So I’m participating in the 30-Day Challenge. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a fun market research/training program where over the course of a month you start from scratch and try to make $10 from a website you’ve developed.

I joined for Sh%ts and giggles and it’s turned out to be a lot of fun and a great learning experience. The guys running it are fantastic and have created a “community” of like-minded folks who share and help each other; in general, a real enjoyable eye-opening experience.

Well, on day 16 I diligently started my blog at Tumblr as suggested. At the end of day 17, my account at Tumblr had been suspended. Apparently, the geniuses at Tumblr didn’t appreciate that probably thousands of people set up accounts within a 48 hour period and so they decided to do a mass deletion of those accounts (and others, I suspect).

Now I’m not a newbie when it comes to internet marketing, although this particular blog is only about a month old so it doesn’t yet get a lot of traffic, but I was always taught that “customers” and/or “traffic” was a good thing. The Tumblr folks must have got their MBA’s from BubbleGum University or some such. Because they just gave the finger to a very large community of innocent people doing exactly what the Tumblr folks set up their site to do.

So, to assure that my account is never re-activated, I sent, shall we say, a blunt email to Tumblr expressing my thoughts on the promotional strategy they’ve adopted and suggested a few changes they might want to make. Here you go:

1. Make an immediate name change to F%&K _YOU.COM

2. Make the sign up process far more lengthy and annoying that the current one

3. Profile applicants based on race, sexual preference, religous affiliation and other categories that are against federal law and deny access to anyone based on this information, thus inviting lawsuits.

4. Write a perl script (I’ll do it for free) that automates #3 so that the Tumblr owners don’t have to move their fat asses at all to deny accounts.

5. Change logo to

6. Begin an offline marketing campaign in micro-niche publications that are more targeted to the 3 people who fit their ideal customer profile.

7. Delete all acounts at least once a month to assure that their ex-customer base remains pissed and grows predictably.