I’m sorry, but I have to stick to my guns and keep this one closed. I will be doing another one of these WhackedOut idea posts again soon - watch for it on my Twitter posts: http://www.twitter.com/WhackedOut

I may have some ideas for you….

Trish - LOL Well, let’s see you RUN with it! Keep me posted and I can’t wait to see what you come up with and how it all works out for you.

Ok it’s official. You’re a freakin’ genius! hehe Thanks for the ideas……I totally love them all! I thought of something similar to this but wasn’t sure how to go about it……your ideas have def helped with the “outline” in my head. Sorry about yer fingers! –Trish

I need to take a breather here! You are more than welcome to post comments, but I will be holding off on providing WhackedOut ideas for your business for a few days - follow me on Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/WhackedOut

I’ll be posting there when I launch a new WhackedOut Idea Fest!

Whew - your comment snuck in while I was writing out my WhackedOut idea for Jeff.

At this point my fingers are so numb I’m having to type with my toes. So please know that because this post will be shorter than the rest, it is now 2:07 AM here and I’m a very, very slow toe typer.

OK… I looked at your site. First of all, great blog and great WP theme.

Here’s the deal…

I have several blogs out there. Some of them are in niches where there are not too many other fish swimming around and they get some traffic and it’s fairly easy to rank on page 1 of Google with any blog post with some medium to long-tail keywords that get traffic.

And then I have some blogs that are in pools where there are so many fish you wonder how in the heck you’re going to compete with any of them. There’s gotta be at least 1,000,000 or more other blogs in the same niche.

Which pool do you think that I prefer?

A little tiny bit of competition, or one that has a TON TON TON of competition, with a million of us all fighting over the same keywords and traffic?

My choice? I choose the one that has the most competition. Why? Because I look for holes other people have missed. I often do things backwards to get people’s attention. And I try to find one or two things (or more) that I can do that will REALLY make me stand out and get noticed in a niche.

I’ve done this very, very recently - and I’m actually very actively doing this now with a blog that I’m a *TOP SECRET* partner on. The blog went from nothing to getting over 500-600 unique visitors a day in just under 2 weeks. The blog hasn’t been up even one month yet - and it’s already beginning to generate quite a buzz with some BIG things happening soon…

Anyway, I say all of the above for a few reasons. The first, the fact that there are only 2 other sites doing what you are doing in NZ and they are not very active tells me one of two things: One, you are a VERY early adapter and you may have to wait awhile until others start adapting, or two, there isn’t a hungry market in your niche, in your location.

Why are you limiting yourself. The web is global! Spread your wings and fly. Fly to new lands. Fly over oceans. Fly to any country that has an internet connection.

You’d have a MUCH larger audience to go after. Millions and millions actually. So what, maybe you have to get a new domain. I’d suggest a .com name. And maybe a new logo. No biggie either.

What is crazy is that you have blog posts from 2005 there. Wow. Anyway, just think about what I said above. Don’t make any crazy decisions quickly. Think about it, talk to people about it, etc. It MAY or may not be the best move for you above - I’ve just taken a quick look and just calling it how I initially see it. Also, if at some point you do decide to make a move, I would do something with your current domain right away. I’m sure it has aged a little like a fine wine and search engines love the taste of an old domain.

Maybe there is something else that could be done with the domain in NZ that has a larger market? Again, just throwing out ideas for you here…

As far as having trouble getting people to enter a competition to win free stuff, I have a feeling that you may not have the traffic to support that type of marketing right now. Contests work, and they can work VERY well, but you need to have a large audience to make them fly. Without an audience, the world will never know about your contests, or even your site.

For this one, I am going to have to go WhackedOut Idealess. I’m sorry. The one thing I cannot do is create a market out of thin air. If people just aren’t interested or you’re just way ahead of the curve, there are no WhackedOut things I can think of to make magic happen.

If by chance you know by your research there are say 500,000 entrepreneur moms in NZ, and for some reason they just haven’t found your blog, then that does open a whole new can of worms and something VERY Whacked Out needs to be done. If that was the case, I would first start advertising on the sites that you know they frequent. Sorry I wasn’t too much help on this one…

Where are all the easy one’s like a pet product store, or some information publishing business?
Whew! And now Jeff, you come along… someone who has a client list of: AT&T, Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, and even Coca-Cola. You were the copy director for Nordstorm… one of my first stops at the mall by the way (which is about once a year… What can I say, I’m a guy and I’m not a big fan of shopping!)

Anyway, You’ve been helping your clients for more than 20 years…. And above all else, you’re a copywriter.

OK. I can’t promise anything here… let me think… think… think…. think…

think…. think…. think… you want to focus on your VERY specific audience…. public companies doing annual reports…

thinking…. thinking….

Annual reports… HA! OK, here’s the first one that comes to mind. This would require hiring a few people and a video crew to create a WhackedOut video. OK, whole video plopped into my head.. will try to type fast to get this into words….

Setting: A VERY busy office with people running all around, bumping into each other, people spilling coffee on themselves and others as people bump into them, papers flying everywhere as someone is knocked over carrying a big stack of papers.

Camera then moves to a woman with brown hair wearing a red women’s business suit (I’m telling you, when these ideas plop into my head, I see everything! And no, she is not wearing white underwear…). Anyway, she is running down the hallway and opens the door to the President’s office.

In the office there are 4 guy wearing suite all arguing and shouting and the woman said, “Sir, we’re almost finished with the annual report.”

The 4 guys move to the side and you see the President of the company sitting at his desk thumbing through a bunch of papers frantically. He says, “Mary, we needed to get that report out 20 minutes ago - whatever it takes, get the annual report out the door and sent to our investors pronto!”

“Yes sir!” Mary then runs down the hall and stops at a door that has a small plaque on it that says, “Temps”. You see her put her hand on the door nob, let out a big sigh and open the door.

Inside you see 4-5 “young geeks” all sitting there doing different things. One is shooting paperclips around using a rubber band. Another is braiding her own hair and it’s all messed up and funny looking. Another is playing with his pet rat in a small cage on his desk. Another is playing video games, and another is sleeping with head tilted back and bubbles coming from his moth and drool dripping down his cheek.

Mary screams, “Wake up everyone! We need the annual report completed and sent to our 50,000 investors PRONTO!”

Everyone jumps up from their desks and runs over to some computer stations. They then start tying 30,000 miles an hour.

The camera then zooms in on the on computer screen as you see you see the words “2009 Annual Report” being typed.

Suddenly one of them knocks over a cup of coffee on the kid’s lap who was typing the words above, he jumps up, knocks the keyboard over, and what he just typed is erased.

At that very moment, Mary opens the door, and yells, “We need it sent now!” The geek then picks up the key board and you see him type, “2009 An….”
and at that moment the girl geek screams… the camera shows the rat that one of the geeks was playing with was on her shoulder. Then all the geeks start screaming, and the kid typing quickly finishes what he was typing while still looking at the rat…

“al Report”

You then see him grab the mouse and click on the send button… a little screen appears on the computer screen showing a bar moving across the screen and a little blurb “Sending” is flashing while numbers go from 1 to 50,000 very quickly.

Quickly, it moves to the next scene of a guy (maybe a lawyer or something) checking his email, he sees the attached report, clicks on it and right there in
big letters on the first page it says,

2009 ANAL REPORT
Wombat Corporation
A Fortune 500 Company

Scene changes to a conference room with 30-40 people sitting around the table and immediately on a big screen you see the same front page of the report as the lawyer guy saw. Everyone’s jaw drops sitting around the conference table…

Then, you see a scene of Wall Street and the ticker for Wombat Corporation go from 50, to 40, to 20, to 10…

Then the screen goes blank… and a voice says, “Let someone else get anal over your putting together your annual report…. Jeff Fraga… proving top-notch annual reports for the world’s best corporations for over 20 years.”

The end.

OK, so that is more like a big budget 30 second commercial you’d see on TV. But maybe scale it down a tad and publish it on YouTube - or… EVEN BETTER…

The domain name: http://www.AnalReport.com is available!

You could grab that domain, have the above video made (or a variation of), put the video on that page along with a form for companies to contact you about their annual reports, and then get down with the marketing…

Send out some press releases… send the link to past clients who will watch the video and then forward it onto their friends, who may be the decision-makers with potential clients, find out (well, I’m sure you know) the top websites that your key decision makers visit on a daily basis. Submit your video / site to them hoping they’ll feature it. If there are any trade publications they read, see if you can get your site mentioned there.

Bottom line: While doing some digging, I see that the “annual report” business is quite dry. I saw your website on Google being advertised on Google Adwords - no worries, I didn’t click on your ad. I just checked out everyone else to see what they were doing
Just what I expected. Dry, dry, dry.

When everyone is going in one direction, dare to get WhackedOut with your marketing and go another direction. If everyone is dry, get a little wet. Make people laugh. Catch them totally off guard.

To take this several steps further, you could create a report called, “Why You Should Never Write Your Own Anal Report”…. or “The Top 10 Reasons Why You Have Every Right To be So Anal About Your Annual Report”… or “Getting Anal Over Your Annual Report Is My Business”.

Wait… the last one is actually a good potential headline…

Anyway, the above is what first plopped into my head and that’s what I’m doing here… just sharing what’s plopping first. Remind me never to use that last sentence again by the way…

So there you have it Jeff. May be way too WhackedOut for this market. May be too expensive. Or maybe…. just maybe is WhackedOut enough to work!