How to abuse the virality system to promote your offer

[lelitob]

How to abuse the virality system to promote your offer

Hi. i'm a 25 year "cinema,ads and comunication" student, today i will explain how i made 500 $ in the first real day on affiliate marketing, at least it was my real first expirience after 2 years lurking information about IM.

Before starting: What is the virality system?

This may sound basic to someone of you, but i have to explain it. ​

Everyone knows, what's virality right? The tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another; but how this works, what's the pattern of this circolation? I've been doing this study for my degree and i've traced a simple pattern that most of the media products make to become viral.
It's a 3 step route:
1. Content creation, it's the site, the blog or the platform where the media product is hosted for the first time.
2.Content selection, this is actually the key of everything, these are sites like subreddits, imgur, big forums where people use to link their media products and a little crowd decide if it's good or not ( upvote downvote). I will explain later how to abuse this stage.
3.Content spreading, this start from the "front page" of the content selection to other site and social medias.

I've really summarize, there would be more to talk - but it's not really necessary for the case study. Let's start the case study

1. Choose your offer and your platform for Content Selection

Choosing the offer.
I've personally run the amazon associate program, it was a safe choice at the time, i had no real expirience and maybe i would have been rejected from other affiliate programs.
I've decided to promote the offer on Imgur, the choice was because i've already saw some post promoting amazon and i had a 3 years "expirience" on imgur.

There are 2 main platform I suggest you to use : Reddit and Imgur.
Reddit
Reddit pro:
-a LOT of people
-Tons of niches
-a lot of fiveer offer for upvotes ecc..
-it has a lot of social media shares .

Reddit con:
- people use to "investigate" your account, watching karma ecc... so if you haven't a good account you should probably buy one
-at the initial start people can't see how many upvotes your post has ( i will explain later why this is an important thing)
- if you want make a personal bot as i do, reddit trace id and has listed every single Thor node
----------------------------------
Imgur
Imgur pro:
-users see the initial votes
- if you want to make a bot, it's easier
- a lot of people
- not so "reputation based" as reddit

Imgur con:
- has a trend depency, that makes you to adapt to them
- not so many niches as reddit

2. Create the Media content that cover your offer.
This could be the most important thing on this case study. Why? because you HAVE to create something that sells, but it's look like that it's not because you want earning something from others, or you will get downvoted to hell.
How you do that? First of all, you have to understand what is good for your platform and what's not, look at what's already working, copy and make it better.
For example there are 3 main kind of sneaky promotion on imgur:

- the "thing you want to buy", cheap wonderfull thing, ecc.. that promotes most of amazon things: Cheap Xmas gift ideas for the girl in your life here an example, not the best but it was the first i found out. P.S: you should add the link to your own personal imgur pages to amazon sites list, i've got my first account closed for this forgetfulness.

- the t-shirt sneaky promoting, this can be one of the best if you're good at design shirts. There are some rules, you can not just put a teespring shirt there like " the 1987 women are the best" like on fb, you have to choose a really good or funny design or follow a trend or a meme on imgur. Here an example of really good post: mama, I killed a man...
here the link I SEE A LITTLE SILHOUETTO 900 sold shirt is pretty impressive to me.
Tip1: add the link only when the post hit the front page
Tip2: if you want to be sneky photoshop the design on a real photo and put something " i saw this shirt today".

- the "useful site list", this is the most used one, it will not give you direct profit but it will give you a lot of visit on your website.
First of all you need to have a site that it's uselful in some ways, some well know examples
ThisIsWhyImBroke.com and Welcome To Dat Twenty: Where Everything Is Under $20 .
Tips for a list:
- use images of your site
- add other not related sites on the list, you can just copy these from other list
-add a description

P.s. there was a site promoted on imgur about "fake" glitter mailing service to your enemy, after 3 month they flipped it and got 80'ooo$ .

3. Posting and promoting your media.
This is a crucial part, you could just post your media over and over, crossing the finger to get to the front page or just cheat a little bit and be sure to hit the point.
I use my own bot made with Python, but you could just buy some upvotes on Fiverr, the nice thing is that you will not need tons of upvote, you will need 100 or max 200 to hit the front page(imgur). why?
If you ever read Le Bon theories you should be aware that a person can be really influenced by other (crowd) thoughts. So if a user see that a post has a really good start like 20/30 upvotes it will upvote it more easily with out thinking. "they say it's cool, i like it" - sorry for the sociology here.
If you're gonna use a fiverr upvoter, you have to message him when you post the content, because he has to be fast to upvote as soon as you post. The first 30 minutes are crucial.


Proofs

amazon earnings, i have the mail cause they got my closed the initial account. This was made in 33 hours.


last screen before i went to sleep

And here the stats of my post:

 

[Bloody Tourist]

Never thought of imgur as a traffic source. Greet stuff thanks!

 

[Melody Tanisha]

amazing stuff

 

[lelitob]

Thanks guys. I'm working on a similar project right now, i will report as soon as possible.

 

[lelitob]

I've posted yesterday a good post,hitted the front page after less than 2 hour2. BUT i've made a huge mistake, i've linked the material on description and my account got an automate ghost ban (ghost ban = when you're not formally banned but every single post is hidden to other people).
At least i have the pleasure to talk with the support and i've learn that this process is automated on shortlinks and other type of links(i'm hoping to find out blacklisted sites too).

Every mistake is a lesson.​

I will try to repost it this week.

 

[dedicatednewbie]

Well.. Valentine's day is cominv, better get your butt to work ^^ haha

btw so ur saying that affiliate links arent allowed on imgur?

amazon or other sites too?

 

[lelitob]

Well.. Valentine's day is cominv, better get your butt to work ^^ haha

btw so ur saying that affiliate links arent allowed on imgur?

amazon or other sites too?

Not all the affiliate links, actually i've made my first 500 bucks with amazon affiliate, i think they ghost ban only the short link version of amazon affiliate.

Some people could look bad at your post for having amazon affiliate links and downvote it , so i suggest you to wait until the post reach the front page and edit description.

 

[lelitob]

UPDATE:
Another campaign launched with this method.

I had to purchase a gig on fiverr, because I've been updating and fixing my bots, so i could't use them.
For this reason i couldn't use a lot of upvotes, more important i could not upvote my post when it was on front page to get more visibility and more sustain time.

The only cost was one gig on fiveer so 5.50$
Earnings: 81$ At the moment

Still good, i've could done better but i learned something more, for example that you reach front page at least 4 hours later from the upload and for now the best time to post still 1:00 pm/2:00 pm (Paris Time)

 

[azgold]

i think they ghost ban only the short link version of amazon affiliate.

Pinterest does that, too (actually, they don't accept the short link at all) but works if I put in the long link with my aff ID in it. Makes no sense to me but that's how it works.

 

[crysper]

This works with most social websites, the problem is that the bigger, more important ones can find bots and strange up-votes patterns easily. You need to test a few times to find a good source of up-votes and you also need quality content, you can get to front page but if it's trash the mods will remove it. Reddit has some algorithms that marks fast up-votes posts for manual moderation if they suspect something.

After all, it's a good method to get ton of traffic if done right. Thanks for the case study

 

[lelitob]

This works with most social websites, the problem is that the bigger, more important ones can find bots and strange up-votes patterns easily. You need to test a few times to find a good source of up-votes and you also need quality content, you can get to front page but if it's trash the mods will remove it. Reddit has some algorithms that marks fast up-votes posts for manual moderation if they suspect something.

After all, it's a good method to get ton of traffic if done right. Thanks for the case study

Imgur "only" detect ip, most of the moderation is from users with downvote and sometimes reports. ( so yeas, you need quality content and you need to know how to "talk" to imgurians - as example a title can change literally everything) as said the bot only ghost ban blacklisted links.

Reddit is far way more complicated for what i know so far, I'm reading a lot of thing about it, because it's my "next big step" not only reddit has a lot of public proxy blacklisted, but as you said it has an alghorithm that count the % of upvotes and downvote and for what i know it trace even the time between votes.

I'm looking for 9gag, even if , as an imgurian, i'm not a big fan of this site (but it's generate a lot of traffic sooo,....). The only annoying this so far is the new google system to detect bots when you have to register a new account - but it's only a tedious thing.


P.S. I was wondering about doing an Udemy course about this as soon as i have enough material, i would like to ask you guys if in your opinion it would be a desiderable course?