How I Tried To Create An Internet Media Empire In Just 7 Days
I recently found myself with a couple of weeks free time in between freelance work. Always one to make good use of my time I decided I was going to create an internet media company that was going to generate me a shit tonne of money, in just 7 days.
It all began when I started reading up obsessively about the success of viralnova.com — a site that was created and run by a single guy. A site that is reported to be bringing in excess of $100,000 a month in Adsense revenue.
How could I not do this!?, I’m a great marketing guy, I’ve created a number of websites and I’m a Worpdress champion I thought.
I quickly thought of a name ( Sodapop ), registered a domain, set up a Worpdress site, Twitter account and a Facebook page and set off on the path to Adsense glory.
Below is a case study of sorts on the things I did and what I learnt along the way, maybe someone will learn something from it.
Creating The Content
I knew these types of sites live or die by content, the content is the marketing. The marketing is the content. So I set about thinking of a whole bunch of interesting post ideas that I thought people would like to view. The exercise itself was really about creating visually interesting content. Stuff poeple will want to share.
From my research I read that the posts had to be postive and upbeat, no one shares bad news apparently. I also made a concious effort to avoid rude sex and violent stuff. I wanted the articles to be as mainstream and shareable as possible. It was about traffic and shedloads of it.
Sourcing imagery
I went about sourcing imagery for the post ideas, this was very easy. The internet is full of imagery. The best places to source it were Pinterest, Imgur and other sites that had written the same or a similar article. Google sucked cos it was too inconsistant and Reddit was okay but it was mostly single images, and not collections of imagery.
When embedding the imagery on a site the general rule folks seem to go by was to put a small back link to the source under each image or at the end of the post. This was too easy.
Writing the post headlines
Writing the headlines for the articles was a big deal, this was the only thing people saw a lot of the time and it they had to make people click.
As a general rule the headlines had to be sensational, open ended, presumptious and often list based.
Interestingly I did find a Wordpress plugin that would let you write multiple headlines for the one post, using cloud power it would then select the best one based on data and publish it. Neat. I would write about 5 headlines per post.
Here’s some of the headlines I wrote for separare posts:
This Is What Happens When You Fill A Room With Motor Oil
40 Awesome Tree Houses You Wish You Had
10 Apple Products You Have Never Seen
Creating the post feature images
When selecting the feature image I knew it had to be visually engaging, weird or make people want to look closer. I also found there were several ‘graphic techniques’ that were getting used on the images. Here’s some examples.
Marketing the site
With about five killer posts drafted up, I was ready to go live. I went on a mission to make as much noise about this thing as I could. Normally I would put up a coming soon page for a site a few weeks before, but there was no time. I had to go live asap and get those ad dollars. I remember one conversation over dinner at the start of this thing, I was talking up figures of 10k a month, man this was gonna be awesome.
For the next 5 days, I spent no less than 10 hours a day creating more posts and pushing them out into the world via various channels. It was extremely laborious, but relatively easy to do skill wise with the need for a bit of creativity also, below are the techniques I used and the results I got.
I’ve always found Twitter is more receptive to content then Facebook so I hit it hard posting tweets, all featuring stinging headlines and interesting images attached to the Tweets. I used all the typical techniques like hashtags and keywords etc to generate engagement. Nothing particular new learnt here except it’s super important to have great images attached to the tweets and also use those same headline techniques for the copy.
I knew Facebook was a key factor in the success of sites such as Viralnova so I my strategy here had to be strong. Unfortunately Facebook is a cash guzzling machine when it comes to promoting content. I started off not spending any money on Facebook promotion, but by the end out of frustration, I ended up starting to promote my page and also a number of posts. They just make it so easy to spend money.
What I did learn is there are two things people seem to engage with most, that is cutesy pictures of animals and amazing pictures of nature. If you’re after engagement, these two types of images are what I would recommend on Facebook. See below examples.
Reddit was also on my list of sites to promote my posts, it’s fast and easy and I used it a number of times to submit links too. I would always submit a link and just pick a suitable sub reddit. Reddit was by far the most successful of all of the channels that I used to generate traffic to my site. It was easy and fast and every time I would get a post published I would get a decent traffic spike.
Imgur
Imgur was another outlet I used, being that it’s image based I would go on there and post up sets of images with a link underneath them. I found the folks on Imgur receptive to the imagery but they would not click on the link through to the site which was quiet frustrating. Below is an example some of the stuff I posted:
I also hit up Stumble Upon which I found was okay but did not really yield any huge results. I also optimised the site for search, but it was really all about Facebook, Twitter & Reddit.
The Results
Total number of hours spent working on the site: 59
Total number of posts written: 20
Total number of Tweets: 46
Total number of Facebook posts: 25
Total spend on Facebook promotion: $74.77
Total number of Facebook fans: 75
Total number of Twitter Followers: 5
Total number of visits to the site over 5 days: 4,200 unique visitors
Grand total made in Adsense revenue: $1.75
The Conclusion
As you can see by the results above, it was an epic fail. I originally set out to work on this project over 7 days but I pulled the plug after the 5th day of logging into my Adsense account and seeing an extremely pitiful result.
As far as a brand new site goes, I believe the traffic I managed to generate from scratch was quiet reasonable. I feel it was more than enough to guage whether I could make money off this site.
Some of you reading might say it’s too short of a time frame or I gave up too early or I just didn’t generate the traffic.
I tried everything, I changed ad placements, I added more ads. I kept creating new posts and promoting them… but to make such a small amount after 5 days of hard work I believe it made no sense to carry on.
All credit to the guys that are killing it in this space, you have truly created something remarkable. From my learnings you have so have serious, serious traffic to generate any sort of decent income from Adsense. I’m glad I had a crack but it’s definitely not for me.
Check out my new side project PitchBits.com and follow me on Twitter here if you like.
Craig.
