So, I sold….

APRIL FOOL’S! I’m still here and no, I did not sell Dorm Room Biz. Although…I would entertain any that may come in if you were interested in purchasing the site.

Anyway, now that the cat is out of the bag, let’s move on. This was the fist year I actually went full in on a April Fool’s prank on the blog and the results came out as I expected. Most people fell for it. Most people commented on Twitter about it and passed along their congratulations, and a comment came through on the blog too. Only one person thought that it wasn’t a real post, so congrats to them.

April Fool’s pranks are pretty prevalent on the internet and blogs these days. The big names like Shoemoney and John Chow have their pranks as well as many small bloggers like me. So I hope you didn’t necessarily believe everything that you read yesterday.

If you are interested in following me over at www.chrispund.com, please do. At the very least subscribe to the RSS feed and follow any updates that I put up on there. I’ve installed a new theme from WooThemes which I’ve also started playing with and customizing. At www.chrispund.com I’ll be blogging about just about anything as well as entrepreneurship, leadership, and more. So definitely check it out!

Back to regular posting now!

So, today, I wanted to post some of the ones that have come across my feed reader in the last 48 hours (have to account for the time zone differences).

1. Tim Ferriss of the 4 Hour Work Week, “The Grand Illusion: The Real Tim Ferriss Speaks” This was probably the first April Fool’s post that I read this year. Tim claimed that his blog for the last full year had been written completley by two virtual assistants that he outsourced from the Far East. His post made the claim that all he did with his blog was contribute a couple post ideas, some pictures, and some videos. He couldn’t even wait 24 hours before exposing the post, following it up only a few hour laters with his post wishing everyone a Happy Japanese April Fool’s Day. His post reached 140 comments and more than 280 diggs.
2. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, “ProBlogger Launches PayPerTweet” Darren’s post was the second one to come to my attention and it came through, surprise surprise, Twitter. His post talks about how he has come up with the idea and launched a service called PayPerTweet, close to PayPerPost. The concept is that people get paid by advertisers or whoever to tweet about news or about a post, or to retweet what someone else said. Darren even provided some hints within the post that pointed to it not being a real service and even included the email address 142008@problogger.net as the contact address. Darren also did a follow up post “TweetBait, April Fools and Jokes on a Blog.” Darren explains that he was offered $20 to tweet about a website. He denied, but after talking with a friend, decided it would be a good prank to launch on the site. Darren’s original post brought in 100+ comments, 18 serious enquiries, a bunch of blog posts, and many tweets.
3. John Chow of John Chow dot Com, “John Chow Cola – The Official Blogger Drink” John had a pretty good post last year when he announced his “Last Blog Post” and said he sold TTZ Media for a lot of money. Anyway, as far as I remember, last year’s post got mixed responses – some believing it and some noticing right away that it was April Fool’s. This year’s post I must say – it is a little out there. I would fall for him stopping the blogging game and traveling over him becoming part of the Coca-Cola brand. Oh he still pulled down 140+ comments with the post.
4. Jeremy of Shoemoney.com, “Make 1,000.00 in 1 hour” I also caught this one through Twitter but was hesitant to check it out figuring that it would be a nice April Fool’s post. Anyway, I wanted to see what it was about so clicked through to it. Having a video posted up attracted more people to actually check it out I believe. Shoemoney took the great approach of the different radio and tv commercials that you see that are advertising something and then the static pops in and you are upset because you missed the phone number, address, or other important information. Some of the people commenting even asked him to upload the video to try to remove the static from it. I found his approach to the post to be the funniest out of the ones that I came across. Shoemoney got 120+ comments on the post, from people being pissed that he would do such a thing to people asking for him to reupload the video, to people wanting to know more.

Did you guys post an April Fool’s post on your blog? Did you encounter any other sites that had good posts to help celebrate the day? Comment with a link and I will expand on the list!