When Steve Spangler started a blog to boost search engine rankings for his online store SteveSpanglerScience.com, he couldn’t have guessed it would set off one of the most amusing fads of 2006, substantially boost sales of a mint candy or be the answer to a question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Spangler, a Denver-based science educator and entrepreneur, has been selling science-related toys and equipment online since 2002; he started his blog in 2004. He also has a weekly segment on a local news show demonstrating cool science stuff. (Water can explode?!)
One fateful day in September 2005, he showed up at 9News with four two-liter bottles of soda and several boxes of Mentos to enact the now-famous “Mentos geyser.” The soda-and-mints experiment has been around for decades, and Spangler himself had performed it numerous times at science education conventions. But the magical combination of TV-blog-YouTube set off a viral phenomenon that has the Mentos folks laughing all the way to the bank—and to a licensing agreement with Spangler’s company to develop a line of co-branded toys that take advantage of the explosive relationship between chalky mints and carbon dioxide.
The blog has increased sales at SteveSpanglerScience.com by at least 25%, he estimates, though he’s about to do some actual studies. Customers are almost as likely to come to the site through a blog post as through Google directly, he adds.
“We want to incorporate blogging more into our e-commerce site,” he says. Though it has plenty of links to the store, the blog occupies a separate domain. “We want to post product reviews and engage in dialog with the customers. We want to know if the Insta-Snow or the Carpet Skates worked for them.”
Carpet Skates?
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