slug":"media-shower-quick-wins-the-credit-card-prank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mediashower.com\/blog\/media-shower-quick-wins-the-credit-card-prank\/","title":{"rendered":"Media Shower Quick Wins: The Credit Card Prank"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every good superhero has an origin story, and so does Media Shower.<\/p>\n

It did not start with a bite by a radioactive llama, or an explosion in a nuclear pudding factory, but with a humor site called Zug.com. In fact, it was the first humor site on the Web.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just launched a website,\u201d we\u2019d tell people.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d respond, \u201cWhat\u2019s a website?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a way of accessing information over the Internet. You need a web browser.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s a web browser?\u201d they\u2019d ask. \u201cAlso, what\u2019s the Internet?\u201d<\/p>\n

People caught on. And as the Web grew, so did Zug.com. We learned how to produce and promote good content, eventually growing the site to several million unique visitors per month. We ran advertising on the site, which started to generate some real revenue. Zug grew from a hobby to a business.<\/p>\n

The turning point came with an article called \u201cThe Credit Card Prank.\u201d We thought it was funny that everyone asked you to sign for your credit card purchases, but no one ever checked the signature. We made a bunch of credit card purchases using ridiculous signatures — like the signature of Beethoven and Zeus — then took pictures of the receipts and posted them on Zug.<\/p>\n

It went explosively viral.<\/p>\n


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About this time, Google was becoming a dominant force, and before long, \u201cThe Credit Card Prank\u201d showed up on Page 1 of Google for the keyword \u201ccredit card.\u201d When we started getting phone calls from credit card companies, asking if they could advertise on that page, we knew we were on to something.<\/p>\n

Finally, we had arrived. We had traffic, we had ad revenue, and we had Google rankings. More importantly,\u00a0we learned how to achieve this success for other companies as well<\/em>. Read on to find out how.<\/p>\n

The Secret Google Meeting<\/h2>\n

A few years later, we heard a Google employee speak to an audience of internet marketers. This was the early days when Google was a lot more open about how the search engine worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, you guys make this too complicated,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are only two things that really matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst,\u00a0write good content for your users<\/em>. Not for search engines. For your users.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSecond,\u00a0promote that content well<\/em>. Get it linked from outside sites.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course! Now it made sense. This is what we had been doing all along, but it took a Google employee to simplify it down to the two fundamentals:\u00a0write good content<\/strong><\/b>, and\u00a0promote it well<\/strong><\/b>.<\/p>\n


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Rule #1: Write good content.<\/p><\/div>
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For example, there was one piece we ran called \u201cThe Senator Prank.\u201d The idea was to write every U.S. Senator, posing as a grade school student doing a government project, and asking for their favorite joke. Dozens of Senators responded, and then we had our readers vote on the funniest Senator.
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\n\"United
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As soon as we came up with that idea, we knew it was lightning in a bottle. Sure enough, it was one of our all-time most popular pieces, getting mainstream media coverage and driving millions of page views. But creating that piece was not easy: imagine sending out letters and emails to one hundred different Senators, following up, scanning in their responses, and so on.<\/p>\n

Good content takes time. Really good content takes a lot of time. And when you spend that much time on something, you\u2019re naturally proud of it. You\u00a0want\u00a0<\/em>to promote it.<\/p>\n


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Rule #2: Promote it well.<\/p><\/div>
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The second piece of advice from Google \u2013 promote it well \u2013 was something we had been doing since Day 1. When we would publish a piece about airlines, we would find every airline blogger on the Web and email them with a link to our article. We\u2019d make a list of journalists who covered the airline industry and let them know about the article. Every major piece had its own PR effort.<\/p>\n

As we began to master these two fundamentals \u2013 writing good content and promoting it well \u2013 other companies began to notice. First, they began hiring us to write sponsored content pieces: we\u2019d write a piece about hotels for a travel site, or a piece about gyms for a fitness site. Eventually, our clients asked if we\u2019d write content for their sites, as well.<\/p>\n

It was the beginning of an industry that\u2019s now called \u201ccontent marketing.\u201d Back then, we just called it \u201cfun.\u201d<\/p>\n

We took Google\u2019s advice to heart and built our company Media Shower in two groups: a content group and a promotion group.<\/p>\n