Sometimes the clever antics of marketers on the web amaze me. Although this space is mostly devoted to news of exotic cars and car clubs, I really enjoyed a story I saw on Richard McKinnon’s blog about a novel promotion for Australian tourism done by the Queensland Tourism Board in Brisbane, Australia.
They have created http://www.islandreefjob.com to entice visitors to apply for “the best job in the world”. Their best job involves earning a salary of 69k pounds for serving as the caretaker to an Australian island paradise for 6 months.
(Photo of island paradise courtesy of talented photographer Natu and licensed under Creative Commons attribution only. See more of Nattu’s photos in his Flickr photostream.)
Although, my dream job might be serving as a food taster for a gourmet Fort Worth restaurant or perhaps director of a Dallas exotic car sharing club, I can appreciate the draw of living rent free in a luxury home for six months in the paradise that is Hamilton Island and being required to maintain a pool with an automatic filter, feed the fish and turtles, pick up the mail, and participate in leisure activities such as snorkeling and scuba diving off of the island.
To get the job you do not need to have hospitality or caretaking experience, but a love of the outdoors and reasonable skill at water sports and snorkeling are helpful.
Fluency in English is recommended, by not required, as the person chosen will write a blog during their sojourn on Hamilton Island and field media inquiries, and produce a photo diary on the blog. Not too tough to qualify for that and even if your English is rusty, it’s nothing that a professional English tutor couldn’t help you overcome.
The hours are manageable also, with an expected 12 hour per month flexible work schedule. That makes the salary a little less than one thousand pounds an hour. The whole take from the job would pay the average Tampa mortgage for years.
Predictably the Australian tourism website pulling this stunt has garnered some hits from their target market of British vacation travels. The blogosphere is also ablaze with chatter about this strongly crafted tourism promotion.
During the first day the job opening was announced the site received several hundred thousand hits and a few hundred people applied before the site’s web hosting company’s servers crashed.
Anyway, if you don’t mind dropping your vehicle off at car storage and heading off to paradise, there is still time to apply for the Australian island caretaker position. Applying involves submitting a 60 second video outlining the reasons you deserve to be hired. Get it done before February 22 at http://www.islandreefjob.com.
Story written by professional SEO Web Copywriter Eric Anderson. Eric’s recent web copywriting projects include a Montana business sign company website and a Dallas car storage website.
