[White Hat] Watch me grow a viral news site from scratch (47)
So, I've decided I want to buy a house here.
Specifically, I want to buy an actually nice house here. None of this "ugly shit cabin for $800k" stuff. I'm going for something like this:
http://www.realtor.ca/Residential/Si...olumbia-V0N1B7
And I've decided I'm going to fund it by growing and eventually selling a viral news site. After all, they're pretty popular these days. Or maybe I'll keep the site and the income from it, and use it to buy the house with a mortgage. Who knows. Either way, this site is gonna buy momma a house. Because while I could pay down a $5k a month mortgage right now, I like spending my money on other shit. A house isn't worth being stuck in one country and not being able to randomly go on month-long overseas holidays.
ANYWAY this is the site that's gonna bring in the big bucks:
http://www.thepopularpenguin.com/
Stats as of today, day 1 of the soft launch:
Number of articles: 10
Facebook page likes: 25
Twitter followers: 0 (account not yet made)
Pinterest followers: 0 (account not yet made)
Ad revenue: $0.00
Ad spend: $18.82
Here's the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thepopularpenguin
I just started my soft launch today. Basically, I'm slowly building up a following for my fan page while getting some of the kinks out of the site. That way, by the time I'm ready to do my real launch, I'll already have thousands of page likes, everything should be better optimized for ad revenue, etc.
Monetization: Right now, it's just AdSense. When I'm really up and running I also plan on split testing with affiliate ads, but right now I'm more interested in getting a foundational base of readers more than squeezing every penny out of the site. My time is better spent getting traffic right now.
Strategy: Right now I'm advertising with Facebook ads, in two different ways: trying to get likes, and boosting individual posts for likes and shares. I'm doing it slowly, my budget is super low right now, mainly because I'm just trying to slowly build it while I get articles written (I'm paying someone to do these) and work out the kinks. I also wanted to see what a $15 a day budget would get me in terms of likes. I'm currently paying $0.50 per like, which I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it seems high. I'm going to have to try some different images. Eventually I expect to be spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a day on ads.
If anyone has any questions, comments, or anything else, I'd be happy to hear it. I've done a fair bit of research, but I'm still very new to the space. I expect to finish this follow along by posting pictures of my new house when I buy it.
A great recent example worth looking at is Elite Daily. The guy who started it, Gerard Adams https://instagram.com/gerardadamsnyc/?hl=en sold it just a few months ago for a cool $50 million.
I guess that will buy you a couple sweet beachfront mansions with some spare change left over to get a pad on Hyde Park and a small vineyard in Tuscany as well. 
Awesome, thank you so much! 50 mill would be pretty sweet too, not gonna limit this site's potential!
Day 2, I'm making money. Not profit, but I also definitely wasn't expecting to be this quickly:
Number of articles: 13
Facebook page likes: 54
Twitter followers: 0 (account not yet made)
Pinterest followers: 0 (account not yet made)
Ad revenue: $5.01
Ad spend: $47.74
I've met the guys from Elite Daily. Several times. You have a lot more knowledge than they had going into it, Hannah.
Inverse of that, I suppose, is that blind faith / ignorant confidence is a HUGE advantage to ultimately succeeding (vs people stuck in analysis paralysis loops).
Edited to add:
1. I know a really nice Aussie couple now living full time at the bottom of the slopes in Whistler in one of the "really nice" houses you describe. Would be happy to make an introduction if we meet up there sometime - they're big time skiers like you.
2: The better case study (than Elite Daily) is http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/09/zea...r-100-million/
The company averages 100 million monthly visits and has over 3 million fans on Facebook, its largest driver for traffic.
Hey Phillian! Thanks for the advice
That's really good to know about the guys from Elite Daily, because I honestly feel like I'm going in completely blind. I've done a bunch of research, but I still feel like a complete newbie in this space, and that scares me. So it gives me confidence to know that I'm not the only one who's gone through it!
ViralNova is the site I was originally looking at. Especially since they were 100% self funded, no outside VC money. I also really like this slideshow by Upworthy: http://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/t...ce-of-virality
Also, I'm definitely up for meeting your friends sometime, and you of course if you ever make it out this way
Right now I'm starting to get a little bit more data. I've cost my cost/like down to around $0.42 by killing some bad performing ads, but I know I can do better. The goal is to get it down to under $0.30 per like. According to Facebook I'm already doing better than 80% of ads in my demo, so at least that's not the worst start ever.
However, I feel like I'm not doing well with my engagement to posts.
I know that I need to fix the blurb for the links, but I think it's more than that. At the moment I'm looking at about a 1.5% like/share rate. My cost per engagement is only $0.24 on average, but the majority of those are just clicks. Honestly, I'd prefer likes and shares to be able to get that viralness up a bit.
And the other thing is, I'm not sure if these numbers are low. They feel low. But I guess I'm coming from a place where 3-4% CTR on an ad is normal, but my ads are much more targetted. Still, I'd like to know if I'm running in the right direction here, or if my ads are somehow colossal fuckups and I need to work on my headline/image choice.
Is a like campaign still worth the effort? Facebook's organic reach is nearly zero these days. So other than brand awareness and social proof I'm not sure you'll get a lot out of these likes.
Hey,
This is a great idea I will follow you here.
I saw your site and I felt like the posts were not good enough, not interesting enough and didn't made me want to click.
You should work a bit more on the copy of your headlines and I think your results will improve.
I run a large network of viral sites that are maintained for alternative purposes other than direct monetization.
Few things..
- The theme you are using is very distinctive and used by 90% of people starting out, would suggest switching it up to something a bit more unique
- Does your brand "The popular penguin" sound like a company that will sell for 50m? I would suggest picking a shorter, more typical viral site name related to the point below
- What is your niche? Who are you trying to reach and get engagement from? I would suggest picking just one of your categories and focus on that. For example, science related viral articles - Then it's much easier to target users and they are more likely to stick around and click through your posts
- Page like campaigns are hugely expensive, if you promote good content then the likes will come naturally
I would start looking at doing native advertising arbitrage, where you promote your posts on networks like outbrain, taboola, rev content etc and then put similar widgets on your own site - in the hope that you make more revenue from these than you pay for traffic
Very interesting follow-along - subscribed!
Native advertising does seem like a natural fit for the site. Also, are you going to try to build a list from the site? The demographics will be rather general, but it might be worth a test.
Thank you to everyone for the advice! A lot to think about for sure.
I was thinking of eventually getting to the point of building a list, caurmen. You're right that it will be pretty general, so I'm not entirely sure how well it'll go, but I agree that it'll be worth a test for sure.
Nick - with regards to the categories especially, I totally intend to narrow the focus eventually. I'm starting off a bit wider just to get an idea as to what engages people. When I gather a lot more data I'll figure out what niche is going to get me the best results, and I'll narrow the focus of the site. But I figure in a year no one's going to go back and see that I made (for example) fifteen posts about science on a site that's now just cute animals.
Do you have a suggestion for the theme? I spent a few days looking at quite a few of them, but none of them seemed to do what I want as much as SV. I do plan on doing some more customization to the theme to make it more unique, but if you've got a suggestion for others I'd love to hear them! As for the site name, I hear you. I was torn as to whether I should go with that or not, but honestly, I thought it rolled off the tongue a bit, and I like that it's not a two-syllable generic viral name like every single other site out there. I might be making a huge mistake with that, but we'll see.
Thank you also for the native advertising idea. Definitely will look into that now.
I'm also noticing you're right about the page likes. I never intended that to be a long term thing, I just wanted to get my first 100 or so likes quickly so the page doesn't look completely new. But I've got one ad that started doing really well ($0.15 per engagement) and the number of organic likes I'm getting has started growing faster. I'm now up to about 85 likes on the page, and I believe around 20-25 are organic since last night.
So far I'm noticing a trend in my campaigns - either I get a lot of comments/likes but no clicks, or a lot of clicks but no comments/likes. I need to improve my copy to get that ratio evened out a little bit more. I've also started doing the "upworthy method" of 25 headlines per article.
Will be following this one Hannah, i'm currently doing something similar.
As for themes, take a look at some of the main sites. Most use the same 4/5 themes.. I also started with SV but switched after a couple of days.
Hers a list of some themes (most are themeforest) used by the virals:
Hottopix
Braxton
Sahifa
Gonzo
Jafida
Newstube
Newscore
celebritygossip - magazine3
Newspaper
frontpage - mythemeshop
Be prepared for a facebook ban.......... facebook doesn't allow what your doing anymore unless your one of the GIANTS and grandfathered in.
Originally Posted by ploppythejailer
I think I saw most of those, I didn't like how a lot of them looked on my phone though. I can't remember which site it was but one of the big viral sites said that 80% of their traffic came from mobile devices, so I wanted to make 100% sure I had something that looked decent on smartphones. Especially the themeforest ones, quite a few looked like they weren't even mobile specific, just a smaller version of the desktop site.
I hadn't seen Sahifa before though, that one looks interesting!
So I went and bought the Newtube theme because I liked it.
Except it requires the optiontree plugin to run, and as soon as you run it with the latest version of wordpress it throws up a dumb error line at the top of the home page, because of course it does. I'm playing with it with a test install of wordpress now.
So this is actually going along quite a bit better and faster than I expected.
I'm already at over 100 likes for the page. 117 in fact. I'll be at 125 by the end of the day, which means that it'll have taken me just under 72 hours from when I wrote the first post to add 100 likes. I had planned on it taking a week to get to 100 likes.
I'm spending the day changing the theme over to something different, and should be done that by the end of the day.
Number of articles: 17
Facebook page likes: 117
Twitter followers: 0 (account not yet made)
Pinterest followers: 0 (account not yet made)
Ad revenue: $6.34
Ad spend: $120.83
What I'm not happy with so far:
- I still can't seem to get something that makes people like/share and click. It's very much a one-or-the-other game right now.
- I'm not getting enough clicks on AdSense. Hopefully the new theme will help, and of course, also the fact that I'll be adding in native ads.
- My bounce rate is sitting around 50%. I want to get that down. I also want to get the average pages per session up to at least 5, from the approximately 2 that it's sitting at now.
One thing that IS positive: I'm getting better at writing the headlines. For the last two posts I've promoted, my cost per engagement is at 14 cents and 6 cents each. And that's in Canadian dollars, so it's more like 10 cents/4 cents USD. Seeing as I started around 30 cents/engagement, I think I'm improving!
I also heard Facebook are cracking down on this type of site, maybe why people are going down the native advertising route... Nickpeplow can you shed any light on this?
Originally Posted by dazed1
now they did change their algorithm a year or so back which allowed some of those viral sites to grow very quickly... basically the click-bait links people were posting are shown a lot less... but I've not heard anything else.
Originally Posted by intergmediagreg
Honestly though, I've been in affiliate marketing in 2008 and there are always people that have "heard" that literally everything ever is under attack at some point or another. It might be true, but it might not, and I'm not going to stop doing this on the basis that a few people heard something isn't allowed anymore, because in this industry, if everyone believed that when they heard it no one would make any money.
Originally Posted by hannahmcintyre
i'd keep at it... i've dabble with a similar site more for fun...i'm not worried about any sort of 'ban'
Hi,
I am in the process of creating such a site for my country as well - definitely following your post.
These 3 blog posts from viperchill were really helpful for me:
http://www.viperchill.com/six-months/
http://www.viperchill.com/100k-one-week/
http://www.viperchill.com/headline-millionaire/
That's all good then, just throwing it out there. I've looked into this before and there seemed to be a lot of ppl complaining about facebook banning advertising accounts for promoting viral news stories. Someone has already mentioned it in this thread.
http://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-final...cli-1626542378
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08...click-baiting/
Following this thread. Doing something similar as well.
Originally Posted by hannahmcintyre
I dabbled a few years ago in viral sites. I remember that sites like wahoha, mgid etc reward publishers with more traffic back to their site than the amount clicking on their sites widgets. So if 50 peeps click on ur sites widgets the next day you can get 80+ visitors coming to your site from your widgets set up on the site. Definitely helpful for going viral. Heard of someone going the BH route and automating clicking on the widgets through proxies and gaining free traffic that way too, which was interesting.
Originally Posted by dazed1
Originally Posted by hannahmcintyre
Originally Posted by geobak
Originally Posted by spokesz
I've redesigned my site now. My bounce rate is lower, pages per visit are up, but I haven't made a cent with Adsense ads since the change. I've signed up for a few native advertising sites but am still waiting on approval, so no native ads on the site yet. I looked at where the biggest sites in the space put their ads, and have mainly tried imitating that.
That said, I also don't have too much data so I'm not panicking yet, but still. Does anyone have an idea as to what kind of CTR I should be aiming for here? I know back when I did niche sites for Google in like 2008 I was aiming for around 30%, so I figure this will be lower, but I would still be expecting better than what I'm getting, which is 0% CTR on around 70 views. It's a bit weird being on the other side of this. I used to care about my CTR where the variable I could change was what my banner looked like, now I care but the only variable I can change is where my banner shows up.
I'm running about 40% desktop, 60% mobile/tablet traffic going by analytics.
Originally Posted by hannahmcintyre
I'm going to throw up some gleam.io contests for an iPhone 6s on the post page to grow my likes & shares from my already CTR audience without having to pay FB.
Do you want to mastermind? I sent you a PM.
We were in this space early last year for several months, and were able to exit out of it for a relatively small amount right before FB made the changes in its algorithm that screwed sites like viralnova, petflow, etc. (look at the Alexa/Compete info for the last 18 months for most all of these sites that rely on FB -- it's not a pretty picture).
We looked at it as just a quick "flip" opportunity -- launched 3 sites simultaneously, put about $100k into it in ads and development, and were able to sell the "network" two months later for a sum enough to buy that house you want. In the meantime, we were at over 300% ROI on FB ads / arbitrage on the site, spending a couple thousand dollars a day to grow it.
We attempted to get back into the space from the ground-up a few months ago, just to see how it's changed and if there's room for another quick flip for some of our guys to work on, and we were not able to get better than 10% ROI on optimized campaigns. This coming from people who have entered and exited the space before, have connections with most of the hard to get to ad networks, and know a lot of the "tricks" needed to make this kind of site work.
tl;dr - this is gonna be tough for you.
protip - don't focus on "like" campaigns; focus on excellent content, then doing ads for that linked-out content, which will inevitably get you the likes/audience you're looking for
protip 2 - FB is not the only (and IMO, not the best) source of traffic for this type of site to actually get momentum these days
Any updates Hannah? How is progress?
Yes!
So I've made quite a few changes to everything over the last few weeks, plus another one of my businesses sort of blew up so I had to take care of some shit there that kept me away from anything remotely resembling free time for the forums.
For one thing, I've now got two of these sites. I created a second site after taking some advice from here, that I should focus on a niche. I won't tell you what the niche is, but I can advertise to around 10 million people in the USA so that's big enough for me.
And the niche site is doing way, way better.
I'm getting likes to the page at under 10 cents each. I know I could just promote the articles and collect likes that way, but seriously, they're so cheap that for $10 a day I'm getting around 105 likes, which is going to help me grow the brand way quicker than I normally would.
Plus I've already had one article go semi-viral. It's had 39 shares directly from the page, my link on Facebook's been shared around 32 times, it's gaining comments and likes faster than anything I've ever promoted, and is seeing about 300 pageviews a day.
Now the bad part: my monetization still suuuuuuucks.
I've changed TPP back to SociallyViral because while it might look like every single other viral site out there, at least people clicked the ads. Newstube had such a terrible CTR for both sites that it just became stupid. I was looking at like 0.001% CTR with 2 AdSense placements above the fold.
My other niche site now uses the theme Eleven40. Already it's kind of promising, I got the CTR up to 0.5% so far, and just edited it to add a new banner above the fold on mobile, which seeing as 60%+ of my traffic on this site is mobile, is important. I really, really hate the theme though, I'm not going to lie. It's stupidly difficult to edit, it uses its own framework which is completely stupid. But I've finally edited it to something reasonable, and if the CTR is good I'll stick with it.
So now it's just the traffic game. Trying to balance up building up traffic and a fan page while finding a theme that nets me a decent CTR. I'm not 100% sure what I should be aiming for here. I know those old SEO sites we could make back in like 2008-2010 with a single long tail keyword a good CTR was around 20-30%. So maybe I should be aiming for somewhere in the 5-10% range here?
I'm also going to be adding some affiliate links inside the posts on this site. This new niche opens up a ton of affiliate opportunity, so I'm going to try and capitalize on that. Plus because they're ads going on my own site, I can make them loop infinitely and there's nothing anyone can say about it.
Great progress Hannah,
At this point, you have to start optimizing on both sides. Try to make your campaigns profitable, I've had an average CPC of $0.005-$0.001in Facebook few months ago with viral posts. This means you can get a thousand visits to your site for $5-$10, everything else you get from people sharing, etc. (organic reach) consider it as a bonus but don't add it into your metrics as it will complicate your optimization work.
This cost is reasonable to compensate with Adsense, where the RPM you should aim for at the beginning and with viral niche content is $10-15. In order to get there, you can increase your CPC, some ways to do that:
* Go into the Adsense panel and activate the Ad review center, block some really cheap ads from advertisers of stock photos, etc. where the average customer value is low
* Review your content, try to add some keywords from high CPC paying topics
In order to increase the CTR, a good CTR to aim for is around 2% with the kind of layout you are using. There are some grey hat methods to increase this but if you want to go 100% legit I'd recommend editing the theme. After split testing several themes and specially socially viral, I found:
* Small header = Higher CTR, make its heigh as small as possible without the site looking non-legit or bad
* Less interaction elements like social buttons, tweet, share, text, etc. Remove as many as you can. They don't add so much value as clickloss
* Three banner placements, a top one a rectangle, bottom one a leaderboard and a side vertical skyscrapper will give you the best results
* The top and bottom banners converted much better when they were Text Only instead of text and display
I would also add an additional non-intrusive revenue source to bump up your RPM, the ones I have tested that don't seem to interfere much with Adsense earnings are native ads. Content.ad seems to work well with a display of recommended posts in the lower part of the page and an exit pop (which is a layer, not a pop up actually) which is triggered only when the user moves the cursor up out of the page. This can give you an additional $1 RPM if done right without taking from the Adsense earnings.
Good luck!
Thanks for the post torero.
You've absolutely nailed my main problem. RPM.
I'm managing to get a couple viral posts going on my new niche site, and they are getting pretty cheap. The problem is my earnings. My page RPM for the new site right now with AdSense is $1.31. I need to literally multiply it by 10. And my CTR is one of the major problems. 0.06%. And this is an "evergreen" sub-niche, it's not one where people traditionally don't click ads... as evidenced by the fact that they're clicking the ads to get to my site at a huge rate.
Thanks for the suggestions, I will definitely be following all of those. I had a vertical skyscraper which I got rid of completely because it has a 0% CTR after thousands of impressions, I figured being able to take that placement and put it mid-post would give it a better chance, but so far no luck.
Thanks again for all the advice!
I will be moderating a panel at Affiliate World Asia with Gerard Adams, co-founder of Elite Daily. Gerard started this viral news site with a bunch of his friends and sold it to DMGT for $50 million earlier this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPOAqayWsnA
You should pepper him with all of your questions!
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Any update? How much money have you made?
Did a quick test on facebook with viral stuff. Promoted a viral post (using boost post) in the US. Averaged $0.13/click. 1000 paid and about 900 organic clicks over all. few 100 likes and 35 shares or so.
So organic is now dead. or may be fb was being generous. Problem was making it profitable.
Any updates here?
So one thing I've found is that arbitraging paid traffic is my main traffic generation method right now.
And as soon as December started the prices for FB ads shot up so high that there was no chance at all of getting it profitable, and I didn't want the December numbers fucking with my overall data.
HOWEVER even with spending absolutely no money I still made like $30 in December. Pocket change, of course, but I actually never really expected to get anything when I shut off the paid traffic sources. It's pretty much from a combo of organic and direct traffic, with a handful of social. The organic views had the highest CPM over that time period.
Anyway, now that January 1st is here and EOY ad budgets are gone, it's time to move back to paid traffic and bringing in more paid visitors. But I'm actually still quite surprised that any amount of money got made in December.
You should definitely follow LitteThings, which even though they started late, are really getting some good traction. They started a little more than a year ago, and are now doing some decent revenue numbers (about $25 million a year) ...
How an entrepreneur turned his pet food startup into a viral website with more than a million visitors a day
http://www.businessinsider.com/littl...profile-2015-9
In 2010, Alex Zhardanovsky and Joe Speiser started an e-commerce website called Petflow, which sold pet food, treats and supplies.
Petflow raised $15 million in venture capital funding from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners. Speiser says Petflow created its Facebook page back in 2011 with the goal of attracting potential customers who might want to buy pet food, sharing a ton of animal-related pictures to the page to drive customer interest.
"We built up a fairly large audience to literally sell pet food between the years of 2010 and 2014," he told Business Insider.
Then, things changed.
"By 2014, we recognized that while e-commerce is great, we have a lot more fun working on digital media and content," Speiser said. "And that fit really well with our audience, which was women over 35 who just loved anything inspiring and feel good. Dog, cat, pet-related, and non-pet feel-good type of articles."
They started creating more and more content for Petflow's blog, and traffic just "took off," Speiser said.
"We recognized very early on in 2014 that what we had here was a much bigger story than just a media side of the business for Petflow. We actually had a media organization, a whole publishing unit," Speiser says.
In September 2014, Speiser and Zhardanovsky decided to leverage their audience for Petflow, spin out the business, and started producing a ton of content for their new venture, called LittleThings.com. The site usually posts adorable videos of animals and other kinds of feel-good, uplifting content: stories and videos of police officers doing good for citizens, underdog stories, and kitchen hacks.
LittleThings has grown rapidly since its inception one year ago. In January 2014, the company had one employee. Now, a year and nine months later, it has 50, and the media company is building out a video studio to produce more original content. Speiser proudly says Little Things has been profitable and revenue rich from day one.
When LittleThings launched, its traffic was much lower than other viral content properties like Viral Nova, Elite Daily, and Upworthy. But its traffic is spiking now. LittleThings' Facebook page is approaching 7 million fans, and its website draws between 35 million and 45 million monthly unique visitors.
"You're going to have a really hard time finding a network as powerful as Facebook"
If you've never heard of LittleThings, you're not alone — though you've likely seen someone share one of their stories in your Facebook News Feed.
"We've been calling ourselves the biggest brand nobody's ever heard of," Speiser said. "We command a pretty large amount of eyeballs out there, but brand-wise, we're pretty new to the market. It's an uphill battle getting our name out there, just now because we just started coming out from under the radar."
According to Speiser, Little Things gets about 80-85% of its traffic from the backbone of Facebook.
"Facebook is the biggest firehouse of social traffic out there," he said. "People talk a lot about 'OK, I'm gonna try to diversify, get more traffic on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or Snapchat.' But in reality, you're going to have a really hard time finding a network as powerful as Facebook. It's just a really massive social network that does phenomenally well for feel good content."
In the past year, Facebook has cracked down on viral sites and changed its Newsfeed algorithm to show fewer of their stories. The changes have killed off some competitors in the viral content space. In 2014, Viral Nova founder Scott DeLong tweeted that running a business on Facebook was "like opening a McDonald's on an active volcano."
Standing out in the crowd
It's no secret that there are a number of media properties doing viral content today, though the numbers are thinning as many make their exits. Viral Nova just sold for as much as $100 million. Elite Daily was recently acquired by the Daily Mail for about $50 million; Mic has gone on to raise tens of millions in funding, and Twitter has reportedly offered to buy it. Upworthy and Distractify have largely fallen off the map.
So how does LittleThings make a name for itself?
"Because we solely focus on feel-good content, people know it's a safe environment where they can consume content and advertisers can buy ads," Speiser said. "Viral Nova spans a spectrum for all sorts of content. They don't really have a focus. And Upworthy is a lot more political than we'd like to be. We don't just curate — we find and create. We're looking for the pieces of inspiring, uplifting content that have yet to be discovered."
Instead of jumping on the bandwagon and promoting something that everyone else has already promoted, Speiser says, LittleThings wants to find videos or stories with very few views, and amplify those stories — 'diamonds in the rough," he calls them. Curation is 70% of what LittleThings does, he says, and 30% is in-house, original work done by the company's growing video team, its illustrators, graphic designers, and editors.
LittleThings is trying to figure out the Facebook video game, and to do that, the company is producing a little over 100 videos a month to see what works and what doesn't.
"Video's going to be a huge focus for us," Speiser said. "Facebook is opening up the spigot in terms of monetization of these videos. You need to be producing your own internal, original content, or else you're going to be left out in the cold."
Shunning millennials in favor of Facebook moms
"Every publisher out there is yelling on top of the roof about how many millennials they have," Speiser said.
Instead of doing the same thing, LittleThings is going after another audience: women who are 35 and older. These women tend to spend significantly more as consumers, making them attractive to advertisers. And they have more time on their hands than a millennial would, so they're likely to spend more time clicking around the website and sharing stories to Facebook.
Like other digital media properties, LittleThings is run mostly by programmatic advertising, meaning its advertising is performance-based and driven. LittleThings gets three times the number of clickthroughs on ads that a publication with a millennial-heavy audience would have — its audience clicks on 2.5% to 3.5% on their ads, versus the industry standard of millennials of less than 1%.
“All of our writers have sources, of course,” Maia McCann, LittleThings’s content director, told the Washington Post this year. “But I always tell writers to go on Facebook and, you know — look at their moms.”
Speiser says anything wedding-related, birthing announcements, army reunions, videos of police officers doing something good for citizens, and underdog stories are all part of LittleThings' formula for success.
"It leaves you feeling good as a viewer, and that's exactly what we're trying to impart on people," he said. "You come to us to leave feeling good, to feel better about your day."
I've never had an authority type of website before, but am currently working on one (infant stages).
One thing I've been curious about is making a "bookmark" or "favorite" button as opposed to the like/tweet/etc buttons. I know it's possible...I'm 95% sure you have to deal with cross-browser issues. Did a google search mid-typing this and found a bunch of results to copy n paste. I think it'd be good if it floated on the side of the website similar to some of those chat boxes you see.
Sure-fire way to get return visitors.
https://www.thewebflash.com/how-to-a...-your-website/
^^Tutorial worked perfectly...I guess its impossible to serve a one size fits all bookmark button (appears chrome actually attempts to prevent it). That link gives a mini-alert saying "hit this to bookmark." Even cooler, it has a script to download there for mobile users to add your site to their homescreen.
If you copy paste this:
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'add_my_script' ); function add_my_script() { wp_enqueue_script( 'your-script', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/your-script.js', array('jquery')); }
Into appearance > editor > functions.php (very bottom of file) within wordpress dashboard + copy paste the jquery code on the first link into your theme's javascript folder (make a new file called your-script.js) it'll work.
I suspect something like this would make an excellent wp plugin...couldn't find one from searching.
Lastly if anyone reading this tries it - as a reminder *back your files up* - while trying this, I ended up putting one wrong semi colon in the no-shit 8000 lines of code within my functions.php and the whole site broke.
What a read! But some amazing content right here for anyone wanting to launch a viral website via facebook. Cant wait to see your progress Hannah!
How are you getting on Hannah? Any more progress?
Nice follow along :-)
Any updates?
Are you using software that scrape content from other sources and post it on your site? How do you deal with cross domain dupplicate content without getting your adsense account banned?
I was on a similar journey with my viral news site and posted a case study here http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...006#post272006
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