Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
This has been the mantra of the UK tabloid press for years and it makes for very entertaining reading, taken with a pinch of salt.
Let’s take a look first at Nick Coates who last year made The Sun and Daily Mail (aged just 17) with a story about him turning down £8.5 million for a website that didn’t look to have any traffic at all. After the publicity the site was worth 100 times the original amount (still not £8.5 million of course).
Then there was Alex Tew and his milliondollarhomepage.com which was picked up by the BBC and every other website in the world. Do you really think Alex sold any pixels before his PR company started pitching the idea to newspapers? In reality he probably gave the first 200,000 away and then made his money on the final slots. The story was in the fact a young student had made loads of money even though he probably hadn’t.
You need to fake it until you make it whether you are marketing online or offline.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
Read some similar posts
- Cut and paste one line of code to make any website editable
- Fake Websites You’ll Only See on TV
- Updated: Google takes strong action on Money.co.uk fake linkbait article
- StumbleUpon sending fake traffic to fake pages
- Green Tree Warehousing suffers reputation management nightmare
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thats what all the rich people alive did! They faked.Great post!
Exposure is still exposure whether it’s a good or bad. It is one of those techniques that one should practice but of course you always longing for a good exposure to get well-known in different industry.
I’d totally forgotten about that million dollar webpage, that was a crazy time. Wonder what the kid is doing now?
(I’m setting myself up there, as he’s probably very famous and I just don’t know it!)
Leave a Comment (registration is optional)