Ah, the price of fame!
Tim McGuire of “The Backup Plan” has been offering his customers ‘Vembu powered’ online backup services since January 2007.
All’s been well, and Tim has been steadily signing up new customers and backing them up!
However, in recent times, in spite of more business, and a huge traffic surge, a smaller proportion of his website visitors are really keen on his backup services!What happened? Well, Hollywood happened…
I have Google Alerts set up for various terms, and ‘backup’ is obviously one of them. As a consequence, I get snippets on everything from generator backups to data backups. Last month, I noticed a couple of alerts for ‘The Backup Plan’. I clicked on the link expecting to see something about Tim’s firm, but was surprised to see JLo’s smiling face instead! Apparently, “The Backup Plan” is the title of a new movie starring JLo. The movie is scheduled for a 2010 release but the spin doctors are already hard at work, and legions of crazed fans are typing thebackupplan into their browsers & search engines – hoping to see more on Jlo!
Not one to disappoint, Tim has even created a link for fans – that takes them to another site that focuses on the movie!
I’d emailed Tim last month asking him if he was being wooed by Hollywood, and this is what he had to say…
“…I am actually getting a brisk amount of traffic coming from people searching for J-Lo. Unfortunately, not a lot of them are interested in backing up. I did get a call from the movie people themselves, but they are mostly interested in seeing if I can link to their site, but they actually do not have one set up yet. thebackupplanmovie is actually my site also; I started that when the traffic was spiking to my main site. I wanted to try to divert the movie traffic to a site just for the movie, and leave my customers, prospects, and partners as the ones hitting my server. So, on that site, I just started blogging about the movie and actors, and giving the fans of the actors a place to chat about the movie….”
In fact, when I last checked, Tim has even written an ode to The Backup Plan & JLo! He also blogged about the launch of the movie’s website and called it ‘cute’. He almost seems to be enjoying his new role; it certainly looks like Tim’s crossing over to the dark side! You could help avoid this by visiting his site; it would be great for him to get more people looking for the real backup plan!
It will be interesting to see how his traffic jumps when The Backup Plan (movie) releases in 2010! I’ll save that for a new post…next year!
