I have read (and rambled on) about SEO, web marketing and the like. I have attempted to promote new and interesting stories and evergreen content, and mostly, achieved a little success. Overall my work is probably rated somewhere between bad and mediocre. Part of my problem is my inability to make half of those great ideas I read about actually work.
Today I saw a great example of how someone jumped on the latest trend and got a million visits to their free blog, with little work. You may already know about it, it is the Mo Farah Running Away From Things blog. This is sort of related to yesterdays post about the Olympics being the most connected games, thanks to all this Internet silliness.
Mo Farah Running Away From Things
Shortly after Mo won his second gold medal at the London 2012 Games, a new blog sprung up. Hosted on the free Tumblr platform, mofarahrunningawayfromthings.tumblr.com has received a lot of interest. All it is is a series of famous images taken mostly from movies with a photo of Mo Farrah running with his outstretched arms and screaming. Screaming in jubilation for winning, but in the images it looks like he is screaming with fear. I have just added the one of Mo being chased by Mos – they are all like that, but with different backgrounds.
Link Bait on Steroids
I heard about the blog today, a Googler shared it on Google+. It seems that the mainstream media have been quick to write about it too, and the site has links from;
- Daily Mail
- The Independent
- The Mirror
- NY Daily News
- Huffington Post
- NME
- Mashable
Plus fitness related websites, such as:
- Runners Space
- Slow Twitch
- Runners World
- My Fitness Pal
Plus a lot of other links. There are 910,000 results in Google for [Mo Farah Running Away From Things], not bad for a website that was built on a free blogging platform 3 days ago.
Copyright Theft?
Of course, the website may be holding illegal content. The owner may not have permission to use Mo Farah’s name or image to promote his site, or the images from the many films used. In fact, these are the film scenes used with Mo running away:
- Jurassic Park – running away from a T-rex
- Scarface – running away from Al PAcino firing his machine gun
- Saving Private Ryan (possibly another WW2 film) – running towards the enemy snipers
- Way of the Dragon – running away from Chuck Norris
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail – running away from the brave knights.
- Ghost Busters – running away from the giant marshmallow guy
- Lord of the Rings – running away from the Nazgûl
- Terminator 2 – running away from T-1000, which is driving a truck
Plus many others, with brides (no idea of the film), Pamplona’s bulls, running away from NFL players (may be a film, looks like the pitch is being blown up, which does not usually happen in real life) and even running away from Daleks (although I thought that the Doctor had killed them all).
All in all, lots of silly photos. But a million page views in a few days.
What a bastard. Not Mo, the person that came up with the idea. Although will they monetise it before the traffic slumps off?
It does make me wonder why spend time writing things like Mo Farah’s Fitness and Diet to please a few amateur athletes when I could be creating silly images to please millions of Internet users. Hmmmm, I really have not got the knack of this whole web marketing thing yet!