The Muppet Show poster

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I have a funny story of how my company blog scored some free marketing from a very unlikely source.

In November of 2010, I received a newsletter from the local community college. Neither I nor my husband attended but a previous owner must have because we always get a copy (or maybe they just send it out to everyone in the area, I have no idea). Now, normally, I would just throw it out but I was waiting for my lunch to microwave so I actually paged through it.

I already told the story so I’ll let you read it in the original post here. But, long story short, there was a really random coincidence in that magazine with something I’d recently read online about The Muppets. (I’m a huge Muppet fan. I don’t remember if we’ve covered this before…)

Even though it was only tangentially related to collectibles, I decided it was too cool a coincidence not to blog about so I wrote up the quick post on it you saw above. To my surprise, it started to get a lot of traffic and then the official Jim Henson company Twitter account retweeted the link and traffic only increased from there. Since the post had taken mere minutes to write up, I was very pleased with all the traffic.

Then, a few weeks later, the man featured in the article contacted me. He wrote up his behind the scenes experiences and more info about the process and asked me to share it on our blog as sort of a guest post. I was happy to oblige and this second post got the attention of several Muppet fans sites and was passed around a different crowd. Still loving the traffic, obviously. 

Flattered by the attention, he was kind enough to provide me with material for a third post, digging out concept art and inkings from the original project. As a fan, it was very cool to look at it all but as a blogger… I just scored an exclusive look at stuff that the Muppet fan community has literally never seen before. That post just went up today to the delight of Muppet geeks everywhere. I had somehow completely dumb lucked my way into a really cool news story.

So I stumbled into this really cool niche story and scored some traffic. Eh, you say. Well, check this out.

For better or worse, my coverage of this story was bringing in some attention to the college and they decided to leverage it for their own marketing gain. On February 1st, 2011, they sent out a press release about this and two other Muppet connections related to the school which was picked up by several news outlets because of their clout as a college. And in their release, they mentioned both me and Priced Nostalgia and gave us a link back. Nothing like getting media mentions without having to do a single thing, I say!

The moral of this story?

  • Be open to opportunities. If a story feels interesting even if it isn’t 100% related to your blog, go for it. Chances are, if it resonates with you, it will resonate with others as well.
  • Be nice. My conversations with the designer lead to two follow up posts. You better believe that wouldn’t have happened if I’d told him to go away or been a jerk.
  • Remember that the best marketing opportunities don’t always look like it at first glance.
  • Inspiration can strike anywhere! Who knew there was such a marketing goldmine in my mailbox? They sent out that newsletter to hundreds of students and alumni and I’m the only person who noticed the story and wrote about it. Luck definitely plays a factor but help luck out by exposing yourself to lots of things.
  • Read your junk mail before throwing it out, obviously. 😉

(I just want to add here that I rarely blog on the PN blog, I actually have a staff blogger who does all the posts over there. So it’s sort of hilarious that the one lone post I wrote for that site in ages is the one that started all this broohaha while poor ActionFigureGuy is thanklessly blogging every day over there while I swoop in and steal his glory like a jerk. Heh. :-))

Anyway, cool, eh?

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