I’ve got SEO skills!

Created to pull traffic from people searching for the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie.

When I started a blog for Brainium, one of the goals was to improve our rank in the search results for Solitaire. Brainum’s Solitaire is virtually the same as every other Solitaire in the App Store, but one feature than not all of them have is the ability to use your own photos to design custom decks and backgrounds.

I came up with the idea to start a blog feature called, “Deck of the Day.” Each day I would take topics that were trending and design a deck of cards and background around that topic. Each post was loaded with key words about our Solitaire App. When I started, we didn’t show up for nearly the first five pages of results, but now Brainium usually ranks on the first page.

After doing some research, I found the typical person often searches for the “best” Apps, when using Google to find Apps. I started using the tag, “Brainium, we make the BEST Apps,” at the end of each post.

For the release of Spider Solitaire, I shifted all Deck of the Day posts to the Spider App. I also added the sentence: “After one try, you’ll be saying, “Amazing Spider, man! Spider Solitaire by Brainium  the best Spider Solitaire App in the game!” This sentence pulled us in a lot of traffic from people looking for the new Amazing Spider Man movie.

Need a campaign to launch your product?

While at Brainium Studios, I had to come up with a creative way to release its newest game—Spider Solitaire. Let’s face it, when it comes to Apps, it doesn’t get more boring than Solitaire, and with thousands of other similar titles already doing well in the App Store, I had to come up with a way to make our App stand out. Since Brainium was unknown in Portland, I decided the best plan of attack would be to launch a campaign that targeted the local community, in order to gain press contacts for future campaigns.

I reached out to the Oregon Humane Society, who has solid relationships with the local media, and offered to donate 100 percent of the profit from the sale of our App, for the first month, to the Humane Society, in exchange for its help distributing the press release. As a former journalist, I knew local TV stations would pick up the story, since they all have a great relationship with the OHS. To get the press release noticed, I piggybacked of the popularity of one of the most popular Apps—Angry Birds. “Don’t feed the Angry Birds, help care for Oregon’s cats and dogs.”

The end result was a hit. The first day our App hit the market, Brainium’s Spider Solitaire was mentioned on every TV news station in Portland, with several of them mentioning it on the seven and 10 o’clock news. It was also featured in the Portland Tribune. I worked with the Humane Society to write weekly Facebook posts calling for people to download the App, in order to raise money for the Humane Society. We raised over $2,000 (over 3,000 downloads) for OHS, and although the owners of Brainium were reluctant to try the campaign, they declared it a hit.

KGW contacted us to be interviewed live for the six o’clock news, the first week of the campaign, but ended up bumping us for a more timely story. The news director told me to keep in touch throughout the campaign, to see if there was a chance to get us on air. I contacted him every week, and although we never made it on to plug the OHS campaign, he called us in the following week to talk about  Portland as hub for Tech companies. He told me when the story came up, he instantly thought of us, due to my persistence in getting Brainium on air.

Below: View Spider Solitaire marketing materials.

At every job…

How I’m Wired…

I’ve got an idea!

My Adidas campaign…

I started this campaign to see if I could wrangle myself a job with Adidas. On Twitter, the campaign grabbed the attention of someone in the marketing department. They called and we talked “Why Adidas?” No open positions, but now I’m on their radar. I could get your product on a lot of people’s radar! Give me a chance.

Sometimes we all need a hero

In case you’re keeping score…