Content Marketing Today

How Wacky Online Content Built a $5 Million Company for a Former Science Teacher

Steve Spengler didn’t think he had anything to say
But now credits his success to his wacky blog

How the heck do you go from being a Denver science teacher in 2001 to the head of a $5 million dollar a year toy company? According to the Entrepreneur section of the Wall Street Journal, providing great content on your website and in a blog, were critical to building a very successful small company.

Steve Spengler took his company online in 2002, but results were disappointing. He stumbled on a web company, Netconcepts, who seemed to deliver the kind of website he envisioned. As Steve noted, “I liked what [the Netconcepts LLC founder Stephan Spencer] was saying about showing people you’re the expert in that field by what you write. I found out how important it was to have more content, like our experiment library. People started visiting.” In other words, once he started to deliver great content, his site, SteveSpenglerScience attracted more and more visitors, many of whom became customers.

Creating a Fun Blog Built Viral Marketing Buzz

News Anchor Gets Drenched on Live TV: You Can’t Buy That Kind of Word of Mouth
But You Can Spread it on the Internet

He wasn’t always a believer in blogs. It was after a video of Mr. Spengler demonstrating the explosive effects of dropping Mentos into Diet Coke spread across the Internet that he realized their power to help his business.

In Sept. 2005, I went on network television to demonstrate the Mentos Diet Coke experiment [where the candy is dropped into the bottle of soda, triggering a geyser]. I had done it before, but this time by accident the news anchor got soaked. She was wearing this beautiful St. John’s outfit, and she was absolutely drenched. [The local NBC station] streamed the video, and the number of views on the site – 9news.com – hit an all time high. It went viral within a couple of weeks and ended up on VH1.

Lots of people grabbed the post from my blog. The headline was: News Anchor Gets Soaked; Mentos Experiment Sets New Record. It wasn’t misleading, just tantalizing. Thank goodness I knew how to blog.

The Bottom-Line

Steve’s blog gets 15,000 to 20,000 visitors/day–up from a few hundred at first. And 13% of his sales are directly attributable to the blog. The secret: great headlines and content worth reading by your target audience. And in Steve’s case, a well-developed sense of showmanship.