"I got my crabs from Dirty Dick's"

The title drove your attention, right?
I've seen it first on a road side billboard. One of those nice peace of southern humor used for advertising.

Dirty Dick's is a small crab house in Outer Banks, NC. It doesn't looks like much from the road, except for their sketchy slogans (another one - "If you never been to Outer Banx, you don't know Dick").

This clever and fun branding clearly works. I gave it a try. The place was packed and the food was great. After dinner I stopped by their store and bought a set of t-shirts, postcards and other merchandise - all featuring the "Dirty Dick's" theme in various ways. I probably spent on it all more than I spent on the dinner. And now my friends know about this place too.

This is a great example of viral marketing that uses good humor to deliver the message.

"Make your message fun" is our motto here, at TheoWorlds.com. Though we work in a different industry, and are more conservative with our jokes, I couldn't resist bringing you this example. I hope you found it entertaining.

Easy fundraising for non-profits on web

If you are a small (or not so small) non-profit organization, looking for new fundraising ideas through the internet – this article is for you. Web can be a very lucrative ground for fundraising. The organizational costs are low, and you can reach people across geographical borders.

There are many ways to collect money for your generous purposes on the internet, besides the traditional donation form on your website. What if I tell you there is a way to easily collect money through the internet without asking people for hard cash? A fundraising campaign that runs on good spirit and a little bit of technology. Easy to set up, maintain, track and… free. And no, it’s not a scheme of any sort. Not even a big secret – I’ve found mentions of it around the internet. I’ll just go into a little more detail here.

So what are the ingredients and how does it work?

Clicks on the internet are worth money. If they wouldn’t – we would not be invaded with banners and spam. But not all of it is evil. Small and big businesses are struggling to get their message in front of potential buyers, and they are ready to pay for it. Last time you were “googling” on the internet, looking for some product, you probably noticed the non-intrusive ads on the top and on the right side of the search results. Those ads are relevant to your search. It’s just a way for companies to appear within the first pages of that search.

It’s such a big business for Google, that they make now much more money on selling advertising than their search engine. Google has extended the idea of contextual advertising to the whole internet – everybody can register and start placing Google ads on their own website, making some profit when people click on those ads. This model is called AdSense.

You can find more details on AdSense on Google’s official website: https://www.google.com/adsense/ . But all you have to know is that it’s free to set up and the more visitors you get to your website – the more money you can make. Google takes care of the rest, like matching the ads with your website content.

The key is to generate enough clicks on those ads, usually by having a very popular content. So how can it help a non-profit? How can you bring more users to your website?

We, at Theoworlds.com, came to this idea by accident. In order to promote our brand we developed a set of highly interactive ecards for Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

Ecards are a perfect viral marketing tool for the internet. We took extra time to create original ecards, investing a lot of time in it and, at the end, it paid off. We got a lot of attention and even got mentioned on CNN Headline PRIME news. At this point, as a way to cover our traffic expenses, we decided to give AdSense a try. The results proved to be very good for such a small website.

For our Valentine’s Day campaign we decided to share a part of our modest AdSense income with The Salvation Army. And that’s when I started to think about how this model could be used for fundraising.

Events like Christmas, naturally, generate a huge amount of traffic for Christmas-related ecards. People exchange them with each other, across geographical borders, spreading the spirit of holidays. It’s also a good time for non-profit organization to appeal to people’s best qualities. All you have to ask them is to keep sending those ecards to their friends and family and anybody they know, because every single click generates a small amount of money for your organization. This will make them even more willing to do so. It’s fundraising driven by good spirit (do not forget the technology).

Setting such campaign takes a couple of easy steps:

1. Setting up a page on your website with an ecard from Theoworlds.com. Sure, it can be any other ecard, but quality and originality will set you apart from many others. At this point we have Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day ecards. We are also working on a birthday one right now. You can get more info here: http://www.theoworlds.com/ecard_campaigns.html . The best part is that we license our ecards to non-profits with no initial payment. You can pay the cost later, from money generated from your campaign. If it never works for you – you don’t have to pay us. But we know it will work. Setting up the ecard(s) takes 2-3 days maximum.
2. Setting up an AdSense account. Though it’s free and simple, Google uses a snail mail registration, so you may want to start this process in advance. We can help you with that or offer alternatives. The ads can be placed anywhere on the page, usually beneath the ecard, like on our website.
3. Sending your ecard around and tracking the AdSense income. Easy like that. The data is updated hourly, so you will be able to track your campaign step by step.

Besides the cash generated from AdSense campaign, you will also build awareness of your organization, and this can bring more donors through traditional channels. So it’s a win/win situation. A free promotion that actually generates money, while asking people nothing more than greeting each other during the holidays.

If you are interested to give it a try – email me at info@theoworlds.com . I’ll be glad to talk to you.

- Sergei

TheoWorld's Birthday Cake Decorator wins Adobe Site of the Day

I just got a notification from Adobe about being selected as an official Adobe Site of the Day for tomorrow. Our Birthday Cake Decorator brought us the 4th SOD award.

All four awards were won in a short span of 1.5 years with our line of original interactive ecards. Check the rest of the ecards here:

• Halloween Pumpkin Carver
• Christmas Gingerbread Cookie Decorator
• Valentine's Day Cake Decorator

We've been licensing these ecards to our clients and the results are very positive. It's an out-of-the-box viral marketing campaign than can be set up in 24 hours!

Find more about licensing our award-winning ecards here: www.theoworlds.com/ecard_campaigns.html

- Sergei

Happy April Fool's Day! Google introduces Gmail Paper.

Here, at TheoWorlds.com, our motto is "Make your message fun". We believe in the power of humor and that a good joke can go a long way. Humor is extremely viral and can supercharge your message. In the worst case, they will be just be laughing... at you.

Today is April 1st, and the intenet is just bursting with great jokes.

Google, the internet leader, released today Gmail Paper - a way to get hard copies of your emails... by mail. Go check their Gmail homepage, or read this post by David Berkowitz (screenshots are attached in case Google removes it tomorrow).

"Do no evil" and "Make your message fun"! Happy April Fool's Day!

Valentine's Day ecard numbers

It's time to share the results of our Valentine's Day e-card campaign.

The numbers aren't so high as for Christmas, but still look very good. The traffic it generated nearly reached 30K visitors some days (second after Halloween e-card). The percentage of sent ecards (out of all viewers) was the highest. It could be just love, but the fact that we are donating a % of our advertising income to The Salvation Army may helped also.

Income from Google AdSense was half from the one generated for Halloween or Christmas. Still we had one day with the income over $100.

All the numbers show that Valentine's Day has the shortest attention span - the interest jumps up and then drops back pretty fast.

Here is the traffic graph that covers all three of our e-cards:
It gives a very good idea about the traffic our ecards generated. Notice the flat traffic area before Halloween. The boost the ecards are generating is amazing.

Consider this: a major(!) traffic increase for a period of 5 months, covering October to February. That's the combined outcome of a viral marketing campaign using our three ecards: Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day.

If you are interested in using such campaign for your own business, find more on: http://www.theoworlds.com/ecard_campaigns.html