1. Matt Cutts links to you from his blog (not just talks about you, but actually links to you… DAMN YOU MATT CUTS! You know you loved the drinkbait, STILL NO LINK!)
2. SEO Fan Girl blogs about you
3. A parady website is created, devoted to solely to you

With that said, I am proud to have passed a new level in my SEO career. I bring you… shamefully, Chris Hooley Secrets. WARNING: this site is not 100% accurate. My favorite drink is not Appletini, it is Melontini and ONLY when served with a pink umbrella.

It was supposed to be a nice little tap, but I think Greg Boser dope virtually slapped me. He’s too bad ass to tag somebody gently, and I have no choice but to obey.

* FYI- the 6th thing you didn’t know about Boser: In the 4th grade he used to pick his nose and make the little kid at school eat it.

* that statement might not be true.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Chris Hooley

• I am a unich.
• As a matter of fact, my shit doesn’t stink.
• I am wearing a pretty pink teddy right now.
• I’m NOT in denial.
• I did not have relations with that woman.

OOOOk. I felt obligated to be funny [thanks greg... I CAN'T HANDLE THE PRESSURE!!!!] I am as glad as you are that it is over. Now for the real stuff.

5 Real Things You Didn’t Know About Chris Hooley

• I was adopted, and found my birth family on the web – no shit. My totally awesome, kick ass family [Hooleys Rule!] adopted me from an orphanage as a baby. I grew up #2 of 4 brothers, and my older bro is adopted too. Here’s the kicker… I found out later in life I had 3 full blood brothers and a full blood sister too. I met them (not in person yet), and they are on my MySpace page. Crazy, crazy web! My name was almost Dustin Mykal Ansbergs.
• I played saxophone for a few weeks in the 6th grade - My parents saw that I taught myself to play Axel F on the casio keyboard and next thing you know, I was picking an instrument for band practice. I rebelled against that one!
• I used to be able to dunk – But I sucked at basketball. That didn’t stop be from playing every day tho. All I cared about was yoking it hard with two hands and hanging on the rim and being a bad ass, so I worked on my legs like a maniac and basically worshipped Sawn Kemp, MJ, and Dominique Wilkins. Embarrassingly enough, I was that white guy with hops who everybody picked first when they saw me warming up, but regretted it the second the game started.
• In a prior life I produced albums and songs for joke bands – Crack Money Records even performed shows with some known bands… Body Count was the biggest band we opened for. Even Ice-T loves the drinkbait!
• I technically had plastic surgery last month- Seriously. I have multiple lipomas, and many of them were concentrated around my midsection and back. My doctors said don’t bother to remove them, but I did, and NO I am not “that guy“.

w0rd!

Ok, now it’s time to tag a few more folks to keep this virus spreading. Let’s see how many people actually do this.

• Peter Wailes, come on in buddy. You have been tagged.
• Kris, I almost didn’t tag you because it would make your angle ring true, but shit man you rock and I can’t resist.
• Fuhgeddabowdit – Donald Trump, say hello to my little friend Mr. Tag!
• SEO Thursday’s Nathaniel Broughton for giving me a reason to be an icey hot stunta.
• And finally, Josh Strebel because his Luke Skywalker ass keeps begging me to link to him. I’m Darth Vader bitch. I tag with force.

Sorry guys, rules are rules and now you need to do it too.

As a side note, Happy Hanukka to the Jewish SEOs out there.

The Premise

At PubCon 2006, a tall thin guy named Kris and I were chatting about how funny it is that SEOs are treated like they’re in a boyband at these conferences. We joked about how we should be throwing our underwear on stage while they are speaking, and they should be signing our boobs.

Both of us apparently took a lot away from that conversation. Kris went on to write one of the funniest blogs ever, and I went on to do that DrinkBait stuff. We both had great success with our campaigns, which kept me thinking. I should do more fun stunts to attract attention and invoke a positive reaction. I mainly was looking to entertain and get a laugh, and of course, create a buzz.

Campaign Specifics

Just creating a post and buying the domain for SEO BoyBand isn’t enough to warrant props for outside the box thinking. I needed to make this good. After pondering it for a few days, I finally had a game plan.

• Register SEOBoyBand.com
• Write story about major SEOs forming a BoyBand
• Hire Skorp to photoshop a few hilarious pics of the band in action
• Here’s the kicker: Max bid on Google Adwords for the phrases SEO, Search Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, etc. the day the Chicago SES Conference begins, and leave campaign running for a few days.

I figured most SEOs search for that phrase rather frequently, and if I owned that phrase during the convention, somebody would notice and I would have created a word of mouth marketing monster. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Why The Heck Run Adwords? Was it Expensive?

Because I’ve never seen a LinkBait idea marketed that way. I wanted originality points, and something interesting to talk about after the fact.

And yes, it was expensive. I spent well over a grand in less than 2 days on marketing a joke.

Let’s Explore That Adwords Campaign

Pictures speak a thousand words. Just check out this insanity.

Almost 14k impressions. 98 clicks. $13.78 Avg. CPC. $1350.38 ad spend. 4k daily budget. $99.00 default max bid.

A little nutts eh? I was breaking through and placing $99.00 bids to force bonus. I let Google’s ad serving algo keep my click costs in the highest end of the general range that current advertisers are running now.

Here are the phrases I was running:
NOTE: this provides some great insight as to which SEO related phrases people are searching for

The best part of the campaign however, was the ad copy. They were mind numbingly dumb, and I though t they were funny as all get out. Check these ads out

Man, I love that. I thought it would be like playing a harmless prank on the SEO world for a bit.

Why Did it Fail?

There’s probably a ton of reasons, but here are a couple I can think of.

• I overestimated the percentage of people at SES Chicago who would search for the phrases I advertised
• SEO people are probably blind to the PPC ads on their vanity searches
• I didn’t put much effort behind making a splash with it
• Maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought?
• There was nothing in the post that called for action or interaction of any sort
• People were too busy at SES to be searching for stuff… bad timing
• I didn’t properly seed the joke by telling key people that this was going to be posted
• I didn’t submit it to any social bookmarking type sites (and neither did anybody else lol)
• I didn’t write the story well

What did we learn here?

I don’t know, you tell me! I would still love to see www.SEOBoyBand.com turn into a pop culture phenom. (*note, that was obviously tongue in cheek sentence, and a purposefully gross overstatement) I was even going to make a series out of it by incorporating industry news and the rest of the mainstream SEO celebrities with a reality show type feel… but if the people don’t like it, I won’t serve it!

With such pop stars as Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Greg Boser, and me (again, joking… those dudes don’t have pull like me yet, but they are working on it) how could it possibly fail? Any ideas?

BS-1 Behind the Conference traces the rise and fall of the most prolific boy band in SEO history. The first group of SEOs ever to travel outside the typical conference circuit and into the dark underworld of pop music made their debut after they met at Webmasterworld’s PubCon 2006. Their first single, “Use the anchor text: love”, quickly rose to the top of the del.icio.us popular chart, giving the band instant notoriety, fame, and wild success.

SEO Boy Band initially started working the conference circuit in early 2006 where SEOs, CEOs, and even SEO Fan Girls have been spotted throwing their underwear on stage as the band performed public link analysis sessions, which often ended in public riots. The thought of the buzz gave band front runner Chris Hooley the idea to take the show on the road.

After a grueling dance rehearsal, the band agreed the choreography and timing was right. SEO BoyBand began touring all over the greater San Jose area. After a few sell out shows, it became apparent to the crew that their newly found fame would get more than they bargained for.

In a rare interview with BS-1 Hooley says: “I was just doing it for the buzz, these free pairs of underwear are just another perk!”

Greg “Web Guerilla” Boser chimes in “not to mention the 600 backlinks I got from Digg yesterday” as he Hi Fived Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz who says “I’m a bad ass SEO“.

Meanwhile, the absence of these high profile SEO rockstars on the conference and blogging scene created a void, which some more crafty web marketing experts quickly exploited.

The release of their second single “Rollin’ Wit da Bloggerz” brought even more fame and backlinks. However, the grueling 7 day a week schedule of blogging, singing, and dancing began to wear on the super group. This didn’t stop the pop marketing powerhouse, they continued the media craze by releasing “Link Pop” and following it up with their smash hit “Love me, Leave me, then Link to me”

Eventually the media craze became to much for the SEO Boy Band to handle. Chris Hooley spent countless days DrinkBaiting, while Greg Boser and other band members stayed up night all night using the harder stuff to keep going.

“I just, really love the purple ones” said Boser after a long night of pounding yoohoo and snorting pixie sticks. “I don’t know what I would do without them”

The increased exposure and sugar consumption eventually started to tear at the band. Bitter rivalries between members of the back up dance crew eventually led to disaster. SEO BoyBand stopped touring after an incident where Tim Mayer and Adam Lasnik nearly choked each other out. Danny Sullivan tried to stop the violence, but ended up instant messaging the police.

Back up vocalsit Matt Cutts saw the transgressions, quit the banned, er.. I mean BAND, and applied a minus 30 penalty to the whole crew. That was the last time Mayer and Lasnik spoke, and ultimately the end of SEO BoyBand.

After the dust settled, nearly a fortune in backlinks was amassed. Chris Hooley, as the owner of the domain, currently controls the link equity created by the band. “It’s a time in my life I’ll never forget. What’s your name again?”

Although the experience might have been a blur to the band members, the memory of their rise to #1 on the SERPs, I mean charts, will never fade.

I promise, the post I’ve been hyping up is still coming.  It will be worth the wait.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll internally combust, and you’ll find the true meaning of life, love, happiness, and scoring links from Google’s home page.  And you’ll see pictures of Matt Cutts shredding on the ones and twos.