How to ruin your April Fools joke
Now I’m going to play a trick on anyone for April Fools, like say I’ve been sued, leave forever, or best of all start my own Toilet ISP. Actually, my favourite prank so far is Jonathan Snook’s logo ‘rework’. Those are examples of good ways to trick your readers. However there are some ways to take the joke that seemed funny in your head, and totally ruin it.
- Start on April 1st. Honestly, how do you expect someone to buy it if you actually post some outlandish claim on April Fools day itself…
- Be unoriginal. You can only pull off the lawsuit thing if you have a popular site, and the readers a loyal. Otherwise, it’s just another dumb prank.
- Give it up in the post. You can’t really think that telling the reader you ‘got them’ after the first paragraph is going to work, can you? With a first paragraph, and then GOTCHA right below it, the reader automatically scans to the bolded word, and in turn, has got you.
- Be overly sarcastic. “Yeah, I’m getting sued. Totally. Too bad, eh. Yeah…”, it just doesn’t trick anyone.
Of course there are ways to get the most out the day or two of fun for some people.
- Don’t respond to comments. Keep the readers second guessing. Could this actually be for real?
- Don’t give it up until April 2nd. Another way to keep the readers thinking that you aren’t kidding. After all, that is the point.
- Live out your prank for a bit. This is a little bit extreme, but if you’re John Chow, then why not take bit of an absence for a while?
- Be genuine and worried. You have to sell it for someone to buy it
Back to the introduction, on Snook’s logo ‘rework’, he really started something. So many people have posted after with their own rip of the SimpleBits logo. Nice job guys, but it was only funny the first time
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Vincent
September 25th, 2007 at 3:26 AM
I remember the april fools of google.
Giving away free broadband connection where the user needed to pass a cable in his toilet.
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