Alan Gutierrez

Alan Gutierrez blogs on software, social networks, and himself.
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Indie Virus

March 16th, 2006

Read about the Indie Virus, the virus you want to catch, in the comments of Esoos’ blog post Writing About Writing About Writely. The Indie Virus is a viral linking campaign. You participate by linking to someone and using link text Indie Virus.

This is the idea of Chris Pearson who wrote about it in his posting The Virus You Want to Catch.

Participating in The Indie Virus is easy. All you’ve got to do is link to lesser known blogs from within a post (or two, or eleventeen), but you have to make sure that the anchor text of your link is The Indie Virus.

I see that Esoos is part of the experiment, so I’ll jump in as well.

I suppose it is as simple as spreading the Indie Virus to Ann Arbor, spreading the Indie Virus to the evacuees, spreading the Indie Virus to the librarians, spreading the Indie Virus to the online interaction people.

I’m going to brainstorm on a New Orleans specific viral linking campaign with Mark and Maitri, if they are interest.

(7) comments

Posted in Blogging, Blogometer, Professional, Social Networking .

(7) Comments

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  1. Maitri says:

    Bring it. It’ll be our new blonde joke.

    Comment by Maitri on March 16th, 2006 at 2:42 pm #
  2. Alan Gutierrez says:

    Maitri

    Thank you. I’m going to post tonight on Think New Orleans about the concept. Mark Foise and yourself can help me hash out how it should work exactly.

    Then we can let the meme loose.

    Comment by Alan Gutierrez on March 16th, 2006 at 3:17 pm #
  3. Chris P. says:

    Haha, that’s the ticket!

    While there are many ways to go about link building, The Indie Virus represents a very organic method of obtaining inbound links. In actuality, I didn’t launch the experiment to garner links, but that has become a very nice bonus in the aftermath.

    I really started the experiment in order to better understand some of the following questions:

    How much “chatter” does there have to be around a particular topic for it to crack the Technorati Top 5 search list?
    Can we raise the profile of well-written but lesser known blogs through the propagation of a linking scheme such as this?
    How big an impact can something like this have? Does this have a real-world business application? What can we learn about organic and viral linking from this?

    I’m constructing a post on the metrics of the experiment thus far, so be sure to stop by later today for an update.

    Comment by Chris P. on March 17th, 2006 at 12:55 pm #
  4. Alan Gutierrez says:

    Maitri

    There you have it. Chris has put together the way to track the link virus.

    I’d like to add a question or two, though.

    Comment by Alan Gutierrez on March 17th, 2006 at 2:50 pm #
  5. Pearsonified says:

    Indie Virus: 7 Day Stats

    Late late late last Friday night, I decided to try and launch a viral marketing experiment. Seven days later, I still have something to talk about. Score. In celebration, we’re going to take a closer look at the numbers behind 7 days of unabashed coug…

    Comment by Pearsonified on March 17th, 2006 at 3:27 pm #
  6. esoos says:

    Nice you see you on board, Alan.

    I like the new look of the blog.

    Comment by esoos on March 18th, 2006 at 2:10 am #
  7. What Eric B. and Rakim, Mantronix, and the Indie Virus Have in Common (a/k/a Chartreuse Parody Post 1.0) | Copyblogger says:

    [...] Now, lots of other people are promoting the idea. [...]

    Comment by What Eric B. and Rakim, Mantronix, and the Indie Virus Have in Common (a/k/a Chartreuse Parody Post 1.0) | Copyblogger on March 18th, 2006 at 7:20 pm #

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