I’m going to share some quick facts about our business with you. HostGator currently spends:
- More than $30,000 per month advertising with Google Adwords
- More than $350,000 per month on affiliate commissions
- And $100,000’s more per year on random advertising.
When you spend as much as we do on advertising, you start to run out of places to advertise online. This has left us with no other choice but to become a lot more creative and a lot crazier with our choice of advertising venues and locations. I present to you Billy the Billboard.
Billy proudly wears the first ever permanent HostGator Tattoo on the back of his neck. Billy, an accomplished boxer and entrepreneur who is currently located in Anchorage, Alaska, sold the first chunk of his body to Goldenpalace.com. The funds were used to purchase a flight to San Diego, where he donated his kidney to a complete stranger that he met off of MatchingDonors.com. Billy has even tried to donate part of his liver to patients in need (he was denied due to having already donated a kidney).
Billy’s current goal in life is to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most advertisements tattooed on him. He currently has six tattoos and won’t be stopping until every inch of his body is sold. “I guess I’m like a male prostitute; I sell my body,†he told me when we were talking one day.
So what does branding someone’s neck for the rest of their life go for?
We paid $3,000 for what will most likely be one of the best investments we’ve made to date. If we get one sale a year we break even. Plus, with all the media attention this will generate, we should easily be able to make back ten or even a hundred times our investment in Billy’s lifetime.
Billy still has plenty of prime locations available. In fact, he’s currently taking bids to sell his forehead! If you are interested you can reach him at BoxingChampAK-at-aol.com or at his blog: Billy The Human Billboard
I believe in the potential of tattoo advertising so much I had this awesome plan to pay the first 200 people willing to get a HostGator tattoo more than $300,000 combined. Within 24 hours of the word getting around our office, I had over a dozen employees offering to sell their skin. The plan was going to be huge and the media attention was going to be even bigger!
Everything was going great until we pitched the idea to our lawyers. They basically said that it would have been impossible to protect ourselves from lawsuits, no matter what contract we came up with. They went on to say that the fact that Billy is an entertainer is completely different than the average person in need of quick cash by getting a tattoo with our logo on it.
Since the HostGator Tattoo Stimulus plan had to be killed, we are just going to have to find other ways to get our name out to the public. In the spirit of more traditional advertising, we recently signed a deal for ten billboards on some of Houston’s busiest freeways.
And even more recently we bought some air time on The High-Tech Texan Show with radio personality Michael Garfield. You can listen to his show online if you’re not in Houston, and you can hear an audio clip from our advertisement here: HostGator’s Radio Ad. on High Tech Texan
We don’t want to stop here though. If you have a creative way for us to get our name out there, please let us know.
Who do we contact for great advertising ideas?
Ken,
You can post them as a comment at this blog post. :)
You must be kidding, it is make up, i bet.
I assure you its not fake I am Billy The tattoo advertiser and that is a real tattoo in the pics I know beacuse its me in the pics.
LOL – worst thing gi’ve ever seen.
Oh – are you guys interested in car advertisement? Lifetime of my car might be short though^^
Kind regards
He should have put the HostGator tat on his face, forehead and back! That is the only company he should be pimpin’!!!
This is BillyTheBillboard in the pics just wanting to let everyone know My Forehead is ready to be advertised on and I will advertise on you for life for $8,000 please spread the word if you would like to advertise contact me at boxingchampak@aol.com and we can work something out I have alot of areas left to advertise on!
Thank you all
I’ll give Billy $5 to add my affiliate code at the end. :P
I would love to be a billboard and make money, how do I do it?
I will make a hostgator crop circle for you for $10.000
Just don’t ask how i do it
lol
@Mike: only $5 for the affiliate code at the end? If I were you, I’d add a couple more zeros to that number. ;)
I’d get small-ish tattoo, size and placement (within reason) of my choosing for lifetime web hosting.
Hostgator should’ve paid him a monthly fee rather than a flat rate – that’s LIFETIME advertising for only $3000? C’mon Brent you could’ve done better than that.
Once again… LIFETIME ADVERTISING!
I agree with the first poster. Billy deserves a free hosting account! The blogspot page has got to go.
I pitty hostgator for not providing him with atleast a free hosting account. and i pitty Billy for the circumstances he has to do a life time tattoo just for 3k. its a sad story over all.
Hostgator please don’t encourage these type of advertisement.
Wow, never thought as that as a way to advertise.
I’m not going to tell you how to spend your money, but what if this guy turns out to be a person who is caught for hacking websites, or child molester a mass murderer, in the Future?
How much will you spend on Covering it up that you gave this type of person 3k?
I agree that it would be better press for Hostgator to also have him “Hosted” at Hostgator just just tatto’d with it.
Ah, he must not be that great of a boxer if he has to do this for money!
As for the Guinness Book of World Records, there can’t be that much competition in this category!
You go Billy boy.
So sad to see such a young man prostitute himself for a few measly dollars of advertising.
He would have made more selling a kidney and the result would not have been permanent mutilation.
Billy should have put his own affiliate link on the end and did it for free. He could have made more than 3k that way.
I’m sickened by this. I thought godaddy was cheesy by selling women The reason I transfered to hostgator.com. What happened to “your body is a temple”.
Roy
HostGator is great company for web hosting services.
what if the company goes out of business?
what will he do then?
:L
That’s pretty awesome, very visible, probably gets a lot of attention.
@BigBoobsGeek
Lol, I wonder if that $2000 bid so far would give me a tit job too.
I’d screw em’ hard. ;)
could not stop laughing…loved this post.
although there is a discrepancy between the 3000$ mentioned here and the price on billy’s blog: “Get a 6” by 1” tattoo advertisement on the back of my head for $12,000″ :p
This is pathetic!
Even if Billy is all for it, you would think that a company such as hostgator could have the decency not to go this route as it’s degrading and simply shows that there are no boundaries when it comes to create buzz in the hope of making more money. Which is simply disgutsing in my opinion.
But judging from all the comment that find this neat and great, I guess I must have moral standards that simply are not in synch with the time and place we live in?
If anything, I wish Billy wasn’t that cheap and that he would work harder at getting better deal for what he is offering.
Good for him, but I’d never do it. As much as I love my tattoos, my body is not a billboard.
god tell me how i can do that to i’d be well up for it
Billy, I hope you make tons of money from your personal billboard business because all those tattoos are not healthy.
Oh its funny but now hostgator is pink..
Wait, wait, wait, is that Comic Sans in the last ones?
You’ve just lost a customer.
That’s an interesting one!!??
I find this article from google, it’s really useful for me, hope I can post this in my blog.
what happens when u run out of ad space?
Hey most people pay to get a tat. You got paid!
You must be kidding
No they don’t!
That is jokes haha. He is going to be rich once he has sold it all though!
not my way but he must know what he will do ;
have fun ;
I had no idea that Host Gator spent this kind of money or that you were even that large an organization. Continue to be happy with your service however.
One word. Idiot.
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