Riding a viral wave - how to generate sales

If we think about the key components of a good selling store, I’d suggest they are:

1. Good Designs
Aesthetically pleasing, funny, cutting edge or talking point designs.

2. Well designed shop
Thats a whole other post series of posts.

3. Heavily or relevantly promoted
Use of forums, messageboards, seo, ppc, blogs that keep the site in peoples minds and tie it to relevant topics or threads.

4. Relevancy
Relevancy to its audience. Retrokiwi is a great example of this. While its designs are less cutting edge than some, it so relevant to its audience (those crazy, Aussie bashing Kiwi’s) that every design is relevant to them. For that reason, it sells and encourages people to send it around to their friends who will also find it relevant.

This isn’t always a possibility for every shop-partner, with less of a single theme, offering less room for relevancy to its visitors, decreasing the likely hood that they’ll see something they are interested in and purchase. One way to get around this is to go for temporary relevancy. You might have seen a mini scandal involving top Spreadshirt partner bluefish and Verizon this week. Its a great example of riding a mini-pr wave reacting to a current newstory, trend, hype or viral spot. The result is a short-term traffic and sales spike, in the long-term you’ll be associated with cutting edge designs and keep some of that traffic from satisfied customers.

How can you make the most of this?
Look around for news items that are causing a storm, parody them or offer each side a shirt to support their cause. Some recent example of opportunities from recent months:

Mis-spelling on the West Virginia basketball shirt. This spread to a number of placing including (tcritic). Very easy to produce a parody for this.

Todd Goldman and accusations of stealing artists designs (this made Boing Boing). The above shirt is a reaction to the scandal from Huzzah Goods, who are donating 100% of the profits from it to a local arts academy.

“The Internet is a series of tubes”. You couldn’t move online a few months back without running into someone making fun of United States senator Ted Stevens, see wikipedia entry for this. The above parody shirt made Boing Boing

T-post run a subscription service producing a topical shirt, in reaction to current news stories, every six weeks. Headline shirts (my favorite t-shirt label) also does something similar.

Where is the best places to look for news, stories, spots, virals to cover?
Digg – Usually at the start of a trend, Digg is a treasure trove of what’s big on the net at any given moment.

Youtube – Look at the most popular or linked video’s.

Stumbleupon – Great for generating traffic, but also a good for seeing whats popular at a given moment

Del.icio.us Hotlist – What posts/sites people are applying 94 irrelevant tags right now.
Technorati’s Popular section – Top search is a good place to start, but also what the key blogs are talking about as well as movies, news and video’s.

Boing Boing – They tend to report whats popular, rather than breaking it, so this is where your shirt would end up as a best case scenario (A mention on Boing Boing is worth 10,000 uniques in a day, at least).

So you have a news story, and a cool shirt, now what?

1. Comment the blogs that are featuring the story.

You can be honest and plug your shirt, less honest and suggest the shirt as being funny, relevant, cool etc

2. Trackbacks.

Along with commenting a great way to get some of the traffic coming from the original sources of the story. Key is to get in their early and be near the top of the list.

3. Contact the place where the store broke.

As with the verizon math shirt, now being sold as the “official shirt” of verizon maths on the site getting the most traffic and the originator of the story Verizon Math

4. Submit to the major sites

People will be searching for the news story, put your product in a position where it can be found by those searching for the story.
Anyone with any experiences to add to this? Any sites or services I’m missing?