CNN.com reported on a site which raised $50,000 in less than 2 months, whose sole promotion was giving a homeless man a sign to hold with a Web site’s address.
Sean Dolan and his father came up with a plan to drive traffic to his website PimpThisBum.com by simply giving Timothy Edwards, a homeless man, a sign to hold while panhandling in Houston.
Mr. Edwards, the homeless man was paid $100 cash, per day guaranteed to carry the homemade sign.
“”””Their idea worked. Visitors seeing the sign flocked to the site and in less than two months Dolan received $50,000 in donations and pledges through the site for the man, including a five-week alcohol treatment program donated by Sunray Treatment and Recovery based near Seattle, Washington.”””
According to the traffic ranking services, the site does indeed get some traffic.
Compete.com shows the site getting over 24K monthly visitors and Alexa ranks it as the 161,000th most popular site.
Although this site was done initially to help one man’s life, the founders are now looking to duplicate the success with other people around the country.
In the bigger picture, stories like this continue to highlight that those who engage in “outside the box” marketing on the net can pull in significant revenue with little to no cost.
Months ago we reported on another company that used lawn signs advertising Website addresses, to build their company, into an 8 figure Internet empire.
If you missed that one then, you can read it now by clicking here.
Yea, I donated some money under my site signature and traffic gone up
win-win
I think what this post really says is that it’s important that we don’t overlook offline marketing efforts in trying to promote websites.
Nice!
Actually their list of donations only sums up to about $10k.
@Good karma how did you do that, they don’t add any links in the donors list?
Mike…I have connections to the underground and above ground world–
I even send him a GoodKarmaToYou.com t-shirt.
My t-shirt sales have gone up
Michael
You have to take this into account as well:
Sunray Treatment and Recovery has stepped up to provide a scholarship for Tim and John’s Drug and Alcohol Treatment for a value of $22,800.00.
Up next: PimpThisDomainer.com 😉
Nice story and marketing idea. However I’m sure now every freeway ramp here in L.A. will be flooded with homeless (and homeful) people with .com signs to go with their money cups!!
Hmm, now that I think more on this….
It will work few times, but when other start to copy it, it will stop working