Welcome To My Island

Just because a web site is created with a free service, doesn’t necessarily mean it will never be popular and never get a large amount of daily traffic.  At least that is what I never knew until I found this geocities site that is receiving an average of 11,536 visits a day.

Just look at the site I’m talking about, doesn’t at all look anything close to amazing, so how is it getting it’s traffic?

The Power of Viral Content

This site has nothing but flash animations to use on myspace or friendster.  Visitors can copy an animation they want and then paste it on their myspace or friendster page.  At the bottom of every animation there is a link leading back to their web site at geocities.  Take a look at the one below.

Want one? Go to www.geocities.com/testiflash

This animation above is an example of viral content. One person pastes it on their myspace profile, and then someone visiting their page sees it and clicks the link, and then decides they want to put one on their myspace page, and so on and so on. Hence the name “viral,” it just keeps spreading and spreading.

You know what the crazy thing is though? If you look at the code, you can see that almost all of these flash animations that they have on their site weren’t even made by them. They took them from other sites and slapped their link at the bottom of each one.

So pretty much a below average free geocities site with “borrowed” (possibly stolen?) content is getting an average of 11,536 visitors a day. Sheesh.

Moral of the story? Try viral marketing, except without the whole stealing other people’s content and then placing your link on it, part. I recommend not doing that.