Getting Buzz: From 0 to (maybe) Forbes in under a week

Personally, I liked your article. It was informative and showed some of the interesting ways in which you use the medium to generate interest. Some of the methods are questionable, but you achieved your goal, and were kind enough to share it with us. A follow up post about the money generated from sales would be interesting.

Where you crossed the line: "Most of them were along the lines of 'Breaking: cure to swine flu found [link to shirt]".<p>This is spam, black hat, whatever you want to call it.<p>You got 90% of the buzz machine figured out. Now you need to learn how to play it ethically.<p>Compare with my version of "0 to AP under a week": <a href="http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/02/27/make-your-way-to-the-top-dont-take-the-stairs-use-the-elevator/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/02/27/make-your-way-to-the...</a><p>Good Hackers have ethics.

So to get buzz I have to post hidden links, tweet sensational headlines, and lie to popular blogs?<p>Count me out.

I'm pretty sure having links with the same color as the background can get your site penalized. Just put your link in your signature. Or edit the post a day later.

I think this is the power of twitter - to be able to <i>hear</i> word of mouth, and influence it. Like any communication, it doesn't need to be done in a misleading way.<p>This might be partly why twitter gets so much mainstream press/TV: it is a good thing for their advertisers.

The fellas from Heyzap seem to have timed their SwineFighter similarly and were mentioned in that same Techcrunch post. I wonder how much their marketing experience parallels that of kyro.

The tactics employed in that post are pretty much the reason I hate "search engine optimizers", "search engine marketers", et al. They're also the reason I end up on Hacker News instead of Digg and Reddit; people who expend so much energy trying to game the system end up ruining it.<p>While the author may have made a quick buck, they did so at the cost of their customer's trust and their own credibility. Once lost, they're impossible to regain. I think the author should follow Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuck for a while and learn the value of honest, permissions based marketing.

Interesting article. Even more interesting are the reponses with regard to your 'black hat' tactics of generating the buzz. There's no such thing as 'bad publicity', right?<p>I myself have been wondering how to generate some buzz around my own fun side-project: <a href="http://www.tjetter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.tjetter.com</a> - a site that allows you to chat with random strangers, as well as <i>read</i> (and replay) all conversations that take place at that very moment... Not sure whether applying your tactics should be the way to proceed. Suggestions?

It's extremely sad to see how much investigation effort is done nowadays behind stories. More stories is not always better.

Blog comments almost certainly don't help with SEO, since every major platform uses the rel=nofollow on them. Forums may not have that, but most of them are poorly indexed by search engines (if at all) so those likely weren't much help either.

I'm not sure entirely fabricating a 'leak' is what Arrington meant when he said 'create a story'. Such advice from journalists (and I've been one) usually means 'give me some angle, give me some reason to write about you' not 'make stuff up'. :|

Why aren't there any women's t-shirts on the site?

I thought this was going to be a really interesting article leading to some amount of dollars. Unfortunately, it climaxed with a call from a (nameless) Forbes reporter.<p>I suggest you delete this post, and stop telling people about the secrets of SEO you learned from a t-shirt site.<p>Better yet, write a follow-up post saying how successful you were.