$6,000 in 6 Days : A Bot Story
Let’s not waste anytime here! I’ve written this article to discuss the tips & tricks that I’ve personally found successful in the monetization of bots. First, I’ll introduce you to a simple onboarding experience that can earn you a few hundred bucks each month! This experience is rather simple to set up & ensures that you leave this article with indisputable value! Next, I’ll dive into the main event that is a bit more complex but insanely lucrative if executed correctly. It will discuss a feature that monetized a user base of 600 users to garner over $6,000 in a span of just under 6 days. For those interested in an update, revenue growth has normalized & revenue now sits at roughly $12,000 since launch on October 1st. With some hard work & God on our side, we’ll likely gross over $30,000 this month.
Side Note: Before we begin, I highly recommend you open up Chatfuel so you can easily create a rough version of the features that will be discussed and explained as you read!
So Let’s Begin!
First up is the onboarding experience that will garner you a few hundred dollars each month! However, before I teach you how to set that up, there is some maintenance that needs to be done. This maintenance pertains to the Get Started Screen that all users must click before accessing your bot. This is important because some users drop off at this screen & actually never get to experience your onboarding process. Since earnings from your onboarding experience is based on traffic, every user counts! So here’s how to kill drop off at the Get Started Screen and make more coins with your new monetized onboarding process that I’ll detail in a few!
Why User’s Drop Off
Before telling you how, it is only fair that I tell you why drop off exists. The reason is pretty simple actually. The Get Started CTA of the screen is a bit unclear. It seems like an inconvenience to users rather than a necessary part of onboarding. Also, the messaging that Facebook leaves above the CTA is a bit creepy without context.
Although we can’t disable this screen, we can add some much needed context to the extra CTA on the screen to make it appear as less of inconvenience but instead an integral part of your boarding process. To do so, go to the Facebook page hosting your bot, tap edit info at the very right of the page, & add a text blurb that directly references the “Get Started” CTA of the screen. It should say something along the lines of “Tap Get Started Below to Begin ___ (whatever your experience entails)”. Once you’ve successfully included this text, conversion to your bot should increase by a staggering 36%!
All Aboard the Money Train
Okay, so now that your users are able to get into your bot, let’s talk about monetizing your onboarding experience. I’ve found that a visual on boarding flow with the use of web views is the best & most lucrative way to go! Here’s how it works.
Create a simple Wix site for your bot. Add a slideshow or a video at the center of the page to quickly show how your bot works & why it’s useful. Make sure that your site is optimized for mobile view. At the bottom of your slideshow or video, create a simple button and title it “Skip Tutorial”. Create a deeplink for the button that leads back to a designated section of your bot. For example, tapping “Skip Tutorial” drops down the web view and summons a message from the bot that says “Thanks for quickly going through the tutorial. Now you’re ready to navigate this platform like a pro”. (For those that may need extra assistance, your generated deep link should look like this : https://m.me/worthmore?ref=SkippedTutorial)
This trick allows you to tie your web view directly into your bot. Now your web view operates like a connected block in your bot. The only difference is that a web view can be easily monetized.
Now for the monetization piece, go to the Wix App Store & add Google AdSense to your site. Place a Banner Ad at the top of your slideshow or video & you’re all set! Now every user that enters your bot, taps on the CTA of your choice that leads to your connected onboarding web view, will likely interact with the Ad above your video/slideshow & add a few coins to your pocket!
I used a 10 second video for my on boarding experience on my page and also activated google ads for the video to rake in some extra dough! Every cent counts!
Total Earnings : $147.07
Main Event : $6,000 in 6 Days.
Now The Main Event! How did I manage to make $6,000 in a span of 6 days with a bot? So here are the ingredients that you need. First, you’ll need a popular Facebook Page that gets tons of content submissions. This is pretty easy to find since most popular Facebook Pages operate by solely republishing other people’s submitted content. For example, if I have a funny video of my dog doing a trick, I’ll likely submit it to a popular Facebook page like Funny Videos that can publish it to their large audience & make it go viral. Secondly, you’ll need a indie bot. This is the monetization piece.
So let me explain why an indie bot is needed! Individuals that submit content to pages are extremely vulnerable for feedback & exposure. If they don’t have an audience of their own, they scour the internet to ensure that their work, in which they likely spent time & money perfecting is somehow heard or discovered. As a result, they are actually willing to fork over cash to ensure that their work is at least seen by an audience.
Well with a indie bot, when a user submits a link, it automatically brings them to a paywall. The paywall specifies that their link will be sent to the loyal followers of the page for instant feedback. This value proposition certainly beats submitting your work & having it fall into the abyss of other unread submissions. So now a submitter has a guaranteed audience ✓
After a user pays, followers of the page are then notified of the submission, they review it, & proceed to leave feedback with a set of emoji quick replies below the submitter’s video. Now a submitter has guaranteed feedback from their newfound audience ✓. If the page’s followers all vote positively on the video, the content is then posted to the page. So a submitter now gets a guaranteed audience, feedback, & a data-driven likeliness of being posted on the page ✓
On the other hand, the popular page is able to make thousands of dollars by simply giving submitters this new kind of access to their audience. To create this audience inside of messenger, the page can simply leverage their brand and invite fans that desire to be apart of the “important selection process” . By doing so, their followers who consume their videos and represent a sample of their actual entire viewer base are willing to rate their submissions & unknowingly give the page rich data on the content that would ultimately keep their page relevant and popular ✓✓✓✓
Killer Use Case!
So our recent client was HOT97, New York’s leading radio station for Rap & HipHop. Like many of our other clients, they receive tons of submissions each day from their followers. In this case, artists would submit their links in hopes of getting discovered by the radio station. On top of submissions, they also had over 1.2 million monthly listeners that were dedicated to discovering new music. With these ingredients, I knew a indie bot would work!
We build a bot that had two flows. A curator flow for listeners that allowed them to set their notification preferences & then rate submitted tracks. Then we had a submission flow that allowed artists to submit & pay for the distribution of their tracks to the curators for feedback .
The incentives for both sides were simple. As a listener/curator, we were testing how well you had an ear for music. So we gamified the rating system. We would send a gallery card of an artist’s submitted work, which allowed curators to quickly preview the track. Below the gallery card were three emojis :🔥 , 😪, or 🗑 . The question pertaining to these emojis was “how do you think the streets would react to this record?”
With this question, we would compare the curators answer against the “streets” aka the other curators. So if I voted that a record was trash & 93% of other curators happen to vote it as fire, I would lose points from my curator score. Curators with the highest score, which pretty much indicates that they have a great ear for music, would be granted career opportunities with HOT 97.
On the other hand, artists submitting their tracks were getting their work sent to an audience, which produced them thousands of views & useful feedback. Getting 1,000 views on a track I spent hours on and a comprehensive report on how those viewers/curators rated my track is very useful as I try to gain exposure and better my craft. The artist with the highest 🔥 rating would be discovered by HOT97. So overall, we created a community of people that wanted to test their ear for music & artists that wanted to get their work in front of an audience.
Both curator & artists had a leaderboard. The artist leaderboard showed the top tracks and the curator leaderboard showed the listeners with the best ear highest/amount of points. Our client HOT97 was the biggest winner in this equation as they were able to bring all of their interested listeners to one place and essentially have them filter through submissions and find them the best undiscovered tracks. This allowed HOT97 to always stay relevant with new music as the data was being generated from curators, who represented a sample of their daily listeners. On the other side, they were able to make $6,000 ($20 per submission) by simply giving artists access to their user base of curators in a meaningful way.
Okay, so now let’s get into the specifics of how the HOT97 bot works. To begin, one we’ve began to onboard listeners that have set their notification preferences, we the market the product to submitters. Once an artists pays & submits, we get a ping on our management app. At 5:00PM, we send out a batch of the paid submissions to our curators for voting. Submitter’s are sent a gallery card with a live link that tracks how their track is performing with curators. When voting is finished, they are shown where their track ranks on the leaderboard. If they enter into the TOP 10, their track can be discovered by HOT 97. We also make $400 every time we send out a batch of submissions as some of our curators are also artist themselves. So every time they vote on a track, they are prompted to submit their own or continue voting. This is our bread and butter because it allows us to use submissions as a reengagement funnel for both curator & artist. To learn more, join here https://www.facebook.com/groups/2021014578119548