In marketing being timely can mean making a huge chunk of change in a short amount of time. When hot news breaks you should be thinking “How can I make money off of this?”
Swine Flu is a great example. People are crazed about this Flu. They think they are going to die and they are worried. Some people aren’t worried and find it funny. How do you turn this into cash in your pocket? I’ve seen a ton of Swine Flu campaigns running and some of the ideas are just genious. (I’m not going to out anyones campaigns here so take a sigh of relief.)
One way you can bank on this is with the “Swine Flu” email submit ive seen on some networks. I hear that it’s not converting that well but maybe you can look at it and get some ideas.
This weekend I was at a concert and saw a vendor selling shirts that said “Fuck Swine Flu.” They were also selling surgical masks that said the same. Pretty smart! I asked him how they were selling and he said he sold about 800 shirts at $15 per piece. That’s $12,000 just capitilizing on something that’s in the news.
The purpose of this post is to remind you that you need to capitilize on what’s HOT at any given time. The kind of money that you can make in short bursts on popular topic can make you more then most people make in a year at a regular job.
Good post. I follow yahoo buzz, google trends, etc. for this sort of stuff. I don’t print shirts because I’m lazy, but I do use other angles for lead gen.
Great post. I thought it was funny when I saw a few networks pick up the swine flu email submits, but it makes sense. Monetize what people are searching for is key.