Funny Pic / Humor Pages and Traffic

[SEOverlord]

I posted this in another thread and realized I was hijacking it, so I started a new one.

To you guys posting funny pics and banking off the traffic to your sites...how do you all suggest getting massive amounts of traffic (i.e. "Likes") to your pages? I run a viral video/funny pic site that was a top 30,000 site in Alexa before it got Penguin-slapped by Google. I recently started a FB humor account to try and capture some social traffic. Google can't take that away from us, right...lol.


I'm on a dedicated Hostgator server...$279/month...but I was getting 80K - 100K hits a day. Now I'm down to about 10K - 20K.


Anyway, I'm running some FB ads, but I can't afford to "buy" a million fans. I've gotten up to about 20K fans now. I've tried buying them in bulk, but a lot of guys are selling fake fans...just to make your page look better.


Other suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

 

[PirateHackz]

Well I'm not sure if you are looking for this type of answer, but my suggestion is just to try bookmarking every post on social media accounts and hope to get reposts. If it's legitimately funny, it might go viral and bring a ton of traffic that hopefully will be recurring. I know that may be 101, but it seems to me that your time may be better served coming up with really great content to snowball with than to try and buy traffic.

 

[SEOverlord]

Yes, that's a good idea. I'm doing that currently and seeing some results.

I recently saw one of these pages that had 8.9 million "Likes." Love to know if that was just organic/viral growth or if he/she bought fans, ads, etc.

Thanks.

 

[tejsin]

I may have a way for you to scale it up big! Hit me up in skype!

 

[SEOverlord]

Will do. Check your PM.

 

[BHopkins]

I have a site that gets decent organic traffic that i've never done anything with. My traffic was/is all keyword related and people searching for funny photoshopped pics.

Facebook is probably the best non-organic way you'll find to increase traffic. Most visitors you can buy are fake so you'll need to do a lot of the work yourself.

 

[SEOverlord]

Yeah, we got tons of organic traffic prior to Penguin. I had been dumb though and "sponsored" some Wordpress themes, so I've got some Wordpress themes out there with a keyword-based link to my site. Some pretty big sites are using that theme and some of them aren't even in English.

A non-English, sitewide, keyword-based footer link is just the kind of thing Penguin was out to slap the crap out of.

Hopefully, I'll be able to ramp up some traffic from FB. Thanks.

 

[yzal10]

i'm getting less than 1k pageloads per day only.. guess i'm doing very badly..

 

[SEOverlord]

i'm getting less than 1k pageloads per day only.. guess i'm doing very badly..

Hey, don't ever say that. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

 

[yzal10]

SEOverlord, can you PM me your site link? i wanna take a look..

 

[SEOverlord]

SEOverlord, can you PM me your site link? i wanna take a look..

There are 2 key rules for making money online:

1) Never reveal your money site.

2) See rule #1.

 

[scriptox]

When you were getting 80k-100k traffic how many users on your site at once was it able to handle?

 

[SEOverlord]

When you were getting 80k-100k traffic how many users on your site at once was it able to handle?

Anywhere from 150 to 8,000. It would start to crap out once we got about 10,000 or so.

 

[scriptox]

Oh right! How about your traffic now? With 10k visitors a day how much in adsense where you getting on average?

 

[SEOverlord]

We went from pulling in $4,000 - $6,000 per month to now pulling in just under $1,000 per month. We're also using ValueClick and InfoLinks and a few other ad networks, which helps.

Working on getting those spammy footer links removed from the other sites that are linking to us. Hopefully that will help with the Penguin penalty. Some of them are "baked" into the Wordpress theme itself so we're emailing some of the developers who made them.

 

[scriptox]

Whats your ctr?? Yeah im using adsense with chitika and i got to say chitika is shitika.. really REALLY low payout to the point its pointless even having them on there compared to adsense.. Just waiting to see if it gets better with them as they have been highly recommended

 

[SEOverlord]

Cannot reveal CTR. It's against Adsense TOS. On top of that, I don't know and I'm not at my desk to look it up.

Yes, IMHO Chitika kind of sucks.

 

[nerfsmurf]

Here is a question for ya,

With some "LOL" sites, there seems to be an issue with adsense due to "lack of content" or this is what i hear from others attempting to start their own. Is your site just Pics/Vids OR do you have other media such as text post or "news" section to keep things in check?

I saw an OK "LOL" site but in the areas where you expect the adsense ads to be, there were nothing. That was my first time actually seeing that myself. But I could just be jumping to conclusions, maybe they were doing maintenance.

I don't like asking without giving, so here are my recommendations, however, you may have explored these options already.

BACK ON TOPIC:

Content Lock:
If you look at some of the big boys, such as 9gag, when you visit ANY of the pages on their sites, you get content locked! But how do you see that ohh so funny image your friend posted on their wall? Well you just RUSH to click that "LIKE" or "Add to Facebook" button Maybe you can implement that! Actually its an app, and you can see it yourself if you visit the site. I think the key here is the timing before the "Like my Page" redirect/popup appears. You want the reader to almost understand the image, then BOOM! They will instinctively click "like" to get back to the image do get their smile on their face.

OR you can take the Black Hat way, which MAY get you in trouble.

Like Jacking:
This method is like-jacking! I honestly thought it was dead, but 2 weeks ago i visited a site with over a million fans on Facebook I only checked out their site to get more info on the niche. Few mins later I check my FB, and I see the damn site in my Recently Liked section! I was pissed! Not totally because of the like jacking, but because I didn't want people to think I was into the niche personally. I don't think people will pay a nevermind to a like jack from a lol site, but you never know. Took me 3 days to find the plugin they used. I have it now, but its not nulled. I can give it to you if you wish.

 

[SEOverlord]

Yes, we have lots of content. Before the Penguin slap we covered breaking news, etc. With each of the viral videos we post, we also do a write-up on the video. The only issues I've had with Adsense is that some of the pics were considered "adult content"...close-up of celebrity's chest, girl in skimpy bikini, etc. We had to clean things up a bit, even though there wasn't really any blatant adult content on the site.

I'd like to know both the black-hat and white-hat way of getting those "Likes" actually. Can't say I'd be too proud of using the black-hat way, but having to return to a 9-5 day job after being "self-employed" for three years was about the most depressing thing I've done in my life.

 

[D4Dirty]

I am In similar boat. Have a great converting gag site, on a good day we get around 100k hits and experimented up to a very nice rpm.

i source my traffic from Facebook but every now and then the traffic stops if we promote too hard and loose our source (pages).

i am trying to think of other sources of traffic and well as fb in order to not rely on just one stream.

tried Instagram with a bot but it was rubbish.

there's always tumblr, twitter or Pinterest to try next.