After 50 million views in May, plus 95,000+ Reddit Karma, did any of the organic viral marketing turn into revenue?
The goal of this opinion piece is to share to you what happens when you go super viral, and how it translates (or not) to bottom-line revenue.
So, I'll quickly detail what it did do, and what it didn't do for my business. So you can learn from my experience for your own business.
Here's what it didn't do:
No, I didn't bring 50,000,000 views to my website. Not even 1,000,000 views. None of the content created was part of an advertisement campaign. If you're going to get 50,000,000 views organically, it cannot, will not be an ad. People spend money on ads. If a piece of content does get a lot of views, by default it's inherent nature is something funny, entertaining, or relatable and worth sharing. Only then, can you tweak that viral content to have a different hook, and Call-to-action at the end of it. Once you tweak it, you can spend money on [ads] to push it out. The benefit of doing it this way is that you know people will engage positively with it, so it will be worth spending money on it.
No, it didn't magically create an uptick in sales. Following up from number 1, it didn't boost my sales at all. While the month of May would be considered a success, most of my sales weren't generated from "viral content".
Most sales came from referrals of successful clients.
Other sales came from other types of organic marketing (I'll explain later).
No, my penis did [not] increase in size. Contrary to popular belief, there's this random idea that social media experts, and "influencers" feel super powerful. In fact, I would claim the opposite. I ended up spending more time in front of my computers, and literally didn't get laid all month. I have a wife and 3 children, so it shouldn't be that hard (literally, nothing was). Instead, I just spent a ton of time dealing with complaining trolls, MODS who have god-complexes, and endless notifications.
Here's what it did do:
I mentioned earlier that May was a good month for organic marketing, but what [type] of marketing performed the best for me? It was primarily being [helpful] to others. I spent a lot of time doing boring stuff like answering questions, doing quick searches for information, based on requests from OP's, and contributing to other's peoples content. In fact, I am confident that the 11,000+ visitors that came to my website, with $0.00 spent on ads were from this, not the viral content.
The Reddit algorithms start treating you nicer. In the past, if I wrote something "controversial", even if it were true, I'd get spammed by angry Redditors, and my content reach would be low hundreds. Now, if I did the same (which I don't), I get reach in the thousands. Even my worst posts will get 20k - 40k views, with zero engagement. I'm not sure if I prefer the latter, in-fact it's quite boring not getting shat on! But, if you've legitimately mastered the Karma game here on Reddit, which I would say I might have (not really), you're less likely to get into random internet disputes with trolls looking to take you down, and get more value out of each post!
I did write an e-book on my process of getting 10,000 - 20,000 monthly visitors to my website with $0.00 in ad-spend. I just published it, and if you're interested feel free to grab a copy. If you hate it, I'll refund you.
I write more content with value for [others]. Some of my original posts here are actually quite embarrassing. I talk about things no one cares about. I talk about how much money I made, how cool I am, and in really this does nothing for anyone. I am quite ashamed seeing the evolution, but also, if you're not embarrassed about what you were creating (as a creator), then it means you have not been in the game long enough to see a difference.
It's funny, even 2 months ago I talked about how my content reach was about 20k viewers daily back in March, while now, it exceeds about 2 million per day (in May).
In summary,
would I change how the month of May played out? Absolutely not! It was very exciting, and I learned even more about how I should carry along my content strategy going into June. I have been on this marketing journey since December, and my abilities have grown quite substantially.
Pretty soon, I am going to need to change my strategy from an organic one, to a paid one. 10,000 - 20,000 organic visitors with no ad spend is great, but monthly revenue is capped. If I want to 10x, or 100x monthly revenue, even with a super high conversion rate, I am going to need to start running some ads, which I expect to do in July.
Please let me know if you have any questions. View the original Reddit Post here.
