METHOD: Establish a Meme Empire & Monetize

What's good BHW community!

I have been a lurker for far too long (on various accounts) on these amazing forums and have never really contributed much - so I decided to finally write a method thread for something that I have had a lot of success with. As a web developer with lots of experience over the years in online marketing, I am fairly experienced doing these sorts of things - so if you would like more information about anything I will be talking about please feel free to reply and ask and I will go into as much detail as I can.

Now moving on to a brief overview of what I will be covering....

The idea of this method is to pick a specific niche or interest to work with that you can find or make memes around (Golf memes, cat memes, etc.. try and think outside the box here)

Then find a unique brand or name to associate by and create accounts on Instagram and Twitter as well as a Facebook page. The next step is to use the social growth strategies I will be going into depth in below to quickly gain engaged and organic followers who are more willing to like and share your content.

Then once we have a bit of an audience and are established - we will more on to automation and cutting out almost all the work on our end. I will cover the best tools for doing this and how to schedule posts for peak engagement times. And then lastly I will cover the part everyone is waiting for - monetization. I will go into depth the various options you have and how to decide what might work best for you.

Keep in mind just like with everything, testing is everything. So try different things and keep adjusting and tweaking for best results. It takes effort, but if done properly it is worth it in the end. I will now dive into the contents of the method.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Choosing a niche & Starting Up ------ 1
Growing Instagram & Twitter ---------- 2
Growing Facebook Page --------------- 3
Organization & Automation -------------4
Monetization ------------------------------- 5

1) Choosing a niche & Starting Up

As cliche as this sounds, choosing the niche is the most important step in the whole process. You want to find something people are passionate about or a large community of people interested in something (I chose to do Stoner Memes). Some important things to consider when choosing a niche are...

~ Audience size - bigger is better. It's great if you find people interested in Pickleball... but you're limiting yourself right away by how small of a community you have to try and target. Try and find an audience of no less than 1 million people.

~ Profitability. Make sure the niche you pick can be monetized down the road. What I mean by this is if you have a golf memes empire, you can sell digital golf swing improvement products, physical golf products, etc.. Lots of options. But if you just go with DeepFriedMemes or something generic like that as a brand, you are going to have issues down the road when it comes to finding a lucrative monetization method that works well.

Once you have your niche, it's time to set up a Facebook page, Instagram account, Twitter account, and Gmail account for your chosen entity. Use the same name for all of them or as close as you can get. Your cover and profile photos are the first impression people will get of your pages, so make sure they are nice looking and niche relevant.

Make your Instagram a business account (done via settings) and link it to the Facebook page. Add a nice catchy bios - and for the website sections of the social profiles link to each other (Facebook website is a link to the IG. IG website is a link to the Facebook Page, etc.....).

Find a few niche related memes and start posting them on all 3 socials periodically for a day or two. Make sure to use relevant hashtags to boost reach. If you want to go the safe route, you can make your own memes using online generators. But since this is BHW after all, I would recommend scraping memes from larger established meme accounts and recycling them. Everyone does it . To go even further, don't just grab any meme you see - sift through the bigger accounts and only scrape the posts that got the most likes and engagement. What I mean by scraping is simply taking a screenshot of the meme and then re-posting. Some people try and crop out watermarks on memes, but I try and leave them when I can to at least give some form of credit.


2) Growing Instagram & Twitter

Since my process to grow Instagram and Twitter accounts quickly is very similar, I decided to cover them both in the same section. The best way to approach this is doing the follow/unfollow method with a slight twist. This is a traditional method that has been around for a while - because it's fairly straightforward and it works really well still to this day.

What you need to do is find a larger meme account for the niche you have chosen. In my case where I chose Stoner Memes, Weed Humor on IG was a good option with over 1 million engaged fans of the same type of content I plan to post. Then I find their latest post, and click the number of likes the post has to bring up the list of every account that has liked it. I will then mass follow about 100 of those accounts, doing so every few hours. Alternate doing this between different larger accounts to avoid asking to follow the same accounts often.

Try not to over-do it or else you will start to raise red flags. Almost instantly people will start following you back. In my experience you can expect a follow back rate anywhere between 10-35% depending on a few factors. The more followers you have the more people tend to follow back. Also, if you have your bio filled out with a nice high quality profile picture more people will follow. Eventually when you've got the point where you're following too many people - it's time to unfollow. Either unfollow those who haven't followed back, or unfollow everyone. The choice is yours. There are lots of free apps you can download that will automate this and make your life easier. Just like following, try not to go too crazy following people. Only unfollow a few hundred every few hours maximum.

As you unfollow accounts, you will obviously shed followers. This is okay and just another cycle of the method. Usually you will only shed less than 20% of your newly gained followers - the better your content is the more incentive for them to stick around. Once you are back down to a following you are satisfied with, repeat the cycle and start following more accounts again.

In addition to following accounts every so often, get in the habit of periodically searching for new posts by the most popular hashtags related to your niche and liking and commenting on them. Just doing this will help bring a lot of attention to your profiles, get you noticed by people in your audience group.

This is what will really put your resilience and patience to the test. If you are able to spend a solid week or two doing this follow unfollow method ON ALL 3 SOCIAL PROFILES day in and day out you are going to be amazed at your results afterward. I'm serious. Keep on grinding and posting a few times daily to keep your audience engaged and satisfied.

3) Growing Facebook Page

The process for growing a Facebook is a little bit different, and can often be more challenging to get up and running compared to an Instagram or Twitter account. However I am about to reveal to you my secret weapon I have used to grow multiple Facebook pages to crazy amounts of likes....

You can do this with one personal Facebook profile, however I would recommend creating 2-5 new fake profiles and making them look somewhat realistic with fake profile pictures from the web. You will then start searching for Facebook groups related to your niche and requesting to join as many of them as you can.

Try not to join the same groups on different accounts, keep them different so your audiences aren't overlapping too much. Sometimes you need to answer a few questions to get approved into groups, but just answer them quickly and to the point and you should get approved fairly quick most of the time. Some admins may catch onto the fact that you are a fake account that was just created, but keep joining more and more. Since I did Stoner Memes, there was lots of groups for me to join.

After a few days most of your group applications will be processed and you should hopefully be approved into lots of them on all your accounts. Now the real magic begins. Start posting memes on your Facebook page you want to grow - then log into your new fake accounts one by one and find a post from the page and go to > share > share to a group. Share to all the groups the account is in and move on to the next one. Try not to do this more than twice per day on each account or it will start to look like spam to the group admins.

You will quickly notice as you continue to do this for a few days your page likes will skyrocket from all the boosted reach and exposure being shared into all the bigger groups. I would highly recommend posting memes that are aimed specifically to drive comments (For my stoner memes example - "Comment your favorite strain!" or something like that..) we've all seen those types of posts before.

More comments on group posts = more time bumped to the top of the group feed. More time at the top of multiple groups with several hundred thousands people each interested in exactly what you're posting = lots of new fans and page likes.

~ PRO TIP
Once your posts start spreading around Facebook and getting engagements organically through shares, you can invite those who have reacted to a post who don't already like your page to do so. This is a feature not enough page owners take advantage of and can be an awesome way to tack on a few extra page likes each day. To do this, go to a post with lots of reacts and click the react emojis. This will bring up a list of everyone who reacted. If they do not like your page yet, there will be a button beside their name allowing you to invite them. This will send them a notification from the page and not you personally.

4) Organization & Automation

By now you may be thinking, it's going to be a huge pain finding new memes every day and going through the process of sharing them on each individual profile - especially considering I'm still not seeing any profit from this yet. And you are 100% right. That's why once you get up and running it's time to automate things and cut out as much work for yourself as you possibly can by taking advantage of an excellent and FREE tool called Buffer.

Buffer is an alternative to Hootsuite, and offers a nice free plan with pretty decent features. They allow you to connect all three of your social accounts to one Buffer account and push posts to all three platforms at scheduled times. Once you have a little stockpile of memes built up, you can fill up your queue of posts. Then simply select which days and times you want to post and voila, Buffer takes care of the rest. You can even add hashtags for the Instagram and Twitter Posts. The only downside to the free plan is that you have a limit to how many posts you can have scheduled on once - so you have to check in and reschedule more posts every few days - which isn't a big deal though considering it only takes about 5 minutes each time you do it.

Look into your page insights often and get an idea of when your audience is engaging with your content the most and schedule your posts around those times to maximize your results. I have found that posting between 3-5 posts per day is a perfect amount.

5) Monetization

And now for the part everyone is here for, how do we make money from this? Below I will break down a few different monetization strategies you could apply that have worked for me in the past and have made me money. Keep in mind monetization is meant to come later down the road when you have built up a significant following on all of your socials. The longer you build your empire, the more you are building it's value and long term profitability. So be patient and eventually it will pay dividends.

~ Advertising / Paid Shout outs One of the biggest benefits of growing all three socials at the same time using Buffer is it's amazing appeal it can have on possible advertisers. It also gives you leverage to earn even more money. Sometimes I would be charging up to $200 per day for paid shout outs across all three of my socials (not bad for a days work of doing nothing).

~ Affiliate Marketing If you have an audience that you think are buyers, affiliate marketing could be a nice option. I had a friend who had a gaming page with 150k page likes. He started promoting gaming chairs and made enough commission doing that to pay his college tuition. The only tricky part is you don't want to come across as being too pushy trying to sell or you risk your audience unfollowing or your account getting flagged for spam.

~ Driving Blog Traffic My preferred method that I have had the most success with is to set up a simple blog on WordPress or blogger or something similar based on your niche. Then start pumping out articles (to find content I would go to Reddit and find a sub Reddit around your niche and find something a lot of people are talking about and sharing already and write a quick article about it. If it's a video, embed it into your blog post). Then blast the article out to all your socials as well as Reddit and watch the traffic roll in.

You can then monetize this traffic how you would like whether it be display ads, affiliate links embedded in the articles, pre-roll video ads, etc..... Obviously the more shares and engagement you are getting the more money you are earning so as you continue to grow and expand your socials your earnings should keep increasing.

CONCLUSION

So that wraps up my guide. Hopefully you were able to find it useful and take something away from it. Once again please feel free to reply to this thread with any questions or comments and I would be more than happy to respond.

Thanks for taking the time to read this right to the end - I wish you the best of luck!!

- Icey Dan

Great share mate. Does Facebook ever care about duplicate memes? What sort of advertising do you currently use on your blogs?

Wow, lots of good info in here. Thanks for the share mate.

Thanks, will try when I habe more time

Nice idea man,
For the monetization part from where do you usually get the offers for Shoutouts? To the page directly or you use some websites?
And how much time does it takes you to grow all those 3 profiles to a good level?

Amazing content, thank you.

great share

A very organized method, good luck in this journey

jamie3000 said:

Great share mate. Does Facebook ever care about duplicate memes? What sort of advertising do you currently use on your blogs?

Click to expand...

Thank you. I've been reposting memes to multiple Facebook pages over the years and have never had any issues whatsoever. They seem to be pretty chill about it.

And for advertising I mostly stick to display ads and affiliate product links embedded right into the articles.

Univa said:

Nice idea man,
For the monetization part from where do you usually get the offers for Shoutouts? To the page directly or you use some websites?
And how much time does it takes you to grow all those 3 profiles to a good level?

Click to expand...

Thanks man. What I did was I went into my page insights and took screenshots of all the important bits of data like daily reach, engagements, etc. And compiled it into a simple PDF. Then I would find smaller businesses in my niche and message them directly explaining that I can get their brand in front of my audience for X amount of money. Show them the PDF to try and convince them. Keep trying until you find a business willing to work out an agreement.

Since I was in the stoner niche, I was able to find a e-com clothingcompany called the High Council to collaborate with. We connected though DMs and arranged shoutouts there. Networking is key so don't be afraid to send messages and make connections.

And to get my Facebook page to where it's at now (60k page likes) it took a bit over a year. Yes that may seem like a long time but it was well worth my time as it is paying off for me now. Lots of factors can impact this however especially how much you're willing to put into it each day and what niche you choose.

Cheers

nice share man! thanks!

Thanks for the share mate.

Memes are like a top thing now. Id add that u can use 9gag for scraping.

This is a solid share on how to grow your accounts.

Nice effort OP.

Real Gold right here. Great share mate!

Thanks for the share, this has motivated me to start my own although im using Follow Planner to do the following/ unfollow.

A tip for hash tags ideas which someone else shared is to use a hashtag generator such as displaypurposes. (cant link just google instagram hashtag generator)

I will type a generic term and then filter out the ones that I dont think are suitable.

So far ive got 9 follows in the first half hour haha.