The hottest search on Google today was for Americans for Prosperity, who are promoting an online petition against the economic stimulus package. Currently, their servers are overloaded from traffic. Working at a web design and SEO company, I’m pretty interested in how they pulled this off.
It appears the people who run the site have done this before. The www.nostimulus.com is registered to Richard Myslinski of Washington, D.C. In January, a Richard Myslinski started an online petition to get American University to pull funding for the National Conference on Organized Resistance, a liberal gathering about protest and dissent in America.
I called, but was unable to confirm if the two conservative Richard Myslinskis in D.C. with a penchant for online petitions are the same person. If not, they really need to get together. Still, we can learn a lot from Myslinski and his successful petitions.
The first petition got about 200 signatures, according to The Eagle, AU’s independent student newspaper. The second has garnered over 60,000 according to the Chicago Daily Observer on Feb. 9. So what was the difference?
1. Cast a large net
The first petition was limited because it was directed only at AU students. The second is applicable to everyone in America. It would seem that online petitions work better when they are broadly applicable. This isn’t always true with search engine optimization and Internet marketing. Often, you will want to be area-specific, but not in this case.
2. Salience
Hot button issues will get a stronger response than blander subjects. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. What does take some doing is finding out what is salient to begin with. Recognizing it in hindsight is easy. Capitalizing on it in real time is much more difficult. Often polemicists dominate in this area. Be careful that you don’t compromise your brand by traffic batting with controversial issues.
If you’re interested in setting up your own petition, I would recommend checking out surveymonkey.com or surveygizmo.com. Both have free surveys that can be customized to a petition form and embedded in a website. They both look clean and professional and can be done in minutes. You can pay more to upgrade options, but usually the free version is sufficient.
Now you’re all set to make your own online petition traffic juggernaut. Just make sure you have enough bandwidth first.