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Creating a Brilliantly Wacky Idea

Sep 2, 2001

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Reusing Your Ideas

Over the past few years, I've created some really silly ideas that have gotten lots of mileage generating press and lots of hits on my Web sites. After a while, all that slowly fades and I'm left wondering how I can get those eyeballs back to my Web sites. The answer was actually very easy: I took my old ideas and repackaged them for other Web sites.

A good example is the Farting Calculator. After I launched http://www.spazco.com, it ran through its phase of being something that had to be seen on the Web, but traffic eventually died down. So, I took the Farting Calculator and changed the skin or the look of the calculator—I repackaged it for other Web sites that wanted their own. My biggest success with this idea came when I approached Jackie Martling from the Howard Stern Show. His Web site, http://www.jokeland.com, was always being mentioned on the Stern show, and I wanted to get on his site. To make this happen, I created a Flash Farting Calculator and HTML page for jokeland.com.

I emailed Jackie the URL directly from his Web site URL so that he could check out what I did for him. Amazingly enough, two days later, he sent me an email saying how much he enjoyed it. Then he requested my spazco.com logo so that he could use it as a link to the Farting Calculator on my site. The link has now been on his site for months and continues to drive traffic to my site on a daily basis. (A bonus to doing this was that, while on a business trip to New York City, Jackie took me to lunch at the Friars Club with Stuttering John. Now is that cool or what? All because of a Farting Calculator.)

After the success of jokeland.com, I created many other versions of the Farting Calculator for other morning-show radio shows around the country. This is a beautiful thing, if you think about it. The hard work is done, and all I had to do was co-brand the calculator, create a simple HTML layout, and email a URL link to the morning-show DJ. This approach has brought life back into my http://www.spazco.com Web site. Now when I create something cool in Flash, I think about whether it can be reused to create the magic that I did with the Farting Calculator.

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