Several months ago I wrote an article on how to make
$200 per day with Viral websites.
If you want to know how to add $300 per day more with Propellerads then
this article is for you. When I wrote that article more than a year ago
I didn’t expect it to go “viral”. A lot of people contacted me in 2015
to learn more about how everything works or simply because they’re
putting some work and wanted some feedback on the results they’re
achieving.
With over 600 comments it’s one of the top 5 articles on my blog and I
know the reason behind it is the “simplicity” of the game.
But as many of you can see, creating a viral website isn’t that easy.
In fact, from over 600 comments I have in that article maybe just a
couple dozens of them are from people telling me that they started their
viral website and made it work. Some of them make $50 per day, and some
of them are making more than $500 per day. The rest is just people
asking questions or commenting about how good it looks but they don’t
have the money to do it, etc.
So first let me explain what this article is going to be about:
- I’m going to explain what you need in Facebook to go viral,
WITH REAL NUMBERS, not the shitty articles that tell you go viral by
creating something people love and that stuff that everybody knows but
nobody knows how to put to use.
- I’m going to explain what you need in Adsense to make money as it’s not that easy. It’s a math game and all relies in the numbers
- I tried different methods and found that you can generate some extra income with popunder ads from networks like Propellerads using your viral website. This will be the final part of the post.
- I’m going to show you a few tests I made and the earnings with PropellerAds
That’s it. As always I’m going to try to keep it short, but you know I
normally write 2,000 words per article so make sure you grab a cup of
coffee before you continue reading.
Facebook Ads and going viral
OK so as mentioned, this is a numbers game and Facebook is the main
traffic source to tackle if you want to go viral with clickbait news and
stuff. I already mentioned how I do it basically in the
former article, however a lot of people email me or comment asking for questions like:
- Is my CPC too high?
- Which countries should I target?
- What do you put in your interests when targeting people?
- I’m making money but I spend more than I earn with Adsense
Those are the main questions I think I’ve received in the last 6
months and I’m going to answer them all so you can understand the theory
behind going viral on Facebook and making money.
This is the first part of the equation and your target here is to get
as many visits as possible with a low budget. Remember we are using
Facebook ads, so you need to invest money to make money and you’ve got to have some decent budget to test A LOT of campaigns.
What is a Facebook Ads campaign?
In this case, a campaign would be the news/article you’re promoting,
but keep in mind the price of the visitors could change a lot if you
change your headline and image to something more compelling.
So the first step is to have a blog and start posting some news in
the form of viral articles as explained before. That should be clear by
now.
But how do you make it viral?
Well, as surprising as this might sound,
most of your articles won’t go viral. AND THAT’S FINE.
It’s something you have to accept because you’re not the best copy
writer in the world and you might not be expert at marketing either.
The thing is you need to test a load of campaigns and news until you
find the golden ones. Sometimes it takes you 10 articles to find a
golden nugget. Sometimes it could take you 30 or 50 until you find one.
Again, don’t worry. It’s normal to fail a lot of campaigns until you
find the best one and scale it. Not even the best marketers in the world
can make every product or campaign go pro no matter how good they are.
However, you need to consider that if you’re going to test a lot of
articles and fire campaigns on Facebook Ads, you need a budget.
How much do I need to get started?
Something a lot of my readers told me is why do they need $1,500 per month to get stared?
They just have $100 bucks and they want to know why they won’t make it.
The truth is they COULD make it, but most probably they won’t. Here’s the math behind it.
Let’s say this is your first time doing viral websites and you’ve got
a small idea of how everything works. You write 5 articles every single
day of the week and every 20 articles on average you find a good one
that goes viral.
5 articles per day becomes 35 per week and 150 per month.
You create a campaign on Facebook ads for each article and pump $5 bucks to test it before deciding if it’s good or not.
- That’s $5 x 150 = $750 USD in just a month.
Now, if you write more articles or if you decide to test with a
higher budget or with different images/headlines you’ll need more money,
so it could easily become $1k per month or even $2k per month just in
tests.
If you have $100 bucks to get started you’ll try a few articles and
before the week ends you’ll burn your money without any success and
you’ll move to the next shinny thing you find in the warrior forum. But
let’s say you get lucky and find a campaign with those $100 and from 10
campaigns you launch 1 of them goes viral.
Now you need money to scale the campaigns and make a lot of money,
but you don’t have it and Google Adsense won’t pay you until the end of
next month… By the time you receive the payment your campaign will be
long dead and the initial momentum you gained will be lost in space.
Now that I’ve explained the basics behind the budget you need to
enter this business let’s analyze how your campaigns can go viral by
answering the most common questions mentioned above:
- Go broad and pick up a country. It doesn’t matter
which country it is. Facebook has a ton of traffic from every part of
the world so just pick up a country where you know the language and
maybe the slang and things that are viral at this moment. You can use
Google trends to do some research.
- You’re going to write viral articles that appeal broad audiences, so initially you don’t need to worry about the gender or the ages of people you’re targeting on Facebook. Later you can go back and check your Facebook reports to see what’s working better. Initially just gather data.
- You don’t need to target specific interests because you’re going broad.
Don’t try targeting people who already liked other big viral websites
or meme websites because they might have already seen the article you’ve
written somewhere else or they are used to those kind of ads in their
newsfeed.
Finally, let’s get technical and do the math so you can understand how to make more money than you’re spending.
Facebook Ads by the numbers
I’ll make it simple with an example:
Let’s say you’re running a campaign in France and your average Adsense CPC is worth $0.25.
Initially you start a Facebook campaign (Clicks to website should be
your objective) and your average CPC is 0.05 with an average CTR on your
banner of 1%.
What do you need to be profitable in this case? Do the math… I’ll wait…
OK so if you earn 25 cents from every click on your Adsense banners
and every click from Facebook ads to your website costs 5 cents it means
you need at least 1 click in your Adsense banners every 5 visitors just
to break even. Right?
So if you need 1 click every 5 visitors it means you need an Adsense CTR of 20%.
Are you going to make money here? I don’t think so… Who gets a CTR of
20% when the average Adsense CTR is usually 1-2%? maybe 5%?
Now let’s image this example:
You’re running the same campaign in France and let’s say your average
Adsense CPC is $0.3. You start a Facebook campaign and with a great
image and headline you increase the CTR of your Facebook banner to 5%.
This results into a CPC of $0.01 which is 5 times lower than it was
before.
What kind of CTR would you need in your website to make money? I’ll help you with the math again.
If you get paid 30 cents per each click in your Adsense banners and
you’re paying 1 cent per visitor from Facebook, then you need at least 1
click to your Adsense banner every 30 visits to break even. Anything
higher than that and you’d be profitable!
1 click every 30 visitors means you need an Adsense CTR of 3.3%. Is that possible to achieve? for sure!
So, in conclusion, what you need to make money with viral traffic is
to get your clicks from Facebook as cheap as possible and to increase
your Adsense CTR as much as possible to earn more money per visitor. The
second question is,
how do I do that?
The key behind cheap FB clicks
What you need here is to split test a lot of images and headlines
until you find the best ones. If you’re not sure how to tackle this go
to your Facebook account and like all the Facebook Fan pages related to
viral websites until you understand the style behind them.
I already mentioned that writing a lot of articles and launching
campaigns is they key behind this business, but trust me, the same
article can perform a lot better just by tweaking the headline and the
image. One image could have a mediocre CTR (les than 2% CTR on Facebook
Ads) while a good image could have a wonderful CTR (4% and above) and
that will lower your CPC costs a lot. That’s simply the key behind
Facebook ads and cheap clicks.
Bonus: You can also use retargeting and custom
audiences once you start getting traffic in your website to launch
campaigns that will perform a lot better (extra ROI) because you know
those people already visited your website. Also, don’t forget to check
the Facebook Ads report in your ad manager to see which genders and ages
are clicking your ad more so you can create ads for them and lower the
CPC.
The key behind a great Adsense CTR
You need to split test several themes and positions. Do the math and
discover what kind of CTR do you need to be profitable as we did in the
examples above and start testing like crazy until you find the best
combination. You can split test themes (
with WordPress this is quite easy),
split test colors, positions of banners, colors of banners, banner
sizes and more. Make sure you split test as much as you can until you
find the best combination for your traffic.
Here’s a simple test that can increase your CTR by 1-2% just by making a small change:
Split testing between right sidebar and left sidebar can help you increase your CTR
Another good thing is to split test colors and mix them with the
design of your website. Have a blue website with blue menu and links?
test blue ads and blue links:
Google Adsense font and colors
Once you start launching several campaigns and measuring all your
statistics you’ll know how everything works and fell more comfortable
spending money.
You need to get out of your comfort zone and make it work. Otherwise you’ll never make it in this industry.
PropellerAds and viral traffic
Finally, let’s talk about adding some extra ROI to your earnings by using
PropellerAds.
If this is the first time you’ve heard about PropellerAds, they are
one of the largest networks and most of their ads are shown on a
popunder (onclick ads, as they call them) format.
What is a popunder ad? Well, you know… the type of ad that pops in
another window behind your original website. It looks something like
this:
Yes, these are the same ads that most people hate and some of then assure pop under and pop up ads are dead but
they can’t be more wrong.
Pop Ads work wonderfully although I accept they’re very intrusive and
sometimes I just hate to see them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t
work.
Anyways, the real reason you’re here is because you want to know how
to make extra money and see how I earned $300 extra per day, so here it
goes.
First thing you need to do is to understand how to
install and show PropellerAds in your website. I wrote a
guide and a small review about them a few months ago, so make sure you check it out and come back when you’re done.
Back in September 2015 I started doing tests with a small viral
website without Google Adsense just to see if I could earn any decent
money with PropellerAds and my (already big) Facebook Fan pages. Here’s
what I quickly achieved:
$30 to $70 per day just from popunder ads and Viral traffic with PropellerAds
As you can see, I quickly noticed PropellerAds had some potential but
the first I wanted to try it with a small website and decided to do the
test just with my organic traffic from the Fan Pages I had grown in the
past with my viral websites.
Some days I made $30 and some days the CPM (cost per thousand visits)
was better so I made more than $70 per day with a CPM of $5.
My next step was to test the strategy with my biggest Fan Pages so I
could make my $200 per day with Adsense plus whatever I could achieve as
an extra with PropellerAds to increase my earnings and overall my ROI
on my Facebook campaigns.
Here’s what I achieved back in September:
Up to $355 per day just with PropellerAds and viral traffic
As you can see, I was earning pretty much the same with PropellerAds
compared to Google Adsense, so I decided to contact my manager at
PropellerAds and ask them if there was a problem if I used PropellerAds at the same time with Adsense.
My manager told me there was no problem and Google shouldn’t have
problems either, however, they told me to be careful with Facebook
because they don’t like pop ads when you’re running traffic through
Facebook Ads.
WARNING, YOUR FACEBOOK ADS ACCOUNT COULD BE BANNED
If you don’t follow the steps below closely your FB ads account could be banned. There, I said it. So please read below to see my strategy before trying anything.
So I decided to check out Facebook Ads Terms and Conditions and yes,
they don’t allow pop ups or pop unders on the destination of the ads.
They don’t have problems with organic traffic (A.K.A. Fan Pages without
Ads) though. So what I decided to do in order to use both Google
Adsense and PropellerAds was to create an specific page with Adsense
banners only for the articles that I promoted via Facebook Ads, and then
clone the same article and put both Adsense and PropellerAds and use
that specific link to promote it to my Fans without paying for Ads
(organic traffic just by posting the links in my Fan Pages).
So in conclusion:
- While you’re searching for your golden nuggets to go viral using
Facebook ads make sure you’re using the URL of your article with Google
Adsense banners only
- For all of the articles that you promote to your fans organically
(no Ads) use the URL where you have both Adsense and PropellerAds
What was the final result?
At the end of September and during October I was making
$500 per day overall with my viral websites. Around $150-200 from
PropellerAds and $300-350 from Google Adsense. Quite a nice bump in earnings just by adding a second ad network to the equation, isn’t it?
AGAIN, make sure you don’t use the URLs with PropellerAds when promoting via Facebook Ads or your account could be banned. DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU!
Anyways, even if you don’t have an Adsense account, you can still
make good money with Propeller Ads and viral traffic, the only bummer
there would be that all your FB Ads would need to be focused on getting
likes to your fan Page instead of website clicks and then you can
promote your viral website with PropellerAds organically to your fans.
Since November 2015 I have been split testing a lot of PopUnder ad networks like the
ones mentioned here
and found a few ones that sometimes perform better than PropellerAds.
But as always, you need to split test the networks because what works
for me could not work for you as there are many factors to count in like
country of the visitor, operating systems, devices, etc. One of the
best ones I tried was
Pop Ads but overall PropellerAds has been more solid for this kind of traffic.
Conclusions
There you have it.
That’s how I added $300 per day with PropellerAds and viral traffic and overall how you can make more than $500 per day
just with viral websites.
As always, remember to put this to test and
never forget to split test everything until you find the best combination for your website/traffic.
Don’t quit if you launch 3 campaigns and fail. That’s pretty common but
the ones that persist are the ones who dominate it and make it big.
Finally, if you want to read more posts like this where I explain
everything with numbers and step by step please don’t forget to share
this post and leave a comment below. If you’re already running viral
websites, I’d love to hear your feedback and know what’s working for
you.
Talk to you later this week!
