The day that nickprints went viral

Yesterday on the 11th March nickprints went viral. He didn’t mean to, he didn’t do anything special, it wasn’t a clever marketing campaign and he didn’t pay anyone to seed it. It is just proof that great content can get you there on its own.

Background

nickprints creates screen prints with his most popular (London and Brighton) prints using hundreds of iconic symbols and images. These have to be painstakingly sourced, drawn and aligned in Adobe Illustrator.

Nick is the creative director at FWD Marketing and a few of us at work have helped him out at some point or other to set him up online and help him sell his prints. One colleague built his website, others have recommended his prints to friends, I’ve helped out with SEO and often posted links to his site and prints across my social media profiles.

Traffic to his site has been between 5 and 15 people a day which he was very happy with, bringing in a couple of orders a week.

Building his profile

Nick took part in the open house exhibitions in Brighton last year and from that a number of boutique shops asked to stock his prints. This included Brighton POD and Unlimited Editions

Recently www.notonthehighstreet.com contacted him asking if he wanted to sell his prints through their online and mail order business. That went live a few weeks ago and some orders started to come in through his sellers page.

On the back of that another online shop called We Love British asked to list his prints. I contacted Sarah O’Neill, the owner of this site, through Twitter to ask where she found Nick. Sarah said she stumbled across him when looking for another designer. A lucky stumble for all involved.

Something’s brewing

This week (w/c 7th March) Nick had started to receive more orders than usual and by 9.30am on the 10th March he asked what was going on because he’d had 4 orders that morning.

I had installed Google analytics on his site so had a look and found that a website called www.notcot.org had referred more than 500 unique visitors to his site.

NOTCOT.ORG is a community of creatives, design lovers, and trend-setters – where .org serves as the studio bulletin board gone digital

So one person had posted an image on nickprints’ Brighton screen print and this had started to drive a huge amount of traffic to his website. By midday Nick’s site had been viewed by people in 65 countries.

No sign of slowing down

The traffic to the site was going up by 100 people every half an hour or so and Nick continued to receive regular order enquiries. This was on a day at work where everyone was so busy, in and out of meetings, deadlines to hit etc. I think Nick was finding it hard to cope with the scale and volume of it all. This though did not stop us giving his prints an extra nudge.

For those that don’t already know about it www.londonist.com is a great blog for any Londoner. The site provide news, reviews, guides and recommendations for a whole range of London centred activity. I emailed their general contact address to tell them about Nick’s London print and suggesting they feature it. The editor, Matt Brown emailed back saying he loved it.

Shortly after he posted a blog on Londonist titled: “Everything important about London, in one image” which featured Nick’s image and posed the question: “But what’s missing?”

As testament to the influence of Londonist this kicked off a lot of activity from their subscribers, and their 22,000 Twitter followers. The most common comment being that he’d missed Fulham football club! As of 10am today (11th March) the Londonist blog post has been ‘Liked’ on Facebook by 85 people and Tweeted 111 times. The post by Londonist has so far sent over 180 visitors to nickprints.co.uk.

Far reaching

With high profile sites NOTCOT.org and Londonist.com featuring nickprints it was only a matter of time before other sites picked it up. A Russian blog and Creativeroots.org both listed it along with 5 or 6 other blogs, not to mention the number and range of users on Twitter.

The buzz on Twitter was enough to convince Nick to set up a Twitter account. He used this to thank a number of the people that had posted his links and said nice things about his prints, as well a retweeting the posts.

The results

When I last spoke to Nick there had been 35 enquiries through his website but I am sure there will be more to come. Today the traffic has slowed but not by much. The analytics for Nick’s website show how far and wide he reached over these two days. Without Google analytics we might never have been able to track down the seed of the traffic spike, or track how far it went.

March the 10th was definitely the day that nickprints went viral:

• In two days 1,999 people visited www.nickprints.co.uk

• All traffic sources sent 2,103 visits via 43 sources and mediums

• 2,103 visits came from 81 countries/territories

You can now follow Nick on Twitter: @nickprints