2019 update: Check out the second part of this article on how I make $500 per day adding Propeller Ads. Also check out the third part of this strategy to learn how to optimize your mobile traffic for maximum revenue with Facebook Instant Articles.
OK, so this is one hell of an article I’ve been waiting to write for a long time. I didn’t, because when I was about to, Facebook decided to change a lot of things in their algorithm and the whole strategy changed.
This still works and it has changed a little, but you can still make a lot of money and bank hard if you have the budget. I was making from $100 to $350 PER DAY back in 2013 with this whole strategy, and even though it might take more budget now to start, you can still make more than $5-10k per month with this strategy.
In fact, I know some people earning more than $100,000 per month with this and the good things is you can have it as a side business, 100% automated and making money for you. I’ll keep this post updated in case this changes, but I’m sure it still works in july 2014. The faster you start, the better.
Things you need
- A Website with a VPS or Dedicated server (I recommend Vultr. CLICK HERE TO GET A $50 BONUS CREDIT)
- An Adsense account at the beginning, and later an account with a CPM/CPA advertising company. A great alternative in case you don’t have Adsense for this strategy is Media.net.
- A Facebook Ads account with credit card or Paypal
- A Facebook Fan Page and some budget to start. I’d recommend $1,000 at least. $1,000 – $1,500 per month would be perfect.
How does it work?
The concept is simple, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Basically, what you’re going to do is to create a viral news website with a basic WordPress installation and send a ton of traffic to it.
How much traffic? Thousands of visitors per day. As much as your budget allows you. Some people send more than 1 million visitors to their website PER DAY. But you don’t need that much. Start with 1k per day and then aim for 5k, 20k and keep growing.
Lastly, the idea is that you generate great (but simple) articles with viral images, videos or stories, and make them go viral with Facebook. When the people visit your blog, they’ll find Google Adsense’s ads and you’ll earn money from the clicks you receive.
I recommend Adsense because the Ads will be totally irrelevant if you use almost any other CPC network, but if Adsense is out of your options for any reasons, try Adversal from this alternatives article.
Sooner or later, you’ll want to move to a CPM based network, but you’ll need at least half a million visits per month to move to the next level. So don’t worry just yet.
I recently explained the reason why Google Adsense beats almost any other alternative, especially if your traffic isn’t organic (i.e. not from search queries). Because we’re going to send a chunk of traffic directly from Facebook, we want somewhat relevant ads even if they’re not coming from search engines, and you know… Google controls a good part of your life, so they can serve decent ads to your audience even if they come from Social Media sites 🙂
Here’s a screenshot of one of my best days. Check where most of my traffic was coming from:
Also, be sure to try this even if you’re on a tight budget because I’m going to show you how to earn money with CPA offers (no Adsense or CPC/CPM networks) and make a few extra thousands per month with paid traffic in my next’s week article 😉
Shall we start?
I’ll divide this in 3 steps. You need to rinse and repeat after analyzing your data. I’m glad most of it has been covered and you’ll see that it’s not as difficult as you think, but it takes some time and a good plan with a budget.
Make your website go viral!
Learn how to master Facebook and other traffic sources to monetize viral websites and make a living from it.
Step 1. Create a WordPress Blog
This one is easy. If you’re struggling with this, leave a comment below so I can help you. You can find almost everything in my blog in the WordPress Category. I cover everything from setting a domain name, installing WordPress and even installing a theme. Again, just leave a comment below if you need help with any step. This shouldn’t take you more than 1-2 hours, if not less.
Don’t forget you need a fast VPS at least to make this work. Vultr has a $5 per month VPS which outperforms many managed VPSes priced at $30+.
Now the key with Adsense is having great traffic and having a good CTR (Click trough rate). Since Adsense works on a CPC basis, the higher your CTR, the higher your earnings. Trust me, with the quantity of traffic you’re going to send to your blog, increasing your CTR from 3% to 5% could be the difference between $100 and $180 a day. So you NEED a good CTR.
I’ve tested a lot of themes for this, and many of them don’t work. I’ve got my CTR above 10% some times when a story goes viral, but at least, I try to aim to anything above 5%.
Unluckily, I can’t show you my detailed Adsense earnings because it’s against their TOS, but I promise you’ll have have a great CTR with that theme and you can add your banners with the Quick Adsense plugin.
I recommend you to change your theme every 1-2 months to keep your CTR high. Some other great themes to start are the CTR Theme and the Divi theme from Elegant Themes.
Having a mobile responsive theme is KEY, since many people will visit your website from FB for Android or iOS, and you want your Ads and videos to look fine there.
Step 2. Create a Facebook Fan Page and grow it
I don’t need to write this whole process again because I wrote it a few months back and almost nothing has changed here. Basically, this is the same guide on steroids, so have a read on how to create a Facebook Fan Page and grow it super quick with Facebook Ads here: From 0 to 1,000 daily visitors in 10 days.
The process is basically the same, but this time you’ll create a Fan Page targeted to all people in a country who like viral stuff and cute/impressive stories. All of the Fan Pages I grew with Facebook Ads are quite active and have great reach.
There are a few changes happening on Facebook lately, so in case you want to take advantage from them:
- Use Facebook Newsfeed and Mobile Newsfeed Ads! The volume there is super high compared to RHS (Right Hand Sided) Ads.
- Facebook is rolling out new, bigger RHS ads. They’re bigger and probably a little bit more expensive than before, but the size difference between those and the newsfeed ads isn’t as big as before. You can drive a lot of new likes from RHS too, and the CTR will be high while the competition adapts (you might not even see those new ads yet). The only draw here is that RHS ads are displayed to desktop computers only, but hey, there’s volume on Facebook.
- Facebook now distributes your ad budget during the day, no matter the time your upload it and get approved. This is super handy because if you start an Ad at 10pm with a budget of $10 per day, Facebook will only spend $1 between 10pm and midnight instead of eating $10 in 1-2 hours with shitty results.
There you have it. Just copy the same strategy from my guide on how to go from 0 to 1k daily visitors and apply these new advantages. Since we’re going big, I’d recommend a daily ad budget of $10 to start, and then move to $20-30 per day if you can keep your CTR high and new likes coming.
You’ll receive a lot of organic likes too, from people sharing, tagging and liking your posts on Facebook and other social networks. Those are free 🙂
Step 3. Write viral stories and publish them in your Fan Page
This step is easy but takes time. Basically, you’re going to look for viral stories, news and trends and publish them in your blog. What I’d do is spy other competitors and check the stories they publish. Try websites like upworthy and viralnova.
Also, have a close eye on Google trends, as you can get a lot of traffic by being the first to write viral news in your website too.
You’re going to post links AND images every few hours, every single day. I recommend you to post between 3-5 links to your website (that means you ned to write 3-5 viral news PER DAY) and also post 3-5 images in between. The images can be part of viral stories, cute animals or impressive facts. They key is to keep your audience active and your Facebook reach high.
Example: 8am image, 10pm link to article 1, noon image, 2pm link to article 2, 4pm image, 6pm link to article 3, 8pm image, 10pm link to article 4.
NEVER copy & paste their articles into your website unless you want to get banned from Adsense. Rewrite the stories from your own point of view, ad videos or whatever you need, and always link to the sources. Otherwise you’ll have problems in the long run. Trust me.
Also, have a look at the placement and distributions of Ads in those websites, as you want to try the same to get a good CTR. I used to have 1-2 Squared Ads in the content, and a big skyscraper Ad in the sidebar. This is a formula that works well.
Step 4. Rinse, repeat and automate.
You should be able to get everything started in 1-2 days if you focus and work fast. Again, let me know if you have any questions below. Depending on how good your stories are, and the budget you spend on Facebook Ads, you’ll start making some profit after a few days or weeks. The more budget, you spend the faster your Fan Page will grow and the more traffic you’ll send to your website. It’s pure mathematics.
If you grow it big enough to make it a side business or even a full time job for you, then you might want to step it to the next level and automate everything. After all, we want to increase our ROI and still have time to enjoy with family and friends, don’t we?
So here’s what you can do:
Automate your Fan Page posts
There are a lot of social media tools that allow you to schedule your posts on Twitter and Facebook (Buffer and Hootsuite, for example). Most of them actually hurt your reach, so don’t use those. Use FPTraffic.
FPTraffic is a great tool built by an Affiliate Manager from a CPA network and it works really well. You can schedule images (it has an integrated finder), posts, giveaways and more so you don’t need to be in front of your computer every 2 hours to post your article/image. In fact, you can schedule for many days in the future, so it’s perfect for this project.
FPTraffic is a great tool even if you’re not doing this but you have a FB Fan Page for your blog/website. Also, there are guides on how to make money with Facebook Fanpages inside FPTraffic which alone are worth the price you pay for it. Grab it while you can and get a 50% lifetime discount before the price goes up from $10 per month to $20 per month.
Outsource your article writing
This is something you might want to do after a few weeks or months. Make sure you understand the whole process and then you’ll be able to hire someone to do it for you.
You have already automated your Facebook Fan Page, so you now need to automate your articles and the business will be 100% hands free.
What I did: I hired a content writer and payed him $3 for every post (300-400 words). Since I needed 3-5 posts per day that’s a total of $10-15. Once you start making money and driving a lot of traffic, $10-15 will be less than 10% of your earnings and you’ll be hands free for another business.
Looking for viral stories and videos can be tricky at first, so I looked for the stories and copied the links into a google drive shared document. I’d upload 5 new links every day so the writer could prepare the articles for the next day and publish them. It wasn’t 100% automated, but let’s say I had to spend less than 30 minutes per day in this business to earn $100-300 per day. I was happy with that 🙂
There’s no magic formula
Most people try to look for a magic formula so they can earn money online on autopilot. They want to get free information and pay for a $19.99 Warrior Special Offer that shows them how to make $1,000 per day without doing anything.
Well, that magic formula doesn’t exist.
This is a business, and it requires work and focus, and you might fail a few times, but it will be worth it. Magic formula’s don’t exist, but systems do. And systems work if you’re good enough to analyze and improve your ROI.
But I know most of you won’t be able to achieve this because you won’t take action. Taking action is the most important thing in this life. So bookmark this page or print it or take notes and start your website and Fan Page ASAP! You can do it in 1-3 days maximum and if you start buying likes in 3 days, you could be earning your first bucks by the end of the next week. What are you waiting for?
Scaling and Optimizing
This is something I cover in my second part of the guide where I used Facebook ads and Propeller Ads.
- How to scale your FB Ads to increase your traffic and earnings:
- How to analyze your FB reports and focus on the audiences that give you more results (higher ROI)
- Few tips and WP plugins to help your news and stories go viral
- Moving to a CPM Ad network for higher ROI
Talk to you in the next one 🙂
John says
Hi Servando,
Hope you’re doing well! And also hope you’ll see this comment and be able to provide some feedback.
I’m hoping to start up my own viral website using your post here as well as a few other resources as a guideline for the process. I’m making a couple variations to better align to my personal wants from this website, but overall this guide has been super helpful with the process of getting everything ready. Thank you for all of the great information!
I’m currently a bit torn on one aspect of it and was hoping that your expertise could help me out.
I’m currently in the process of getting all of my content ready for the website (roughly a month worth of site article posts available in advance for full automation at launch). Every post is custom content which I know isn’t time efficient versus copying other successful posts from other websites but it’s something I enjoy doing a lot so I took that route (plus I’ve had fair luck with viral content in the past, so I’m fairly confident in my ability to provide decent material for the content viewers). I am primarily looking at only sharing articles from the website on the Facebook page (similar to how other established viral sites do). I know that might lead to less engagement with the page but I’m hoping that volume > engagement over time (hopefully that’s not wrong, I’m basing a lot of that thought process on what I’ve noticed from bigger sites’ Facebook pages).
That being said, I’m a bit torn on what is best to do with these posts. My current thought process was using half my budget to promote the business page for likes and half my budget on promoting each of the posts to a lookalike audience to comparable sites’ Facebook pages (since organic reach seems to be a struggle with Facebook’s new algorithm). However I’m not sure if that would be the best choice, or if I should spend the full budget on promoting the page and just let the Facebook posts generate organic reach, or possibly not promote the page itself and spend the full budget on post promotion for a better chance at getting page views/ad revenue (while hopefully getting them to like the Facebook page in the process through site interaction – and maybe increasing the chance of a post getting more shares and get a better chance at viral traffic due to how much reach each post would have).
Realistically, I will probably only have 500$ to work with at launch. I know it probably won’t get the best results versus having more to spend but from my own personal financial stance I can’t really use more than that. I’m hoping to get at least a potential ROI from it and use that money to continue scaling the site. But for starting out, I don’t know what path to take that would be the best financially for me and provide the highest chance of aggressive scaling in the future. Ultimately I’d love to transition to doing this as my full time work after a couple months (which, to be frank, the site doesn’t need a huge ROI to achieve that because I don’t make much at my current job haha). Even hitting 100$ a day would be a huge increase from my current income, so that’s my short term goal and hopefully your advice can help me get there.
I’m very new to this field. I work in retail and learning about everything related to this endeavor has been such a fun and refreshing experience so far. But right now I’m stumped on the best course of action for me. If you had any insight I would really love to hear it!
Thanks again for the great guide and I hope to hear back from you soon!
Servando Silva says
Hi John.
I’m glad you found this article interesting. This has changed a lot in the last few years, so make sure you read all of the linked articles in this post to read the updates.
Custom content is fine as long as you understand how things work in social media to go viral. You’ll learn this with every post you make. Don’t feel bad is most of the posts fail. That’s normal.
Good to know you enjoying writing the content though. That will help a lot.
More volume doesn’t mean more engagement on FB if the engagement per post is bad. If the engagement per post is bad and you keep posting your reach only goes down with time.
I’d use your first budget to grow your page likes to a point of 10,000 or more, while posting organically to recover some of your costs.
After that it’s all a game of creating ads for each post and see which one does better. A good test for each post before adding a budget to it is to see how it performs organically. Some will do much better than others.
$500 I’d say is pretty limited unless you focus on a country where ads are not that expensive (USA for example is super expensive), so make sure you select something easier. O recommend at least $2,000 to start learning and testing the waters with this strategy and even focus on a niche that can go viral instead of generic viral stories nowadays.
Kilimo Kwanza says
Hello Sir
I would to get your direct contact there some issues I would like you to help me please.
Servando Silva says
I don’t do private coaching, sorry.
You can ask your question here to see if we can help.
Austin says
Does it matter what countries to target in Facebook ad traffic campaigns? Any specific country or just leave it open to all?
Also, where can I find best ad layout examples? Thanks
Servando Silva says
Yes, it matters.
Always select only 1 country per campaign and test several countries based on what you’re writing (culture, language, etc).
As for layouts if you’re using Adsense we now use Ezoic (check our article here) to do the optimization via Artificial intelligence.
Shaun says
Hi
What are the biggest niches to promote, I heard Pokemon sites are very popular. Is there a way to analyze high converting traffic arbitrage websites and basically copy and paste? Thanks.
Servando Silva says
You’re going to need a social tool for that to give you ideas. Probably with a decent price to get started.
There are many niches and many of them can be big.
oyeyinka pelumi says
1. how can i get a theme, with user registration…….where viewers retain their post as a membership in my website and get points (or $0.15 or $0.20 dollars) for commenting and reading of my articles and sharing of post.
2. will i earn when people click my website without clicking any google ad on it.
3. if i monetize my fb page and i get thousands of viewers will i get paid for that.
4. can i get a website builder from you sir (i think we can chat privately for that)
Servando Silva says
Hi man.
1. I don’t know. Google search more info about it and let me know if you find something that can pay per points to your readers.
2. If nobody clicks on your ads your performance will be terrible. Google wants quality people that are interested in the ads and click through them and end up buying stuff or signing up for whatever service being promoted n the ads.
3. Yes. Social traffic is not worth as much as organic traffic from search engines, bu it’s still worth and valid.
4. I don’t have website builders, so no, you can’t get website builders from me. There are many website builders available if you do a quick google search though.
tolu owoeye says
Hello, thanks for the guide to adsense arbitrage, i admit this is the best out of the articles i’ve been reading on his issue. However, i’ve come up with questions and i will be happy if you can answer me.
1. is it possible to use blogger blog for adsense arbitrage?
2. can a viral content base on a specific niche? e.g education niche
3. can at least $200 do for low budget arbitrage?
4. does it have any relation with chatbot?
i’ll be very grateful if you can answer my questions accordingly..
Servando Silva says
Hey. Sure, let’s see if i can answer everything for you.
1. Yes, it’s possible but I wouldn’t recommend it. You have more control, plugins and all with a wordpress site. Trying to save $5 per month going with blogger is like not wanting to invest on something basic for your business.
2. Yes, although it’s much more difficult. There are just some niches where it’s easier to go viral with a lot of articles.
3. No. I’d recommend anything over $500 per month as minimum, but $1,000-$2,000 per month would be recommended.
4. No.
Hope this helps!
Jason says
Where can I find the WordPress Category in your blog?
I would like to know which theme is advised to start with and what would be the settings you recommend to start placing the adsense ads for good CTR base on your testings for us to start with?
Servando Silva says
Here is it: https://stream-seo.com/wordpress-themes/
However, I mentioned some themes in this blog post to get started.
Honestly it’s a matter of testing all the time. Testing ad positions, swapping themes every month or so help a lot as well.
Jacob william says
Fantastic Article
But I think Recently Facebook Start Their Own Monetization system
So it will be more benefited if create Viral type of videos
for Fanpage and boost it and Earn Money From Facebook
after that also include Google Adsense with one website to earn double.
Hope this work
anyway you can Join My 24scan.com CPA network where i pay weekly to the affiliates who earn more than $100 per day
checkout on Affpaying and other CPA network list
Servando Silva says
Yeah, we already covered an article about FB’s own network and it’s linked at the top of the article 🙂
sanaullah says
Hello admin,
I need guide about Adsense and facebook traffic.
I heard about Facebook traffic that it is not safe for Adsense. What if I make a viral content site and advertise on facebook and get traffic?
Show me your result of 2019.
Servando Silva says
Facebook traffic is safe for Adsense. It might not perform as well as search traffic, but it’s valid traffic 100%.
As for the updated guide, if you read the article you’ll see there are a couple of updates linked there already 🙂
Jacob william says
Yes it’s not safe if you’re promoting any kind of CPA offer or Digital Products
Servando Silva says
There are white hat offers that can be promoted on FB. Not all of them are black or grey hat. It also depends a lot on how you promote it.
As for digital products, I don’t see a problem there as long as they follow FB’s rules.
Nyong says
I have been blogging for over 2 years now but you won’t believe it when I tell you that I have just $32.32 currently in my Adsense account
Servando Silva says
I actually believe you.
A lot of bloggers tend to write about whatever they want without focusing on getting traffic or doing keyword research, so they end up with hundreds of articles and no readers and thus, no earnings.
Onam Sharma says
These strategies working in 2019 ?
Servando Silva says
Check out the updated articles listed at the beginning of the post 🙂
The strategy works but it has evolved during the past few years.
Anas says
why is it important to create a FB fan page when you have Fb ads ?
Servando Silva says
Well, because without a Facebook page you can’t run ads in the newsfeed. Simply as that 🙂
A Fan page is the first requirement of FB to run ads nowadays.
Anas says
Are you telling me that’s the only reason to have a FB fanpage ?
Servando Silva says
That’s the first and most basic reason.
There are many others as well. If you can’t find a reason to have a Facebook page then you probably don’t even want to tackle Facebook for driving traffic.
It’s basically the core of the whole strategy.
jade says
I wonder if this strategy still works on 2019?
Servando Silva says
Hi Jade.
This strategy works but it’s been evolving during the years. Make sure you read the latest version of it here.
hadafnet says
Whats your opinion about automating facebook fan page commenting and refreshing website OG Tags with a bot on a VPS through facebook API ?
Servando Silva says
While it works, we prefer doing everything manually as Facebook detects automation and usually lowers reach or blocks the bots if you overuse them.
Changing the website OG tags sounds like a good strategy to keep your CTR highs on links. I’d definitely try that!
Goya says
Nice article. If I allocate a portion of my facebook ad budget to boosting ads daily. Would that increase organic reach? Lets say I have $5 to spend daily. I use $3 to boost my best performing posts to only my fans, then use the rest to increase likes. Also I would be posting daily.
Servando Silva says
Yeah, that works and eventually you get more reach. However you’ll find different posts perform differently and you’ll keep ones running longer while others might be paused after 24 hours.
Don’t use the autoboost post feature though. Go and create the ads in the FB Ads manager.
Yusuf Imad says
Great article, Thank you.
i understand all the tutorial but why do we need a VPS or RDP??. i’ve heard a lot guys talking about it in facebook. but i want to know what it’s used for??
thanks
Servando Silva says
Hi Yusuf.
The reason is because the VPS will load faster and also supports a lot more traffic than a shared server, which is important because viral sites tend to receive bursts of traffic whenever an article goes viral.
Danu says
I don’t usually read big articles but this article was very interesting and helpful!
Thanks for taking your precious time to write this article!
I am interested in starting a new blog but I don’t have a good content writer.
Where can I find a content writer that charges only $3 for every post (300-400 words) ? Can you recommend any good content writer for me?
BTW I am managing a free seo analysis tool at https://tools.seopengu.com which will help website owners analyse their site for on-site SEO issues, I hope it helps someone who is looking to find out seo errors and optimization tips.
Thank you and have a wonderful day!
Servando Silva says
Hi Danu.
I not sure where you can find a good content writer for that price.
You get what you pay, and for $3 the writing will be pretty mediocre I guess. I’d start by raising that to at least $15-20 per post and make those posts larger than 300 words as it will represent much better quality for both search engines and your visitors.
Afia says
Hi,
I’m professional freelance b2b writer. Please contact me if you are looking for affordable flat rates articles/blog posts.
simplyafiya89 at gmail dot com
Nomi says
Thank you Servando. Great content.
Please what do you recommend here? Buying likes for my viral site Facebook fan page?
Or just boosting each post and let it earn me likes.
Again, if I buy Facebook likes, will my post get to the members who have liked my page?
Servando Silva says
Initially I prefer buying likes and just posting organically until you reach 5k or 10k fans. After that we focus more on boosting posts but not using the boost post option as it narrows your targeting in a weird way that doesn’t really work. We create the campaigns in the facebook ads manager.
Nomi says
Thanks for your helpful response. Please enlighten me in the kind of campaign you run. There’s is a plethora of campaigns to run on facebook as regards website promotion.
Do you use conversion ads?
Servando Silva says
Traffic campaigns with landing page view objective 🙂
Chris says
Hello, what is the best kind of facebook ads to run for this purpose?
Ads for engagement? Ads for clicks? Ads for traffic? Or Ads for conversion?
Secondly, how do I know the actual post to advertise of do I have to advertise all the post on the blog?
Servando Silva says
You want traffic, so the best objective is traffic and especially focused on landing page views (not link clicks or clicks). You need to implement the FB pixel in your website to measure Landing page Views.
You don’t know which post you need to advertise. That’s the beauty and difficult part of this strategy. Every day we tested 5 new posts and paused them if they were bad only keeping the best ones that could make a positive ROI to scale them. Keep in mind most of your articles will fail and won’t go viral. For us, maybe 1 every 10 was a good article and the rest were bad. 1-2 of those 10 were horrible LOL.
Chris says
Hi, please I want to know. I have a blog where I write about bitcoin, investment and crypto currency.
Can I add AdSense to this kind of blog, does Google accept this kind of site to contain AdSense codes?
Servando Silva says
I’m not sure to be honest. Just check their guidelines.
Earlier this year Google and Facebook blocked the ability to pay for ads (Google Ads) related to the crypto currencies niche. However one thing is that and another is Adsense which is monetization so better check it yourself.
soufiane addoudar says
is 100$ enough tu statr this busness
Servando Silva says
Definitely not.
I’d recommend at least $2,000 to get started.
John says
Thanks for the great article, I have 2 questions:
1. The traffic flow of this method is FB ads –> FB fanpage –> Adsense site, why not taking down the FB fanpage and have FB ads landed on Adsense site directly? Assuming I could arbitrage to spend $10 on FB and earn $11 on Adsense site, wouldn’t it be more effective without the FB fanpage?
2. Or, is it because having a FB fanpage in the middle is more rewarding?
Servando Silva says
Hi John.
Both methods work, but building a fan page with many fans can also get you a ton of organic traffic which is free.
Jason says
Few questions about this project:
1. when should I invest in the Facebook AD? (how many articles on my website or how long the domain.)
2. I can’t apply for the instant article right now but all my old fan pages can, I just need to wait few days or I need to something to make it happens?
3. What is actually re-writing the story? can you give me an easy sample?
4.Thx for this awesome article!!!
Best.
Servando Silva says
1. Try having 10-20 articles before investing, especially if you’re not yet approved with an adsense account.
2. Sometimes FB doesn’t allow more IA accounts as they’re very strict now.
3. Just write it with your own words instead of copy pasting it.
4. Glad you liked it 🙂
bob says
this article is titled $200 per day with adsense viral websites. Does this $200 mean actual net profit on top of daily expenses?
Servando Silva says
Back when I wrote this article we were doing $150-250 profit per day.
Things have changed a lot though. We’ve changed our strategies to adapt and survive while still profiting 🙂
fab says
so youre making much less right now? competition?
Servando Silva says
No, we’re actually doing more. But nowadays we have to spend much more as well.
Before we could spend $20 and make $100 per day with a viral article, just to mention an example
But nowadays we need to spend $1,000 per day and make back $1,300 ($300 profit) but we have changed our strategies a lot. You should check our other articles 🙂
Steve says
Hi Servando, you mention in your article “always link to the sources:” What about potential copyright issues? Is this a concern? Many thanks.
Servando Silva says
Yes, it can be a problem if you apss the news as yours. But by linking to the sources you’re giving credit and since the news are not copyrighted it’s all good.
Justin Bianchi says
im try and success.
spent $20 in 1 day.
islah says
there is an email i want to chat with you about fb ads
kobylarry says
hello Silva, my question is this : if i am creating campaigns on facebook do i go for engagement as my goal or getting more website visitors , which one do you suggest best. At the long run,all i want traffic to my blog post.
Secondly, if i am creating campaigns on let’s say : cheapest laptops’ as the keyword in my article, do i have to pay attention to the audience reach or potential traffic
Also, i wanted to know if you have an article on bing ads.. i have most of my links indexed on bing rather than google.
Servando Silva says
What do you want and what makes you money? Likes/comments on Facebook? or traffic? 🙂
We usually go by traffic and optimize for landing page views and other events.
The keyword and SEO for this technique don’t really matter. I don’t use Bing Ads. Sorry.
James Cross says
When I click on the VULTR links, I see a wide range of options for servers but no $3/day option. Can you be a little more explicit about Memory, CPU, Bandwidth, etc required to support a site like this?
James Cross says
Sorry totally messed up the $3/day thing. Do you mean the 25GB, 1 CPU option to get started?
Servando Silva says
That would be $5 per day and it’s quite decent to get started 🙂
Servando Silva says
The $5 per month option or even the $2.5 per month option should be enough.
Just check the plans in vultr.
Ankit Kamli says
Hi I had an admob account which they terminated due to violation. Now, I can’t create new admob, as they will terminate that account too after they detect it. Are admob and adsense same and can I still get approval from adsense for my WordPress site? If yes can you check my site, do I need to change something?
Blackandbeast.wordpress.com
Secondly, if I get approval, can I use those ads for my different sites?
Servando Silva says
You won’t get approved on a free .wordpress.com site.
Shubham says
Does my adsense will get banned if I connect it with my viral website…. ?
How to earn with a viral websites…..?
Servando Silva says
No, if won’t get banned if you follow their rules.
Simran says
Thanks Servando,
amazing post, i will implement all above things to make my campaign success. you have complete guide to learn the facebook paid advertising properly.
Servando Silva says
I don’t really have one but there are a lot of guides out there and courses for FB Ads.
Eric says
Hi,
Will I be violating Adsense rules if I drive traffic from Facebook (paid or otherwise)?
Servando Silva says
No, you won’t.
Eric says
Thank you very much! What about the use of backlinks on an Adsense site?
Servando Silva says
What for?
Eric says
To boost traffic
Servando Silva says
You can do that, sure, but this strategy doesn’t rely in any organic traffic.
Eric says
Many thanks!
ankur says
Hello Sir,
I am quite new to blogging. Probably, a content writer you wants to be a blogger. In general, should i paste the link of my blog post on the facebook page? One more thing, do I need to activate adsense first before sending the traffic from facebook page?
Servando Silva says
Yes, and yes. You need to have your Adsense account approved first, and for that you need a website which doesn’t seem to be new or without content or they might reject you.
djamai souhaib says
Please, how to scale FB Ads to increase traffic and earnings???
Servando Silva says
That requires a lot of testing and there are many strategies. I recommend you to take a course on ow to scale your ads because it’s something that can’t be explained in a comment or even 1 post.
Julian says
Is there a plugin for ”next and previous” button for blog posts?
Servando Silva says
Yes, there are a lot of plugins that do that if you search for in the wordpress repository.
read hits says
lOVED THIS ARTICLE AND GOING TO APPLY TIPS 🙂
CHIBOUB AHMED says
yes this is work well with the “next and previous buttons” thnks man, i know someone he use this method, and he made 6 figures
Servando Silva says
Those buttons help spreading your CTR and increasing your impressions for sure 🙂
elias says
From which you get the money you do from clicks
Or through offers
Servando Silva says
What?
Money is earned per every click on the Adsense ads.
gabriel says
Hola servando te quiero comentar algo, soy un novato en el cpa ya tuve mi primera campaña exitosa en trafico pop. Supongamos que tengo 1800 dolares para invertir, que seria mas sensato usar estar estrategia y despues monetizar con audience ,propellerads o mejor sigo aprendiendo sobre cpa?
“He leido tus tres articulos sobre este tema estan geniales sigue haciendo contenido asi”
Servando Silva says
Hola Gabriel.
Si ya has tenido campañas ganadoras en CPA y algo de experiencia te recomiendo que sigas con eso.
También esto te podría interesar: https://servandosilva.com/
Saludos!
Mustapha says
Hi, can i add PropellerAds & adsense in same website ??
Servando Silva says
I don’t recommend it unless you separate them like I mentioned in different pages or even better, different domains for this strategy.
JL says
Sir, thanks for the wonderful guide.
Rewrite the stories from your own point of view, ad videos or whatever you need, and “always link to the sources”.
By “always link to the sources” means reference to the original content?
Servando Silva says
That’s correct 🙂
Vabhes Roy says
SEO is one of the best tools for digital marketing. This post helps to get the new strategy for marketing.
Jin says
Hi, where could you find the writer with that kind of budget? 15$ for 5 articles?
Servando Silva says
I only could fin prices like that in forums from tier 3 countries.
Halla says
Thanks for the grate information you have provide us.
hafa18 says
hello
i was have 0.21 cpc in adsence and ctr 2% and after 4 days my ctr became 5 and the cpc became so low 0.04
note my target country south africa and 99% from mobile
please help me what i must do to back to cpc 0.21or above 0.1
thank you
Servando Silva says
That’s normal as you only see the average of cost per click and you now have a lot more clicks.
This would e a problem if your CTR was still 2% and your CPC went down.
Also it can change from day to day so make sure you get a lot of traffic before assuming you will get an specific CTR and CPC.
david says
do you this method is working for this year
Servando Silva says
The method has changed a lot so I recommend you to check this updated post instead.
Eli says
Great Silva, I run a health niche website and have been promoting a link to the site via FB ads, I tried with $1 a day but I couldn’t manage to get more than $1 via google adsense in that day, mostly i could manage $0.8 with around 700 page views.I have developed fear to scale the budget to $10 per day as I might lose more money, what’s your advise on this particular scenario.
Servando Silva says
$1 per day is nothing to test.
You should at least start with $5.
If you got 80% of that money back then start investing and optimizing your campaigns until they’re profitable.
Eli says
Thanks alot.I will test with $5 a day and see how it goes.Will give you feedback after a week
Ankit sharma says
Hello Servando,
I have a health relates site which have articles about home remedies, yoga, health tips, medicinal plants and superfood. I have google adsense on my website but not earning anything.
Do you thing your idea is going to work on my website. I have a FB fan page with 30000 followers.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
Do you have traffic?
And how are you placing your Adsense Ads?
Lisa says
Hi servando,
thanks for sharing this tips.. questions though, adsense have an Auto Ads recommendation, should I just set the Auto Ads or set the ads just like you said, 2 square ads and 1 skyscrappers ad set?
Servando Silva says
Split test and see what gives you more revenue.
Auto ads is something I’m testing at the moment.
dream works says
can’i use more than native ads compagne in my website
Servando Silva says
I didn’t understand your question.
saf1 says
he mean if we can use adsense and another advertising methode (cpm), both at the same time. i have the same question.
Servando Silva says
Yes, you can use some alternatives at the same time like revcontent or media net, but not pop networks.
John says
Hi Servando. Very nice post! The last four years I have runned a viral page. On average I had 40-50.000 visitors each day and that without ever boosted a post.
The last week I have had terrible reach on all my articles. Videos and images still have great reach. Articles is down to about 500-1000 persons reached on a facebook page with 80k followers. (I have several facebook pages)
I have never changed my domain. Do you think that could be smart, and if yes, why is that smart?
Servando Silva says
It could be smart, but who knows. It’s worth a test because Facebook has many ways to flag you, including your domain, your page, your API, your ad account and more.
So testing with a different domain or simply picking on any other website and send traffic to it could let you know if the decrease in reach is due to your domain or your fan page overall.
Wahag says
I want to ask what is the relationship between my website a (Viral website) and the Facebook fanpage??
Servando Silva says
Your facebook page is where all the traffic is going to come from. Without it there’s no traffic and no earnings.
Carlos says
Great Article, I wonder if it still works in 2018, I am about to find out.
Servando, you mentioned about the use of a VPS Server, but you dont explain why is this necessary and how to set it up. Do you have an information source you could recommend?
Servando Silva says
Hi Carlos. Make sure you read the following articles in this series.
As for the VPS, the one I recommend is self explanatory as you can deploy WordPress with 1 click, but if not there are a lot of guides around already.
The reason you need a VPS is because you’re going to receive hundreds or thousands of visits per day once you start sending traffic, so the faster it loads the better for your visitors and your earnings.
M says
What’s the URL of your Viral website?
Servando Silva says
I would never reveal that. It’s like suicide.
Besides, we have many sites, not just one 🙂
Ganesh Raj says
Hey,
Great article. From where did you hire content writer?
Servando Silva says
From forums until i found a good one.
Armando72 says
I already have a budget for boosting FB posts but would like to create a separate budget for FB marketing. With Facebook further limiting reach with planned changes to their newsfeed, is it still viable to spend money getting people to like your page?
If it is, assume I’d spend $20/day boosting image/video posts (since they get more interaction). With the goal of getting people to like my page, would that $20 be well spent or would it be better put towards somewhere else to promote my brand (i.e: Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Outbrain,…)?
Servando Silva says
It will all depend on how viral is your post.
If it’s a mediocre post with low CTR it won’t work. If it’s a good one then it will do wonders.
It0s always been like that, however every day it becomes a bit more difficult.
Armando says
Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Al says
Hi Servando,
Thanks for all your information here. A few questions please:
1. My idea is a premium URL, parenting 101 site. The URL with the best SEO metrics is imperfect English (i.e. HowToChangeTire.com rates better than HowToChangeAtire.com). Does this matter from an earning or advertising perspective? How best to handle this? I purchased both domains.
2. How do you avoid the content you post on the Facebook fan page from canabalizing the website traffic? Is it only a teaser on Facebook?
3. Do you recommend buying IStock photos or is it ok to copy from Google images?
4. I am still a bit confused by AdSense and Facebook targeting. I think you’re saying don’t target too much at first, but we also need to keep the CTR high and cost per user low. What’s the balance for targeting?
Thanks.
Servando Silva says
Hello.
1. No, it doesn’t matter from an advertising perspective most of the times.
2. Canibalizing which traffic? I don’t understand. On fB you publish the link and maybe a line or two of text. After that if people want to read the article they need to go to your website.
3. I’ve never done that so I’m not sure to be honest. We always source our photos from Google search and never had a problem in years.
5. Initially you don’t target much, however after a while you build lookalike audiences from people who visit your page and you can start targeting those specific audiences.
Hope this helps.
Kartik Sharma says
Hello Servando sir,
I have been doing exactly the same for my Indian audience. Highest i’have made in a day is 450$ in last month.
I made a few mistakes while learning this ie, I started using “Play Button” or “GIF button ” in my Ad image and as a result got my 4 advert accounts banned.
I will not repeat this, though the results in starting were amusing 😃
My issue: Its been 10 days and I have tried automatic bidding, manual bidding, changed the post, changed the URL, Change the website, changed Ad account, changed Facebook page.. But my ads aren’t getting enough reach (I mean forget about manual bidding, it isn”t even reaching at automatic bidding)
What could be the issue sir?
Plus, I had a page that is banned now, I do have other pages but they do not have more than 200 likes (My banned page had 3 M likes 😢)
Does Facebook page likes affect your advert’s reach when you’re promoting links?
Please help me sir, I will be very thankful.
Servando Silva says
Your page could be flagged or if you ads are not running your account could be under review. This happens many times if they suspect you’re the same person they banned 4 times before.
Philip says
Hi Servando. Thanks for your article. I’d like to know if Vultr is a hosting service and how does it work?
David says
Do you try to optimize the viral sites for seo or do you rely 100% to facebook as traffic monster?
Servando Silva says
We just focus on FB ads.
David says
Do you boost facebook posts that contains links to get more klicksto your viral website?
Servando Silva says
Of course. We only do it for our best articles though after proven they’re viral organically.
Vas says
Tell me.
There is a problem buying advertising on mobile devices with FB ADS, when a visitor navigates, the FB opens the site in its mobile browser and cuts out all ad units of adsense.
Is there a solution to this problem?
Servando Silva says
Adsense has mobile responsive units, however there’s a much better solution which makes more money. Read this.
Vas says
Thank you.
I tried, but the effect is very small for my audience.
I have 5 pages ~ 1m subscribers.
Can I get in touch with you and talk? Write me an email.
thx
Servando Silva says
If most of your audience comes from desktop devices then use Adsense+Native ads.
I don’t do personal coaching, sorry.
Nadia Khan says
Hi Silva,
Thanks will apply these steps in our upcoming websites.
JC says
Just create it Facebook fan page and grow it.
Just write viral posts.
lol if only it was that easy.
Servando Silva says
If this was easy everybody would do it and it wouldn’t work.
Definitely requires a lot of work, patience and money to build a business.
Brian says
Hi Servando, thanks for sharing your system.
Can you please expand on:
1) “always link to the sources” (any good sample page from the net to show?). Let’s say I find a viral news on CNN. I then write a unique article on the same news and include the actual link to the source. Do I include the URL Source: https://www.cnn… or just mention Source: CNN?
2) Images: where do I get them?
3) I also don’t understand this: “8am image, 10pm link to article 1, noon image …”
Thanks
Servando Silva says
Hi Brian.
1. Yes, you include the link you in the first example you mentioned.
2. Google is your friend 🙂
3. In your fanpage, to keep engagement you can publish an image/video in the morning and every 3-4 hors, and between those posts, you post youtr links to your site to make money. If you only post links your reach dies because you have less engagement.
Sammy Joseph says
Hi Servando, I’m really impressed how good you are explaining steps and I’m happy that you always answer all the questions. That motivates me to learn all about this nice business.
Look, I’m ready to start this strategy but I have a great doubt about copy write infringement. I know AdSense is very strict and a viral blog needs images and videos from other sources. My question is: is it enough to link the source to avoid AdSense ban?
Of course, I will write the posts on my own point of view.
P.D. Sorry for my basic English.
Servando Silva says
Yes, Adsense checks more about copied text than images. As long as you write your own articles and link to the source you won’t have problems.
Gabrielle de Bellefeuille says
I’ve noticed that the link to the Morning Theme doesn’t seem to lead to that specific theme, and I can’t find it on that website. Have they stopped offering it? If that’s the case, do you have other suggestions, besides the other mentionned in the post? I was looking forward to using it.
Servando Silva says
Hi Gabrielle.
Yes, it seems they stopped updating that theme and deprecated it.
Elegant Themes has several ones that could work as well as WPZoom. I tend to change themes every couple months anyway to avoid banner blindness.
Ansh says
How do you receive CTR of 3%?
I tried many things but my CTR remains at 0.50% only.
Servando Silva says
Testing a ton of ad sizes, colors, positions, etc to improve your CTR.
In out best times we reached 11-14% CTR (I haven’t seen those numbers in a while though), and it was just a matter of testing a lot and creating super viral articles.
Anton says
Hey Servando, have you ever received dmca takedown notice?
Servando Silva says
Yes, I did a couple times.
We just deleted the reported content and problem solved. It was as easy as going to the wordpress dashboard and deleting the post.
Tyler Steill says
I already have a page with 13k likes that were generated organically(without paying). Can I just use that page without spending anything on ads for now or will I still have to pay for ads, I know I’ll have to pay to get the website up and going but hopefully I can save a lot on not spending on ads until I get more capital.
Servando Silva says
If the page has good engagement you can start making money from it, but 13 likes is just barely enough to start monetizing it, so eventually you’ll want to run ads to your best posts and keep growing it.
David G says
My question is how do you target people on facebook who are into viral news stuff? Is there a specific parameter on facebook ads which help you find people who are interested in viral news?
Servando Silva says
Initially you need to either go broad (just target country and ages) or you can target other viral sites fans. After it you will build audiences with your pixel and create lookalikes from them to get better engagement and interaction.
harsh says
is this method bossting viral article with facebook and earning from adsense??still working????
Servando Silva says
It works much better with FB instant articles.
BartonIndies says
Amazing! you have explained them pretty simple and crystal clear… I wonder if you could share us such a tips and trick to balance between traffic and revenue as I now start from non VPS Server. Thank you for the sharing…
Servando Silva says
You can start with a simple $5 per month server with Vultr and not worry about paying a lot of money for it.
hamza says
hey! thank you for this tips.
just wanna ask you from where can i hired a content writer ?
Servando Silva says
Forums, upwork, iwriter, etc.
A bite more says
Hi !!
Thank you for such a helpful post.
One friend of mine and I have recently started a facebook page and a youtube channel. its been 28 days and we have nearly reached 1500 likes on Facebook and almost 70 subscribers on youtube.
https://www.facebook.com/abitemore/
We are building our website content as well.
Our website and page mainly revolve around food. We cook delicious quick bites and write their full description.
Now, we both are from different background and have very less knowledge about monetizing this whole thing. If you could provide us with some guiding tips would be a great help.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
Hi there.
If you have a small budget, even if it’s only $1-3 USD per day I’d create Facebook videos about your recipes and use video ads to promote your Youtube channel. it’s a great strategy and FB loves videos while you still send the people to the whole video on YT and the end up subscribing.
Jan Steen says
So what are we doing wrong at our website? Followed the whole procedure but currently at 9~10USD a day with Adsense. Better Templates? Better Business? Better content? Or did are the ads on the wrong location?
Servando Silva says
There’s no “wrong” location.
Are your posts going viral or not? that’s the key of success to this.
Also, please make sure to read this guide as it is updated and works much better nowadays than Adsense.
Elías Herrera says
Hola excellente artículo aunque veo que ahora recomiendas que monetizar con fbinstant articles. Mi pregunta es : quiero hacer lo mismo del artículo pero mi meta para comenzar sería ganar unos 5-a 10 dólares diarios , cuanto tendría que invertir o cuantos fans debe tener la fanpage para llegar a este meta? gracias
Servando Silva says
Probablemente con unos 10,000 fans de Tier 1 tengas para iniciar.
Si es de países tier 2 o tier 3 necesitarás unos 30-50k fans.
Elías Herrera says
Excelente amigo muchas gracias me gusta tu blog tus artículos son muy prácticos , siempre ando en búsqueda de casos de estudio así se aprende más. Si alguna vez vendes guías o cursos en español para monetización con AdSense , Facebook o Amazon estaría bastante interesado en comprarlos.
Servando Silva says
Gracias por tus comentarios. Saludos!
glen says
Hey, has anyone noticed a significant increase in cost per like? I have almost 7,000 likes, and it’s cost a pretty penny. Also, Facebook is killing reach these days. This method was probably awesome a few years ago, but now it takes a significant amount of capital to get rolling and a solid gameplan to get the engagement. $5k minimum I’d estimate. Also, I’m going after U.S. likes.
Servando Silva says
Yeah, this method works now with pure ads mostly, and it’s better if you use instant articles instead of adsense to monetize.
glen says
I can’t even imagine how awesome one-cent likes were, I’d probably be a millionaire if I was on that gold rush haha. This method does still work, but it’s not for someone with little Facebook experience, startup capital. I’m going to try the instant articles. A good idea is to reach out to similar pages to see if they are willing to create a network or let you join theirs.
Victor G says
Why you said that Buffer and Hootsuite, for example, actually hurt your reach, how FPTraffic is different?
Servando Silva says
FPTraffic now decreases your reach a bit as well.
Facebook likes people posting or scheduling content manually for maximum reach and engagement.
Pasan says
Hey ,
Just have few questions.
Should I add a DMCA notice 🙂 and how can I write one?
Servando Silva says
No. Just link back to the source and that should be enough most of the times.
Pasan says
Source at the bottom of the article right?
like – source: The New York Times?
Servando Silva says
Yeah, that’s fine.
Rohtash Nimi says
hai ..silva
its a very useful and informative article for grow our blog, increase our absence earning…and also useful for make viral our website…
thank you very much for this article
mouassa says
hi thanks for this article i don’t speak and write english well i want hire content writer could u please provide me someone
Servando Silva says
No, we don’t have writers for rent or anything like that.
Md. Azharul Haque Pathan says
Awesome Tips and it will help to get more traffic from facebook.
Martin says
How many Creative Ads you used in one Adset?
Servando Silva says
I like using 1 per adset but if the budget is big enough i can use up to 3.
michael fordjour says
I want to follow your advice from start to finish.
Am a newbie help me to make money online as I spend a lot of money without any income.
Regards.
Servando Silva says
What are you currently doing?
Masud Pilot says
It’s risky to boost post for traffic if your income source is Google Adsense.
Martin says
Hello,
I have great CTR but my CPC from Canada traffic is 0.09€-0.18€ ,, whats cause of this?
Is it because i use facebook ads to drive traffic to my website? Or is it because Articles are poorly optimized for keywords?
Any ideas what would help? Thanks !
Servando Silva says
Since the traffic is coming from social media the keywords don’t matter as much.
What niche are you into?
Martin says
General, Viral news,, any ideas on how to get up cpc a little?
Servando Silva says
You should try this new strategy. It works better nowadays.
Mohamed says
Could you tell me more about content curation strategy, as many viral websites go along with it? And also the tools needed to curate a piece of content that can re-shared on social media for the sake of social media marketing as a part of driving social traffic to a viral website.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
I never used tools for this, but doing searches on FB and keeping up a list of the best trending articles and viral page sin your bookmarks helped me a lot to get ideas to replicate.
Joann says
Hello Servando Silva
I have enjoyed your article and learning a lot, but want to ask how can I actual make money posting ads of my face book ad page. I have done it but found out who I was doing it for was a scam… I actually made them some money too, I pay to boost it and it worked. So tired of being scammed. Can you please help me by leading my the right way to actual make some money. I am currently using AdSense for someone else and getting paid little to nothing. Want to start on my own with AdSense but need to know what the steps are to put on my own to make money, instead of being the middle man..
Servando Silva says
Adsense is not a scam and starting your “own” Adsense as a company would need a lot of work. why not use Adsense or FB instant articles?
Joann says
No I’m not say AdSense is a scam I’m getting paid little to nothing with them, I would was saying another company Jobzipo was. Ok will try to find out how to use FB Instant Articles. Thank you!!
dp4max says
Hi SERVANDO SILVA
Good to hear your Articles. I am SEO started seo company too, little bit knowledge in PPC can we earn this ( 1,00000) amount in Ad sense? I ready to investment to put Ad in Facebook but content writing only struck for me. Could you help and guide me to start one website for complete Adsense to earn money. Here I drop my mail id and website kindly contact me.
Servando Silva says
You’re asking if you can make 100,000? per month? per year?
I don’t do private coaching or anything like that so don’t drop your email here. Sorry.
Sreehari Sree says
Thanks for this post.
Well explained one!
As a newbie to blogging and AdSense, It helped me lot.
Thanks again
Martin says
Hello!
Thank you for that method it really changed my life.
I am using facebook ads to promote my viral articles.. I test them with budget 3€ a day and when they are profitable, i keep them running. I use Adsense and have 3-6€ RPM.
On facebook ads i use Traffic campaign and it varies but i can have 0,01€ to 0,003€.
And I am making fine money however i dont invest into growing my facebook page / 15k likes..
What would you recommend me to do to improve? Should i just test more articles and make more money with them, or grow my page to 100k likes or someting different?
And optimisation for delivery, which is better, link clicks or impressions?
And why i have on article#1 CTR 16% and CPM 0,50€ and on article#2 CTR 8% and cpm 0.25€// i mean on facebook ads, didnt better ctr means better cpm?
I would love to see your response thank you very much!
Servando Silva says
If you’re making money just keep doing what you’re doing and scale out. The initial 5-10k fans are good to get started at the beginning but since you’re already in another phase it’s fine.
As for the optimization, for viral traffic we do link clicks or content views using the retargeting pixel.
Martin says
By Scaling out what you exactly mean? If i find good article with 0.004€ click how can I scale that out?
Thanks!
Servando Silva says
I mean increasing your budgets, duplicating adsets to spend more and earn more, etc.
Martin says
Last question please,, i saw when i increased budget to 100€ the cost per link click went rapidly up..
Should i duplicate one adset 10 times and make 10€ budget on each? Would it be better?
And what worked for you,, optimilisation for link click vs impression,,,, and pay for impressions vs link clicks
Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with us
bisong says
Hi I created a food blog website and paid for 1 fb ad with a budget of $3 a days, I also have a fan page with non of my post or articles on it, just my page profile and cover pictures, I choose to drive traffic on my website directly , but I got just 2 clicks, 68 impression and 68 reach In 11 hours, CPC $0.81, why did I have just 2 clicks and that much reach? Please advise me on how to get more click to my website on Facebook ads
Servando Silva says
One of the reasons could be you have a really bad targeting or expensive audience.
It’s better to target a few people until you get at least 5,000 likes and then start driving traffic from there than just going for website traffic.
bisong says
thanks very much for the advise, my target is USA, very expensive as you said, will go for the likes as you have instructed, i appreciate your prompt reply.
slim says
Hello servando. I have read your articles a number of times and i am impressed. Please i would like to know if this still works in november 2017. I see that this post was written in 2014.
There was a time in 2015 when facebook changed their alogrithm. This affected a lot of bloggers. So does thia still work?
Thanks
Servando Silva says
Hi.
We have a new guide for 2017 of how this works and what’s better for nowadays. You can check it right here.
Philip says
Hello Servando, you always have nice articles and I appreciate your work. I have an educational blog and not a viral site and my target market is the US. I’m targeting earning $50 daily on the site and I just got approved by Google. Will I achieve my target if I build my Facebook page and use the strategy you talked about in this article? If not, what would you advise that I do? Again I’m starting with little or no budget. Thank you very much.
Servando Silva says
Probably not. The idea of this strategy is to have real viral articles, and that’s probably difficult to achieve in your niche.
If you’re starting with no budget I’d focus on SEO ranking low competition keywords.
cherif says
hi
i try your strategie but i have some question
i have a newspaper theme 8 and CTR it’s just 0.50% and CPC 0.12 cent and i use hostgator
do you think if i use a new theme and vps i will get more CTR and CPC?
Servando Silva says
If you receive a lot of traffic a new better server will definitely help.
As for the theme, you can try that but have you tested several positions and ad sizes/colors?
Cherif says
I just place the ads in ads position in theme
Servando Silva says
Bad idea. That’s how the theme looks great, but usually get very low clicks.
Jamel says
I’ve been following this article for awhile and have put things into action. I have a question though. What about a website that is just with viral videos? Rewriting multiple stories is time consuming without outsourcing but posting viral videos and writing a brief summary of what it’s about with a little extra banter is way easier and I’ve come across some sites actually doing this. What’s your take on it?
Servando Silva says
I’ve done it and it works. Just make sure you have at least a couple paragraphs explaining the video and not just the video embedded.
150-300 words should be fine.
Jamel says
I really appreciate this reply. I needed it to make sure that I wasn’t wasting my time and I was already writing articles with 150-300 words, sometimes 500 which was stretching it but now that I got your confirmation I feel like I’m on the right path. Thanks again!
Data says
Hi Sevando
Great article! Respect
I was thinking about the same.
My question is that whats the RPM for this kind of traffic? Is it more than 1$ and is it safe to use Google adsense?
Servando Silva says
The RPM depends completely on your audience geo, quality, device, OS, niche, etc. so it’s impossible to say.
Akshay says
hello, this is my 3rd time to read your post. Can you share the link of your viral website?
Servando Silva says
No, we don’t do that for various reasons to avoid competition, people literally stealing and copying your niches, etc.
John says
These are really useful . Most of the peoples copy the same content and post on their pages. And they do get likes and shares. Do you think its good or we should create our own content for social networks.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
I think you should give it your own spin and not just copy it completely.
Akshay Ambarte says
Hey, i would like to ask you that what are your views on using autopilot plugins and autospinner for viral content blog?
Servando Silva says
I don’t like using them because copy is important to engage with readers along with the pictures/videos and headlines. I prefer taking 10 minutes per article myself than leaving a machine do it and have a very lousy article that doesn’t perform.
Sydney says
This all sounds good except the part about posting images. If you don’t own the images, how can you legally post them? It seems time-consuming to find who owns them, ask for permission to use, and wait for their reply (if they even give permission to you to use their images).
Servando Silva says
You link to the source and problem solved. The same happens with videos.
Everybody in the internet post images taken from google or other places and nothing happens unless it’s something trademarked or something very specific. When that happens, you just link to the source and make clear that you’re not the owner of the image.
Norman says
I look for them in forums or places like upwork, freelance, etc.
Servando Silva says
Mostly in forums is where you could find them.
rahul says
do this still work in 2017 please . I mean if i make million fan base on facebook ,will this really boost my adsense income ..do adsense not recognize the traffic source
Servando Silva says
If you have a million fans then you SHOULD FOLLOW THIS STRATEGY FOR 2017 🙂
It works much better than Adsense.
Anas says
Hello,
How can i contact you in private please ? I have more than 4million fans on facebook french, but i have a very low ctr in adsense, i have some questions for you.
Thank you a lot !
Servando Silva says
Hello Anas.
If you’re in my email list you answer any of my emails there.
Also, you might want to read this article as it works much better than Adsense nowadays.
Shiam says
Very impressive. It’s still work in 2017.
Servando Silva says
It needs a few tweaks. Check this guide from 2017 🙂
David says
Servando, I have a website called Jackfroot.com. Do you think it’s possible to make $10,000 a month from Adsense?
andrew says
Hi, do you still doing this? using FB ads to drive traffic to website?
What is you invalid traffic?
I heard somewhere that using facebook ads to drive traffic to website and combine with adsense, will give invalid traffic and the CPC is low.
Can you please share what you think about this?
thanks.
Servando Silva says
Yes, it’s usually around 10% but nowadays we’re using this strategy which works better than adsense.
Mayank Tiwari says
This is one of 40 or 50 articles I have read lots of time over internet .
I am bit confused to choose facebook ads as there are lots of ads type in facebook , like boost post, drive traffic to website and get more engagement as liks or comment .
But I am confused to to choose better one and how to maintain my roi as atleast 100% .
If you have already written an article regarding this , please help me to find this.
Servando Silva says
Clicks to website is what you want at the beginning to send traffic.
Keeping your ROI at least at 100%? you’re dreaming though…
Wijitha says
Hi,
Actually this is very interesting. how do i start this kind of project can you help me sir
i have IT knowledge but my english is poor
If you can help me it ‘s appreciated sir
Servando Silva says
If you have any questions just ask them here 🙂
Dave says
Hello, I would like to know what theme do you recommend me that is mobile responsive and that loads faster for my new viral blog? I have it with WP.org I am just starting and I would like to improve it with a new and better theme.
Thanks in advance!
Servando Silva says
I like themes like the Genesis Framework or some that you can find at Themeforest but I don’t have any personal favorite.
Antonio José Soler Morillas says
Can I do the same strategy in al Joomla web?, this is my web and I want to monetize https://imorillas.com/facebook/ but I don´t know why it´s too hard to increase visits from facebook o another social channel.
Servando Silva says
Yes, you can do it with any CMS including Joomla. The process is the same.
Mido says
Thank you so much for your awsome content and your big effort.
I am looking for a free theme responsive to mobile devices ( my niche is mental health ).
Servando Silva says
Nowadays there are a lot of free mobile responsive themes. Check out the WordPress repository and you’ll find a lot.
Stark says
Have Purchased domain for this project or using subdomain of WordPress , also please recommend the best domain hosting , although I can google it , I prefer experience over search result.
Servando Silva says
I already recommended a hosting for this kind of sites in the article. Vultr was my choice.
Stark says
My question was regarding Domain name not hosting , could you please enlighten
Servando Silva says
For domains I use Namecheap.
Djamel says
Très intéressant. Merci pour votre aide.
mhub says
Hellp silva 😀
i still this method work
thank you
Servando Silva says
I actually recommend you to check this newer strategy. it works better in 2017 than the one you just read.
Austin says
Hello, Couple questions.
1. Do I have to purchase a wordpress AND Vultr account?
2. Which wordpress plan should I use? Personal, Premium or business?
Servando Silva says
Hello Austin.
WordPress is free and there’s no purchase cost. You should look at WordPress.org
If you look at WordPress.com you can’t monetize your site and there’s a cost as they host everything for you, but you never really own your website completely so I never recommend going for the .com route
Viralman says
Do you use Impression or CPC on your FB ads?
Servando Silva says
Cost per Impressions.
Pinoyathletics says
Nice tips. Im guessing certain topics go more viral than others.
Servando Silva says
Yes, that’s true.
Azahar Ahmed says
Hello, my website is ” https://sprintally.com/ ” all contents are unique but why people are not visiting my site? Why is Alexa ranking going down? Please help me with your great answer.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
What are you doing to get people to your site? Having unique content is important but it doesn’t mean people are going to visit your site just because of it if they don’t even know it exists.
James Ferguson says
Did you use the free version of Word Press? If so what template are you using and how are you placing the ads within the actual posts without plugins? Thank you love your work.
Servando Silva says
No. I would never use their free version.
Also you can’t put ads in the free version of WordPress so this strategy only works for WordPress.org
t says
hi ,but hope Adsense will not ban the publisher using paid traffic with facebook and how can someone outsmart them
juan says
Hi Servando, how did you do it with vultr? is not to hard to setup wordpress there? how about email and security?
regards!
Servando Silva says
No, it’s quite easy. It takes me 10 minutes to setup a WordPress site there.
As for email I use Google Aps for work.
juan says
Thank you, I will try it. Great post BTW!
masyarief says
hi,,how to make viral article on fb,,i am beginner at blogger
Ahmed Bagua says
Hi .. What is Best placement for ads to increase ctr in adsense ?
Servando Silva says
There’s o best placement. You need to test several placements and sizes until you find your sweet spot for your audience and website design.
Naeem says
Thanks for the share! How to get higher click rate from USA traffic? I am getting $8 from lump sum 100 ad clicks. On web I have read that disabling Dining & Nightlife, Home & Garden, Occasions & Gifts and Real Estate categories from adsense setting can make more bucks. Whats your opinion? Plz guide
Servando Silva says
Testing multiple locations and ad sizes will end up getting you a better CTR no matter which country.
Tommy says
Hi,
could you give recommendation where i can hire content writer. Thanks
Servando Silva says
I look for them in forums or places like upwork, freelance, etc.
Malisa says
Hi,
I am about to start my own viral blog, after reading this i am feeling like really good.
Thanks for the inspiration
Regards,
Servando Silva says
You should read this article first 🙂
sameera lakmali says
Hi, please i need your help. Some of my facebook pages got unpublished. It has 250k likes and it is stil unbuplieshed. I couldn’t recover it. It got unpublished because i posted earning ads on it. And also i have another faceook page but im afraid to earn money from it because i think when we post earning ads on facebook they unpublish pages. So i need to know whether the adsense ads make pages unpublish? and does facebook alowe to post adsense ads on facebook fan pages? Please help me 🙂
Servando Silva says
No, Adsense doesn’t have that problem. What were you posting on your pages?
Himanshu says
Hi,
It is good idea but I need to ask you something. Are you following same strategy of viral websites right now?
I think that such tricks can earn you some money for short period of time but for longer run, you need original and quality content website like stream-seo. Am I right?
And quality websites give you more income rather than such viral websites.
Servando Silva says
I’m following a new strategy, as mentioned in this recent post.
It just works much better than Adsense at the moment.
Waleed says
Hello Servando!
Thank you for the great and inspiring post, I have three questions:
1- Do you also promote the articles that you share? or just the page itself?
2- When should I change my marketing plan? When should I pause and edit the FB marketing strategy? What I mean is, is it fine to spend 20$ per day and get 5$ from Adsense as a start? if yes when do you think I should earn as much as I pay?
3- Do you think targeting one country in the Facebook ads is better than multiple countries? And any recommendations on which countries to start marketing to?
Thank you so much,
Servando Silva says
Hello.
Let me help you with some answers:
1. Sometimes we promote articles, when we find they’re really good organically. The organic test comes first, and then only the best ones get promoted with ads.
2. I like to start with $5-10 per day with each article to test the waters. This is the second phase test because the organic reach is the first test. We let ads run 2-3 days minimum but if the ROI is below -50% we can pause them on day 1.
3. You can target multiple countries but do it in different campaigns.Don’t use the same campaign or adset to target multiple countries. You’ll mostly receive traffic from the countries with the lower CPMs if you mix them all.
Finally, I would recommend you to read this article. It works better than using Adsense nowadays.
Armando says
One thing I’ve never really been clear on is audience. My page is nearing 6 digit likes but I’ve never been able to scale an article to a million views (while other sites with nearly the same article do). My question is do you start testing with your audience and their friends and scale to the same audience if it does. Or, do you recommend going broad and target a country and not bother advertising to fans if the page is not over 100,000 likes?
Servando Silva says
Is your audience super engaged organically?
I normally start testing with my audience organically, and if the response is good then I have different campaigns targeting different audiences to test. Here are the main ones I test:
1. Campaign targeting the people who have engaged with my page posts in the lasts 3-6 months
2. Campaign targeting interests (depends on the niche I’m working)
3. Campaign targeting people who visited website (using the fb pixel)
4. Lookalikes of all of the above
I don’t use campaigns targeting friends of fans unless I have no idea initially who to target (this is normal when doing generic viral articles although i recommend going into a niche now to get better reach). Even so, once you have people engaging and visiting your website I would just leave “friends of fans” out of the targeting and focus on engaged people, people who have visited and lookalikes.
Hope this helps.
Armando says
Thank you so much! This is going to be super helpful and can’t wait to try running campaigns you mentioned, especially #3. Never thought of trying FB pixel or lookalike audiences. My page does get good engagement organically but I think I focus too much on “friends of fans” thinking they’ll engage too so I’ll take your advice and leave them out of future campaigns. Cheers!
Servando Silva says
The pixel nowadays is key for your campaigns.
Using the pixel and lookalikes will help you a lot to bring prices down.
Always glad to help.
Favour says
Help Silva thanks for the information, I want to try by taking but my problem is as a newbie I need expert like you to help and assist me as I start.
Esp on VPS installation, can you journey with me on starting?
My second question is this, does this only work with WordPress, what about blogspot?
Also can I use WordPress Wordads instead of AdSense?
Servando Silva says
It works on blogspot but I never recommend people to start with a blogspot as Google can close your whole site whenever they want.
As for the VPS, there are many guides out there to buy and setup a server. I don’t do private coaching about it. Sorry.
Naeem says
Thank you for the informative article. Could u plz sharing your experience of Facebook boosting? What about boosting web post links on website? Is it worthy?
Servando Silva says
Hello.
We have tried this in the last couple months with very mixed results.
It seems like organic traffic has much better CPM rates than boosted traffic, so we’re focusing our ads on buying likes and getting new fans instead of boosting articles straight to the website.
Lucas says
Hi, Thanks for the great post. I will start immediately.
One question I have is after you boost your story with fb ads w/ $10/day budget, how long do you usually keep it running? As long as its still profitable or you have a certain limit? Thanks!
Servando Silva says
If it’s profitable I’ll run it for as long as it’s still profitable, but if it’s not, then I’ll give it 2-3 days maximum to be optimized and if it’s still not profitable I’ll pause it and move to the rest of the articles.
Tack Alexander says
Great article, but I want to get organic traffic rather than paid traffic
Servando Silva says
In that case you need to learn how to do SEO.
Alex says
Servando, is it possible to contact you directly? I would like to discuss this with you further, I promise I will not take too much of your time.
Servando Silva says
Hello Alex.
If you’re in my email list you can reply any of my emails and it will be forwarded to me.
I should mention I don’t give private coaching and i’m not looking for joint ventures at the moment, just in case. But if you have a question related to the article that you don’t want to ask publicly for valid reasons I’ll be happy to answer you via email.
Best Regards!
Melvin Carr says
I have set up my site with intotaiment articles and Virals inside but i have got about $500 to start my add campaign. Can it still go along way for me?
Servando Silva says
Hi Melvin
What is intotaiment articles?
$500 is a tight budget to get started with this, do you have more for the future just in case?
SubliminalWormhole says
If I understand how the law works correctly, it’s perfectly legal to embed a YouTube video in an article you’re publishing on a Blog site. That’s because you’re sending business that YouTuber’s way. It’s just like providing a link in your article on a Blog site to someone else’s article for reference purposes. You’re sending business their way. However, if someone downloads a copy of someone else’s YouTube video on a website for their own financial gain and take away business from that other YouTuber in the process, then it becomes a problem from a legal standpoint. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Servando Silva says
You’re correct.
The reason I mention linking to the source in many cases is because not all the time the articles need to be made around youtube Videos. It could be something else, like just pure funny images and stuff like that, in which case I’d link to the original post just in case.
If all the content is included in the video then it’s probably fine.
rahman aji permana says
great! i think, saya akan melakukan beberapa tips diatas. terima kasih
i am from Indonesian
Servando Silva says
Hi!
As mentioned in the article, we’re using FB Ads and viral news for this strategy.
David says
Why the Vultr VPS and not a SSD block hosting service? Is there a big difference when traffic peaks?
David says
Or a SSD Shared hosting service?
Servando Silva says
Block storage in Vultr is meant for storing data only, like Google Drive and Dropbox do. It’s not meant to receive thousands of visits from different countries every minute.
fahad says
hy
this article is amazing.may be it can change my life.
thanks
hatem belmamoun says
Hi thanks fort the post
I have question , im working on viral site , do you thing I need to activate SEO on WordPress or not ? Or it will make only problem with copyright ?
Servando Silva says
You don’t need it, this is all viral traffic so it doesn’t come from google.
And copyright is something independent from SEO.
Alex says
Hi Servando,
Thank you very much for your valuable information!
I have a question regarding viability in overall of this approach.
Another author on the page below is claiming that it is not worth “buying” likes on Facebook through advertising, because engagement of audience will be almost zero.
http://nichehacks.com/lessons-learned-viral-news/
” After several Facebook ad campaigns (99) and spending almost € 800 (about $900 USD), I ended up with 110,000+ page followers.
This turned out to be a HUGE mistake that almost destroyed my page:
New followers didn’t know or care about my project (even in the viral news business you have to build a good connection with your audience) and their engagement was close to nothing.
Together with Facebook changes (organic reach for pages with more than 100k fans dropped to 5%, according to Locowise), my page’s reach dropped to shameful levels.”
Could you please bring your thoughts on this?
Is this approach still viable – as you described on this page?
Cheers,
Alex.
Servando Silva says
He doesn’t explain how his fans ruined it and also he doesn’t explain what kind of targeting or ads he used.
But I’m sure he did things wrong. With 110,000 targeted followers you will have a thriving audience that gets a lot of traffic to your site, if you do the correct targeting on FB.
Also, it’s important to note that ads nowadays aren’t only to get likes, but also to drive Facebook after you got those people to reach them (especially if your organic reach is low).
Check out our latest article about this 🙂
I’ve seen there’s a trend of people who focus on SEO and most of them are really bad at paid traffic. Not sure why. I love both.
Zainab says
pls I’m from Nigeria,I ve a group I formed from Facebook where I ve over 2k members and counting, I want to be màking money so I post interesting stories and I get likes/comments.I want you to help me cos I wanna get a website and link it to my Facebook straight to my googleAdSense.
how do I achieve that?is group page fan page ?
I’m interested to know from you an experts.
pls simple English will help me understand. kindly break it down.
yours.
z.k
Servando Silva says
I¡m not sure I understand your question.
But a Facebook group is not a Fan Page. They’re different and you can’t do ads for groups.
Noel Pirfa says
i have got an adsense account and i don’t just know how to get traffic to the site all i earn since i was given the account is just $0.96, hoow can i benefit from this please help me out
Servando Silva says
Well, if you read this article we focus on social traffic from facebook ads.
There are many ways to get traffic though, and you need to learn one and dominate it.
Kobbom says
Hi,
How about the invalid click issue in adsense ? Do you have experience with that ?
Best Regards
Servando Silva says
Yes. Sometimes they discount 5-10% of the clicks at the end of the month. I have learned to live with it.
Joshua says
Thank you for the information. I was banned from Google adsense but started using propeller ads. Can this work with propeller ads. And what is your advice for my blog. Thanks
Servando Silva says
Check out this article which is the second part where we used propeller Ads for the same strategy.
amine says
Thank You Servando for your reply.
I’m gonna follow your tips and change my ads’ locations and sizes.
Muhammad Ikram says
Assalam o Alaikum…!
Thanks for your great article, i send near 3k to 4k daily traffic using twitter, Facebook and other social media site. i have a problem, my this traffic showing in my site but adsense account is showing only 15 page views and 30-40 impressions.
what is the problum i have? kindly Help me
I need your help can connect with you?
Servando Silva says
I don’t give private coaching, but did you make sure your ads are being shown in your site?
Muhammad Ikram says
yes ads are properly showing
Promise says
Thank you very much for this Great article Sir.
Please I have News site, Where some of my content( post and images) Can be seen in other sites.
Can I get google Adsense approval.
Please reply me Sir.
Servando Silva says
I don’t know.
That’s up to Adsense but usually they require it to be a few weeks old and with enough content not to look empty.
Tom says
Hello,
What is best source to get images for all the article news?
Servando Silva says
Google was my best friend for that.
abdelghani says
Thanks for the great article
I have a problem. I brought visitors from the UK but the click price is very low “cpc = 0.06$ ” . Note that most of the Traffic phones are via Facebook Ads.
Do you have a solution to the problem.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
It’s not a problem.
The way you make more money with Adsense is by increasing your CTR mostly, not increasing your CPC.
As for the mobile traffic from Facebook, you can control it when you setup your campaigns so it only shows for people browsing on desktop. But mobile traffic is good as well, so it’s more a problem of people not getting enough clicks (CTR) and testing a lot of layouts, ad sizes and combinations to increase your earnings per visitor (not earnings per click).
Regent says
Hello Servando,
Thanks for this article. I found it at the right time. However, I have a few quick questions.
1) with a budget of 3k to be spent over three months with this technique, am I good?
2) my Ads on facebook should be targeted at getting new page likes right?
3) Is it a good idea targetting India and USA at the same time?
Servando Silva says
Hi there.
1. It’s a very decent budget. make sure you read the second part of the article and also the article we recently published about Facebook Audience Network and Instant Articles.
2. At first, yes, but then you’ll need to target you ads to your fans to send them to your website.
3. No, never mix 2 countries in the same campaign.
Gary says
The image shows 2013, does this still work same to this day or cost of ad’s and competition too high!
Servando Silva says
Competition is higher for sure. Nowadays you need an edge but still works if you read part 2 and some of our latest blog posts as well.
Jason Hamm says
Hello Servando
First of all I think you meant ” I’m sure it still works in july 2017.” not ” I’m sure it still works in july 2014.”
Thank you for your post, it’s really interesting.
I wanna ask you a question, my website http://www.litemovies.com is getting 60% of traffic from USA, UK and canada my CPC and RPM are very low, (CPC $0.08, RPM 0.5), So is there an tips to improve my stats and increase my earning via adsense.
Thank you again.
Servando Silva says
Oooops. Yeah, that’s what I meant.
As for your earnings, I think the main reason is your banner locations and sizes.
If you added a couple of big rectangle banners inside the content (1st paragraph and maybe one in the middle or the end) it would give you much more than using 2 small ads in the sidebar and 1 at the top.
The key here is to split test as many locations and sizes/colors to fine the winning one for your site.
Jason Hamm says
Thank You Servando for your reply.
I’m gonna follow your tips and change my ads’ locations and sizes.
Mehdi says
Is it so competitive or I can start it?
I live in a third world country and it will take me months just to spare 70$, do you suggest I start doing this?
I tried many ways to earn money online but never found success even with freelancing, please advice me as you are more experienced
Servando Silva says
Hello.
Yes, it will be always be competitive, for sure.
Where there’s a way to make money, people will pour in and be greedy about it. It’s just the nature of the system.
If it takes you month to spare $70 I wouldn’t recommend it. You need at least a couple grand ($2,000) to learn and start testing things, which would take you years to get. If you’ve got a lower buget like that maybe start with something “easier” like blogging or SEO. They are competitive as well and they take time and efforts but you don’t a high budget to start a blog.
Alan says
Hi Servando, nice to meet you. 🙂
It is good to see your post, and i have learnt much from them. I have one question regarding to the using of the article pictures and videos in our own website.
I saw you have suggest some recommendation on how to get the ideas of viral contents everyday. Like going to “Upworthy” and “Viralnova” to check out.
But, if we copy those pictures/videos to our website article (of course i will rewrite the article contents again), is it citing the image contents source and put on DMCA notice at our website will be able to help us avoid the law cases and google adsense banned?
I do understand we need to seek for approval from the website owner for using the picture/contents, but sometime those big sites wont even bother to reply our email request.. and consider we need to write 3-5 article everyday, it is really time consuming if want to use the picture in every article… And for the image get from shutterstock, they don’t allow their photo for commercial uses… meaning if the article has the picture get from the shutterstock inside, we cannot monetize the article with adsense ads…
So, can i ask what is your advice on this part of issue? I am interested in the blogging field, but i am quite worry for this issue. Hope i can get some advice from you before i start my journey.
Look forward for your reply.
Thank you.
Regards,
Alan
Servando Silva says
Hello Alan.
Just make sure you link then at the bottom of the article as the source and there shouldn’t be no problems.
Many of the videos those big pages use are just embedded videos from Youtube, so it’s not even their content.
But don’t copy the text, write the article yourself to avoid penalties from Google/Google Adsense.
bxchoo says
You said “shouldn’t be no problems.” in your last message. Is it typo error?
So what you means is if i copy those photos to the article in my website, i just need to cite like this: “Image Source: from Business Insider” under the photos. And then i have to attach the hyperlink URL of the original article webpage to the words “Business Insider”. Then, it should be all fine right?
But, is there any cautions need to be take note when we take someone else photos? Like try not to takes those professional photographer photos? So sorry for having so many questions about the same topic, i just hope to get all things clear before start the blog, i am quite worry for this kind of legal case…
Yes, i understand the article text need to be rewrite. Otherwise it will ban by google for duplicate contents.
Thank you for your advice. 🙂
Servando Silva says
Yes, that’s what I meant.
I should have said “There shouldn’t be any problems”.
For viral articles you’re not going to take professional photographers photos. Most of the times they are google images or even screenshoots from the viral videos edited with paint/photoshop.
Alan says
Thank you for your guidance. 🙂
Will take note for this part. Have a great day. Cheers.
russel says
let’s say i have 30k usd to invest, is there a different way for this kind of technique to scale up quickly as possible?
Servando Silva says
I’d do this with a twist. Check this article.
Satish says
Hello,Thats a great article what i have a doubt i have just a shared hosting,Can i do it on shared hosting ?
Servando Silva says
I really don’t recommend it as shared hosting loads very slow and you lose traffic and visits.
tomzpot says
Hey great article ,i was just wondering if you run facebook ads and have google adsense on your blog, wont google adsense ban you for paid traffic? They normally ban alot of people for paid traffic. Any help?
Servando Silva says
They normally ban for people who do incentive traffic or fraud, but social media traffic is real and legal. Sometimes what they do is discount a portion of your income (e.g. 10% of your earnings) if they feel the traffic is low quality, and there’s always a risk of ban with them but most of the times it’s just fine.
tomzpot says
Thanks alot 😀
Umesh Sharma says
Hi Servando,
Great article. I do owned two news portal sites. One in Nepalese and other with English contents. I’ve above 50k unique visitors to my English sites and about 80k in Nepalese contents site daily. Most of my visitors are redirected from my FB page. I’ve 2.6 millions likes and follow for my FB page and very engaged and interactive. I’ve built a large community. However, I am not getting the revenue as I should have from AdSense. Most of my viewers are from Nepal and U.S.. I know you mentioned above that you don’t give private coaching or mentoring.
Thanks
Servando Silva says
Nepal has very low rates, I assume, but USA should have decent ones.
You should also try some adsense alternatives since you have USA traffic.
Farris says
I am reading this in 2017. Does this strategy still work? I am using a funny pictures website instead of viral news, I think it’s the same thing. I want to monetize my traffic with AdSense. The question is, I have 10k+ fans in my Facebook business page. And I don’t get a lot of traffic from them. Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I post 1 to 2 links per day and my reach is 25 views per post. Sometimes I don’t get any visits. I don’t know whats wrong?!?
Servando Silva says
Yes, it works if your audience is engaged.
How did you build those 10k fans? From the numbers you tell me it sounds like it’s almost dead on engagement. What happens when you post images? How many likes/comments/shares do you get on average?
Jaswinder Kaur says
Thanks for this Super long and Informative Article.
Is it necessary to make Facebook Page, can we do without it?
Servando Silva says
Glad you liked it.
No, you can’t do it without a Fan Page.
msh says
thank you, I work with your method it is good but CPC in AdSense is low about 0.12 although I target high country payment (USA, NZ, AU). please, any tips to can get high CPC.
by the way, my niche is entertainment
Servando Silva says
If it’s viral sites the CPC will always be a bit low, and you have to work and compensate with with lots of traffic AND having a decent CTR.
If you choose a niche you can do some keyword research with the adwords tool and see which keywords you can use to get higher CPCs and include those keywords in the content as long as they make sense.
qualiall says
Hi. The thing that worries me is potential legal issues..like someone saying I used an image without permission. How worried should I really be?
Servando Silva says
Most people don’t care and unless you’re using something like a famous person or brand nothing happens 99% of the times.
For the other 1% usually it’s just a letter to take down the ad or website where you’re mentioning it, which is just a couple clicks in WordPress to delete the post and keep on with new posts.
Darius Money says
Great Article. So at the start, we run a campaign for likes to our web page right? So once get a certain amount of likes, do we just start running ads at our current fan page followers, or is there a certain target audience you would recommend to target?
Servando Silva says
Yes, you got it right.
First build your fan page up to 5,000 or 10,000+ followers and then you run the website ads and target them.
Matthew Hutchinson says
Servando,
Is this still working in 2017?
Thanks
Matt
Servando Silva says
Hello matthew. Yes but it requires more things. Make sure you check out the second part of the article linked at the beginning.
ilyas says
hey thank you very much for the great article i am workin on a arabic website what do you think about UAE and saudi arabia cpc ?
Servando Silva says
They’re not so great to be honest.
Pekk says
Hello, what do you think about Greece? Is the CPC good?
I would also want to know if Blogger is a good alternative option for WordPress
Thanks in advance!
Servando Silva says
Greece isn’t very good from my tests.
As WordPress is much better than blogger also.
nabil says
Hi Servando, you have said in your article “always link to the sources”, do you mean put the link of the source website into your website, could you please explain more ?
Also for the videos, shall we put the video of “viralnova” into our website ? if not, from where can we get these video to put it as a viral information ?
Thank you in advance for your reply
Servando Silva says
Yes, it means putting a link somewhere to say the image or article was sourced from whatever page you took inspiration.
I don’t think there’s a video of viralnova. Not sure what you’re trying to ask here.
nabil says
I mean, there are videos in viralnova website, as exemple (http://www.viralnova.com/deer-motorcycle/), so may I download the video or just put the link of the whole page as source ? how it shoud be done ?
Another point I want to approach is FB ads, to get an audience from USA is very high cost, so it’s difficult to get huge traffic from an audience that give you high ROI, you should have a good budget to start, whereas others countries are cheaper to get traffic from, but also the revenue will be very low from their adsence clicks, that’s the big issue !
Eric Cheung says
Thanks for your great post. So the viral site will be a news site right? Do you have any suggestions for the domain? Also I think the part 3 will be the most difficult part since it’s quite time consuming to choose viral topics and most pics we don’t have the copyright to post…
Also, I have a CPC site of health tips related topics, I know it is a quite competitive niche and SEO will be very costly, I have created a Facebook page for this site, problem is that the topics may not be so viral… Do you think I can get a chance for getting traffic from FB ads?
Servando Silva says
The domain is the less important of all. Don’t spend more than 5 minutes on it and get it.
As for your niche, your articles won’t probably go viral but you can get a lot of good traffic out of it if you know how to monetize it.
msh says
thank you for this rich article.
I make a Fb ads for my blog article I get this result:
CTR: 19,745%
CPC:0.06
budget:5 EUR
reach:500
post engagement:83
Click(ALL):104
how can increase the volume of my reached audience? I see some marketer reach to 4000 just in 3 dollars.
In Adsense how can increase CTR? please, I need your help can connect with you.
Servando Silva says
Hello. I don’t give private coaching or mentoring, but your CPC and CTR are already very good.
Try mixing engagement ads with traffic ads so you get lower CPCs at the same time that you get more engagement.
msh says
Thank you for your reply, please I can’t understand how mixing engagement ads with traffic ads, you mean choosing traffic objective and make image clickable. I am a beginner in this. thank you Servando
Servando Silva says
That’s correct.
You can publish a link which is a big image that drives traffic to a post and boost it for traffic or boost it for engagement, but if you do both at the same time it tends to have better results.
Kamal Choudhary says
Hello!!!
First of all, Thanks for the super article.
I am going to start a new site with this strategy. My site language will be URDU and targeted country would be Pakistan.
I wanna ask that how the site language will impact on CPC?
What relationship can happen betweem Cost Per Result & CPC for Oakistani traffic?
Looking for you reply…Thanks in advance.
Servando Silva says
Hello Kamal.
Pakistan has very low CPCs so your traffic will be super cheap but also your revenue will be low.
It’s probably one of the worst countries to get started because the value of Pakistan traffic is very low and most advertisers don’t work there.
RT says
Does this method really works?? And is it an good idea to get traffic to blog from facebook, will it not create any problem in google rankings? And one more thinf to build great fans you will also need huge investment?
Servando Silva says
Yes, it works.
As for Google rankings, it doesn’t matter. Google actually loves when a website has a lot of traffic, but even if it didn’t, this article is not focused on SEO, so people don’t care about what google thinks with this strategy specifically.
Pankaj Sharma says
Hello,
I run a celebrity blog and I need audience from the United States and Europe mostly, Any idea or suggestion that what type of stories I should Publish or what type of audience should I target and test via facebook ads. My website is wcelebs(.)com. If you can look at my website, guide me personally for the articles and facebook targeting I can also pay you. You can also check my website’s facebook page I have recently posted videos there. But the main question is what I asked at the starting of this comment. What type of celebrity stories and what type of audience to target to get cheap traffic via Facebook from the USA and European countries. Thanks in advance.
Servando Silva says
Hello.
I really can’t know your audience as I don’t run celebrity blogs. That’s something you should test a lot until you find the best interests for your ads.
Pankaj Sharma says
Thanks for the reply. I think testing like that would require a lot of money. Any convenient way where I won’t have to spend much to find the correct audience on Facebook?
sayed says
Hi servando
Thanks for this great article
1 – where i can hire a good writer with reasonable cost ..
2 – are you boost all of your daily articles by FB ads , or what u exactly do
thanks
Servando Silva says
Hi
1. You can find them in forums or freelance websites.
2. I boost them based on how they do organically first. If they have a good organic reach then it’s time to test some paid traffic. if they do really bad organically it’s not worth doing the test to lose money. Move on to the next article.
Keds says
Hi! I have been with Google Adsense for years already and for my case I guess I am not earning enough to sustain my hosting expenses from my Adsense earning.
I’m getting around above 1k pageviews daily and an almost 3k followers on my page.
My website specifically feature Horror Stories and I get to publish stories on my website, Twitter and Facebook at least once or twice daily.
I’m still thinking why I’m not earning very well on my website. Please advise.
Servando Silva says
Well, if you have really tested all the ad variations, sizes and position in your site then there’s not much you can do.
If not, that’s what you should test first. Also, keep in mind the traffic prices change a lot from country to country.
Gnaneshwar Gaddam says
Thanks a lottttt.. nice article!
This Ideas Helps me a lot to grow my website traffic.
max ali says
what about Disclosure Policy page, Privacy Policy Page, About Page, Contact Page and a DMCA Policy Page , do i need all of them in my viral site ?
thax in advance
Servando Silva says
It makes the site looks better and avoids getting banned for simple reasons.
While many sites operate without those, you should add them for long term.
Reda Elyazidi says
thank you for this AMAZING post, I just want to know where I will come up with photos like those published by viralnova…etc and if i apply to adsense, should i choose at first articles full of text or starting with videos and photos, because adsense i think doesn’t allow us to use videos and photos without texts, please can you help me with that
Servando Silva says
Your articles should have both text and images/videos.
You can get most of them from Google image search.
Reda Elyazidi says
Thanks, can I use pictures with a license from google or without a license?
Servando Silva says
You don’t need a license for most of the pictures. And I don’t think Google is the one who would give you the license anyway.
nabil says
Hi Silva, the methode you are talking about, is it adsense arbitrage ?
Servando Silva says
Kind of, yes. You can consider this arbitrage but from facebook to adsense instead of adwords to adsense.
nabil says
Thank you for your replay, in adsense arbitrage you can put “next buttom” in the advertisement to permit the reader to follow the information (6pages for exemple) and each time hir/her press the buttom next , it’s an revenue for you.
my question is: this king of arbitrage or arbitrage in overall is it legal for google ?
Servando Silva says
This is legal but you got it wrong.
Not every time they press the next button and see a new page you’re going to get revenue.
Adsense pays per clicks, so if the same user visits your site 10 times but only clicks in your ads once, you will receive the payment for 1 click and not per 10.
What will change though is your CTR, because Google will see it much lower as every user is visiting several pages per session. This is a good thing.
George says
Hello there!
Can we use Fb ads network to monetize the blog as well???
Servando Silva says
Yes you can. Check out this new guide so you learn more about FB Ads network.
Shean says
Hi, Servando
I have one niche Adsense website and 3 month average CPC/CPM are $0.1/$0.7 (Taiwan)
According to these data, do you recommend I launch into viral website like your strategy in my country?
Thanks for your reply.
Servando Silva says
The CPM looks really bad to be honest. Taiwan probably has not many advertisers and that’s why the CPM is low. Also, the country is relatively small, which means you won’t be able to scale your campaigns much.
Any other countries you could take on?
Shean says
Thanks for your advice. As far as I know, part of Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore people are also use traditional chinese.
If addition these country as my target audience, will the situation be better? or Asia area always not have high CPM?
Servando Silva says
Malaysia and have much better rates.
Joshi says
Awesome article!
What if I embed YouTube videos to my website & copy images and using them in my website.
Will it be any problem if yes what is the solution?
What if I photoshop these image and then to use?
Thank you !
Servando Silva says
Embedded videos are no problem and for images unless they have copyright it shouldn’t be a problem either.
Servando Silva says
Hello Sami.
Blogger loads fast, but it’s not your blog and Google can always close it down.
Any person who’s serious about having a website should have at least their own domain and host so they own all the property of their websites.
Jess says
Thoughts on promoting blogs with AdWords as well as Facebook?
With FB ads. Do you use:
“Get More Website Visitors”
“Promote your Page” or
“Boost your Post” and boost the articles you share?
I had a Pokemon GO site back in the day and only ever did the “Promote your Page” I got a good 20k FB likes – but not many went to my site.
Right now I’m boosting every article I share from my blog to my FB page and it seems to work alright. Only doing $5/post though.
Great articles,
Cheers
Servando Silva says
I don’t use Adwords for this strategy, sorry.
As for FB Ads:
You should test them all. Promote your page works usually to get fans which is part of the strategy but you still need to pay for traffic.
Then use website visitors and boost posts to send traffic to your website and analyze the data and scale up.
Jess says
So you do both Promote Website, and boost post?
Thanks again.
Servando Silva says
Yes, and based on the data and results I decide which works better every time. Or if both work well I let both run.
yudist says
Hi SIlva..
Thank For your great article.. I just think about how to start optimizing my new website using fb ads to google ads.. before i read your this post.. i’m in confuse to determine the website niche..
SO.I’m Thankful with Your idea about creating a viral news blog
Sure.. i want implement one by one step as you mention in thus post
Boujlal says
Hi Servando,
Thanks for this very interesting post I have a problem wich is I don’t get clicks on my ads this is my website lifeed.me and this is my Adsense statics http://imgur.com/5w7KYGt
Thank you!
Servando Silva says
Split test like mad man the best sizes, colors and banner positions to get the best CTR.
Chris says
good stuff.
Question, how do you optimize the facebook ads targeting. Is there are a way to create lookalike audiences based on people that clicked your ads? Is that possible? How do you use the facebook pixel at all? If so, how?
thanks!
Servando Silva says
Hey Chris.
yes, there’s a way to retarget people and also create lookalike audiences. Check the Facebook article sin this blog. I have a lot of Facebook tutorials covering that.
Chris says
Specifically for ad arbitrage? Alright..will look for your posts. Thanks
Servando Silva says
For everything, not just arbitrage.
abhisek says
What a terrific post and congratulations for your extraordinary success.can you advertise your website on facebook if your website has google adsense ads running or it violates google adsense tos..will running facebook ads will ban your website from google adsense.
Servando Silva says
No, they don’t.
Sometimes Adsense discounts some clicks they think are invalid (when they detect a lot of traffic comes from social media), but it shouldn’t be a big issue.
nabilo says
What is profitable niches for Adsense and viral websites..
NABILO says
What is profitable niches for Adsense and viral websites..
Servando Silva says
There are a lot. it depends more on your strategy. It’s not like there is a list of the top 10 profitable niches that work every single time.
cunhon says
Hii Silva, which one the best CPM based network for working to.
thanks
Servando Silva says
For what niche and geos?
cunhon says
viral content niche. geos Indonesia
Servando Silva says
OK, Indonesia doesn’t have super high CPMs anywhere but propeller and popads both have decent rates for them.
bobby says
hello sir,
great article i learned a lot from it . i recently started a new site but failed to get visitors to it can you help me ? i also have a tight budget to start with
Servando Silva says
For this strategy I recommend at least a couple grand to learn and get started. If you don’t have budgets you won’t have visitors either, so that’s a bad idea.
Joshi says
What kind of domain name to be chosen for viral blog Adsense websites? Any one please
Servando Silva says
Any domain works. If it’s a .com it would be better to make it look professional but even .net works fine 🙂
kazim kamsang says
Hello Silva…Please I wish to know if the VPS you recommend comes with a free cpanel..Thank you
Servando Silva says
No. Vultr and other unmanaged services don’t come with cPanel. They work faster without it but if you want cPanel look for managed hosting instead.
Filip says
Hi,
can ´t fing the morning theme. Is it still available?
Thanks
Servando Silva says
Looks like they recently deprecated it.
However another one I used was Magazinum and that one is still available it seems.
Webguy says
You need to have content people like, if they don’t like or share only about 2-3 percent of the people on your fan page will ever see the content. While I never had the sucess of the blog Author I do make 40-60 dollars a day and only spend 5 dollars a day on Facebook ads, my biggest day was $120, my shitty days are $10-15 but usually get around $50.00 a day on average. it pays for my apartment, car and insurance and only spend 5 minutes online 3-4 times a day. I also use keywords to get those high ass paying ads, some of which get up to 4-5 dollars a click. (mesothelioma, attorney, real estage)) etc in my footer.
Servando Silva says
It sounds like you had good results nevertheless.
Keep pumping those numbers!
Ben Lovell says
Hi again Servando, how can I contact you away from this post?
I would like to run something past you. 🙂
Ben
Servando Silva says
Hi Ben.
Are you subscribed to my list?
If so, you can answer any of the emails I send every week and you’ll get direct access to me. 🙂
Sheena says
Thanks for sharing this.
However. I already submit my viralnews website to adsense but after 10 days the status is still “we are reviewing your site” is that normal?
Do you have any tips to get adsense account? My problem is only adsense account for now. Its hard to get in. Please help me. You are already my hero for posting this. Please be my hero again 😀
Servando Silva says
I recommend you to get approved with another site first. You can start using one of the alternatives (no.2 approves really fast) LISTED HERE.
MMOByte says
Does this still work in 2017? I see you listed it is still working in 2014 but no news on it working recently.
Servando Silva says
It’s more difficult to work nowadays but some people are still working on it.
franklin says
hello servando silver can i use same adsense account for two different blogsite?
Servando Silva says
Yes, you can use it in an unlimited number of sites as far as I know.
kazim kamsang says
actually its limited to 500 sites
Servando Silva says
Ah, thanks for the data.
500 sounds like enough for most folks 🙂
ayoub says
you told me “”It’s better to get your Adsense account approved with another website that has no viral news””
if i do just viral website will i be accepted without doing another website who isn’t viral ?
as i told u i will do 20 articles every mounth and bring trafic and after 3 months i will apply for google adsence ?
Servando Silva says
It doesn’t matter how many articles you do, it’s still better do get approved with something else and not a viral news site.
There’s just a better chance of getting approved with something else.
ayoub says
hey i want start a viral website
first when i will create my viral website i’m gonna write like 20 articles every month and bring paid traffic from facebook for this articles and after 3 months i will apply for google adsence
will they accept me or no ?
Servando Silva says
It’s better to get your Adsense account approved with another website that has no viral news.
ayoub says
i got another question and please answer me
if i buy a google adsence account will they accept me ?
arvind says
Great article Siva…even i get more traffic through my Facebook page, google plus communities and twitter account…really once you have more subscribers you can easily pull up your blog traffic…great post…thank you for sharing…!!!
nonoy says
I have around 70,000 followers in my Facebook page. Before, about a year ago I had around 40,000 fans. Before, even with that amount of fans, I have large amounts of traffic, earning around 20 to $100 a day. Regardless whether that happened because it was election time here in the Philippines.
Now with around 70,000 fans with news updates from my blog, I can only get 2 to $5 a day. Even with so many engagements, I can only get 5 to 8,000 visitors a day via Google Analytics.
In short, there has been very little conversion of traffic coming to my blog. My traffic was lost drastically even my page likes has gone up, both paid and organic.
Note: I tried ‘boost post’ once or twice, but since I notice there was no good results, I stopped it and remained organic.
nonoy says
Sorry. So my question is: why and how did that happen?
Servando Silva says
What’s the monetization method you’re using?
You need to boost posts a lot more than just once. Boost the ones that are really good so you can send tons of traffic to your site.
Facebook is more about paying for traffic with link that go to website than it was 1-2 years ago. If you don’t use ads you’re pretty much out of the game now.
nonoy says
Oh I didn’t know that. I’m using Google Adsense and Proppelerads. I’ve read before that Adsense don’t give earnings to you if you’re traffic were coming from Facebook ads. Is that true?
nonoy says
I tried the boost post. It really pissed me off. Im spending money for my campaign, but it doesn’t give me anuything. Im paying them for nothing. I dont get the traffic that I deserve! What the fuck is going on? The world is getting stupider and stupider as time goes by! Fuck Facebook! Fuck everyone of you! Everything in this world is BULLSHIT!
Servando Silva says
Chill down mate.
You don’t DESERVE anything. This strategy is meant to work if you learn the ropes and test a lot. if you boost one post and it doesn’t work and you get mad, you already lost this game. If it was as easy as just boosting and receiving the traffic “you deserve” everybody would be rich without any efforts.
Joe latham says
Well said bro!
Ben Lovell says
Jheeez Nonoy, be patient, learn from your data, learn from your mistakes, keep working at it and when you find what works, rinse and repeat.
You will get there eventually 🙂
danny says
can you tell me how to get the adsense approval because all thes are relevant for those with approved adsense. Please
Servando Silva says
Has your site been rejected?
Adsense wants sites that are not completely new and with relevant content that looks good. That’s all it takes. They’re slow but you can use any of the alternatives listed here (check number 2) to get started.
Olka says
Thanks for your article. Very interesting!
Do you care ot share some of your pages/sites to see how they look like and how your audience engages?
Servando Silva says
Hello.
I would do that if it wasn’t a terrible idea. Every time something like that gets shared publicly you get a lot of people who copy it, people attacking your sites and other things.
ISHA says
Thanks very much! Very useful, I hope to follow your steps…
carim says
Hi Servando, I have got little money to invest and I am wondering if there is a minimum investment before it can be profitable ?
Servando Silva says
I’d recommend having at least $2,000 for testing, but up to $5,000 for learning all and being profitable.
Bradd says
Hi, like your post very much,
I have a question for you
Is this strategy still works by now 2017?
If I rewrite someone’s post do I still have to put the source of the article.?
Did you face any legal issue by copying others articles into you blog, is it enough just to put a source to avoid any legal problems?
Servando Silva says
It works but it’s more difficult now. Yes, try to show the source if you’re taking an article from them (even if you rewrite it).
Smith says
I doubt anyone can make money from viral websites these days,
it is no longer profitable and even big players such as viralnova,
distractify and upworthy are losing traffic and revenue day in day
out. So I would advise anyone who wants to copy this model to
do proper investigation before investing their money and getting
burned because I have observed that most tutorials on viral sites
never tell a personal success story with examples.
Servando Silva says
Those huge blogs were hit really bad. I know of people doing it well so far but they’re not as known as the examples you mentioned it. If you go through the comments you’ll find some success stories but it’s definitely more difficult than it used to be 3-4 years ago.
Adsbanned says
Thanks very much! Very useful, I hope to follow your steps… 🙂
Mzie says
Hey Servando
Thanks for the insightful post. I just want to ask if i build a viral site following this method, what are the chances of me being approved by adsense. Currently i do not have an adsensr account. Thanks
Servando Silva says
The chances in that case are low.
First build a simple website (not viral) to get your Adsense account approved, and then you can use it for any website in the future.
Ben Lovell says
Hey Servando, great job on these articles. They were a real inspiration when I got going with viral content.
I now have a website that is generating around 10,000 page views a day.
However, I’m really struggling to get the earnings up on it. I saw your post above saying that one of your best days traffic wise was around 55,000 views. In my case, even if I hit 55,000 in a day, I would be nowhere near $200 for the day and that’s with AdSense and ContentAd set up.
Any advice and help on this would be hugely appreciated 🙂
Servando Silva says
Split test a lot of ads sizes, positions, colors, etc.
What’s your current Adsense CTR on average?
Ben Lovell says
I think more split testing is definitely a good plan.
The average CTR at the moment is around 1%
Andy says
Unless I’m not trying hard enough, it seems as though Facebook’s prices have made this strategy more or less impossible in 2017.
I used this technique in 2016 to some good effect with a soccer team fan site.
I was targeting the UK market, paying £0.03 for every new like but now I have to pay £0.15 and upwards.
I tried many things including, targeting different less affluent nations but this didn’t work as a) these people never clicked on article links and b) wouldn’t be engaged with the content anyway. I also varied the advert images as well as texts, tried launching ads on different days – basically every thing you can think of, I tried it :D.
I have also tried the ‘boost post’ method but still made a loss when doing so.
For example, I had an article that was converting REALLY well, a click through rate of 20% but after paying £3 for the boost, got about 1000 clicks. May CPMs are maxed out at £2 for every 1000 page views, so the maths didn’t work on this occasion either.
It seems as though this technique could have made you a millionaire in 2013, but as Facebook’s reach has grown, it has now become too expensive to compete with the big boys. Maybe I got on the boat too late?
Servando, I love your blog and have picked up many tips from this site down the years, but I’d love to know your input on this. Do you think this technique is now dead? Or am I being too pessimistic! 😀
This is a disclaimer to say I’m not moaning about this at all. I managed to get some good traffic using this technique last year and still do even now. Just your input would if you have time would be amazing to me.
Servando Silva says
Hi Andy.
You have tried a lot. Kudos for that.
The technique is not dead, but it needs a twist. Basically it needs to be a viral thing within a niche, and not just for everybody like it used to be before.
Also, if we say the difficulty of this technique in 2012-2013 was like 20%, after 2014 it went up to 50% and now in 2017 it’s more like 80% difficulty. To keep up with all Facebook changes nowadays you need to use their features, boosted posts,, video ads, remarketing pixel, custom audiences, etc.
Eli Ferreira says
Wow, very good your tips. I’ll put them all into practice. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Sam says
Hello Servando,
Sam here. Following our discussion on March 14 above, here are some questions I trust you could answer for me….
1. Could you describe in simple terms the major differences between a regular article and a viral or trending article or content
2. Regarding particularly viral Adsense sites, how many viral articles do we need to start with, and how often is it advisable to add additional articles? On the other hand, can we start with certain number of articles and concentrate soley on promoting the site to different social media WITHOUT any additional articles or rarely adding new articles?
3. Are Viral Themes also SEO optimized for organic traffic other than viral traffic?
Thanks.
Servando Silva says
Hi Sam.
Sure. Let me try and answer you.
1. Technically there’s no difference. An article is viral when a lot of people share it, like it and gets a lot of free traffic. That’s it.
2. You’re not building an SEO blog, so it doesn’t matter much. You could start with 3, 5 or 10, but if a visitor goes to your website and they want to read more and you just have 1 article, it won’t make sense. Just try to have enough articles at least to have some related ones in the sidebar/after entry and in the homepage so the site doesn’t look brand new.
As for how often you should add more, as often as you can because you will find your winners faster. if you add 5 articles per week your chances of having a viral one are very slim. If you add 5 per day you’ve got more chances, and if you add 50 per day you’ll find a winner almost every day. If one every 30 articles goes viral, what do you prefer? do you prefer to find that winner every day, or every 3 days, or every month? This is a numbers game.
3. They can be, and you will receive some organic traffic but don’t expect much. People don’t search in Google viral headlines, and Google shouldn’t be your main focus in this strategy.
pepe says
Hello,
Thank you for this amazing article. I’ve managed to grow a facebook fan page and it generates “decent” organic traffic.
Still, everytime one of the links gets tons of organic clicks, I promote that post (targeting by interest, age, country, etc – and non page fans).
On google analytics I see that traffic that the paid promotion is driving to the website (lets say 5000 visitors). But on the adsense page (adsense url channels) it only shows a small % of that number – say 200 pageviews and, of course, just the expect income from those 200.).
After testing I realize that adsense is only “count” the traffic that is generated organically on facebook. Not the traffic that is coming from promoted posts.
It seems really odd, I know.
They ALL come from facebook. Why/how would adsense have different behavior with facebook paid traffic and facecook organic traffic. Right?
But the numbers don’t lie.
In the past I used to promote some posts on facebook and generate some adsense income that way.
But now, this weird thing is happening.
Some additional information:
– The ad placements are 100% according to the adsense TOS.
– All websites content is 100% original, and all articles have, at leats, 500 words.
– The adsense account has 8 years.
– I’ve tried to promote posts from other facebook pages and to differente sites. This isues keeps happening – adsense is not counting that traffic.
Any idea about what is going on?
Thank you
Servando Silva says
Hello Pepe.
That sounds quite interesting. I’ve seen some people get discounted a percentage of the clicks (not impressions) when they come from social ads, however, this percentage is usually very low unless they clicks are totally incentivized.
You can do a very simple test to see what’s going on. Setup a new website with a new domain and send some traffic there. Make sure you track with new Adsense ads or placements not to mix it with your old site stats.
If the impressions are not counted in the new domain either then your account might have a problem.
pepe says
Hello Servando,
Thank you for your advise.
Cheers.
Ali says
Hi servando
Thanks for this great article
I have a facebook page with 600.000 fans and a website
I get 500-2200 visitors when I share a link on my page
Which ads schould I do to make 200$ aday? And how much schould I pay daily?
Thanks in advance
Servando Silva says
Boost your posts using clicks to website ads.
Ben Lovell says
Where is the option to do this?
Servando Silva says
Go to your business manager, create a Traffic campaign and select the link from your fan page you want to boost.
ayb says
What the different between PPE and Traffic in facebook ads ??
Servando Silva says
With PPE Facebook optimizes the post to receive more engagement, like comments, shares, likes, etc.
When you focus the ad on traffic Facebook optimizes it for website clicks to send traffic even if people don’t like or share.
safrudinkurniawan says
CTW is more expensive than PPE, what is your suggest to get thousands clicks with cheap PPE or CTW ?
Servando Silva says
It’s not necessarily more expensive. It all depends on what you want. Clicks and visits earn you money, likes don’t.
I actually like to run both at the same time.
Intan says
Hi Servando,
When you created the FB campaign, what were the cost for your likes and which country did you target? I,’ve always wanted to start this but FB has killed the reach a lot. Would be great if you can tell me how much traffic you get in a day and how many page likes you have. Just something for motivation 🙂 Thanks a lot
Servando Silva says
I always aim to get likes for less than 2-3 cents if possible.
At the beginning the cost is always higher, but then it goes down after Facebook optimizes it.
As for the traffic it depends a lot on your niche and also the virality of your articles.
A bad day could get 5,000 visits or 10,000 while a great day could get 100-200,000 visits.
Joe Latham says
Does Ad sense allow these type of viral type sites and be able to run on facebook ads? what one must do to get their site approved on a new website?
Servando Silva says
They do if you keep your text quality right and you don’t just blatantly copy other articles.
But it’s always better to get your account approved with other website.
Joe Latham says
ok Cool thanks man.
bismil says
Hi mate, I just want to know, Can we really get good ROI using this strategy?
Spending 100$ per day to Ads but not gaining more than 100$ per day through Adsense clicks means we will lose our money rather to earn?
Servando Silva says
It depends on what you call “good ROI”. A decent ROI in this strategy is 30-50%.
But sometimes I have seen 300-500% when articles go viral and even more.
It all depends on your articles.
Manish says
Is it still a good idea to start viral site in india in 2017 especially with low google adsense RPMs ($0.40), the amount that you end up spending is not what you receive in earnings through ads.
Your comments. I was running a viral news site but didn’t work out because of this reason only.
Servando Silva says
India is definitely not a good country for this strategy.
Overall, the best countries are tier 1 and tier 2 countries.
Tier 3 countries are difficult to monetize and the RPM/CPMs are very low in most of the networks, not only Adsense.
Sam Dante says
Hi Servando… I do have a lot of articles on the financial service industry, like loans, how to acquire funding, credit, using letters of credit to acquire loans, credit cards, etc. Do you think these articles would be a good fit for a viral wordpress adsense site? If so, which of the wp Themes would you recommend?
The second half of my question is… for a viral adsense site, is it acceptable to use SPINNED trending content exclusively with no content written by me or outsourced? Your comments, please. Thanks.
Servando Silva says
Hi Sam.
I can’t think of an angle right now for a viral post in that niche, but maybe try something like: “how people in X country save tons and take advantage of credits/loans with these simple 10 tips” could go “viral in that specific niche.
A theme that looks professional would fit. there are thousands to choose, so definitely up to you.
I never used spun content because most people used it for search engines and backlinks, but this time you’re actually sending real social traffic to your page so they’ll quickly notice when something is spun.
Sarwan says
Hi Servando,
great post!
I’m planning to start job portal website. I need some advice and tips from you,
1. How can I promote my website?
2. How to market job seekers and job providers?
Thanks & Regards
Servando Silva says
Hello.
Try writing a list of all the biggest job lists and job market websites in the world and see if they have facebook pages you can target. That’s how I’d get started.
Kevin says
1.Some of my friends told me that with 1m likes on facebook you could make easily $100 from google adsense,is this true from your experience?
2.i have a page with philipines (ph) mostly ph likes, can it still make money from google adsense? i know not alot like usa or other countries but it still can make $100 right?
3. I have a page with 300k+ likes but only drive 100 traffic to it everyday and it makes me only 15 cents per day, so i dont know how can a 1m like can give me $100 a day lol…. please help
Kevin says
and sometimes not even make me 15 cents
leonard says
What should each article length be? I applied for Adsense but was rejected. They listed a couple of reasons why, and one of them is not enough words.
Regards,
Leonard
Servando Silva says
For viral articles I still try to add at least 500 words plus pictures or videos.
For other adsense sites (not viral stuff) i can easily go over 1,000-2,000 words.
boughouri says
Hi I want to know what the best marketing objective of facebook ads to get traffic to my blog,
also I have a big question what the déférent if i use a lot of targeting to get the a lot of peaple or I have to be carful to use just targeting that have a relation with the article
Servando Silva says
Clicks to website if you only care about traffic.
You can target all you want, but if the audience is not related you will just pay for nothing as nobody will click through your ads.
Mohsin shanks says
hey,
Thank u so much for this article it has one of the most pertinent infos iv readed so far, I just wanted to ask if this method can be done with a basic host, I mean I cant afford to pay 20 $ per month, I only got a bluehost basic plan so is it good or not ?
Servando Silva says
You can get away with it the first days but keep in mind you’ll be losing money.
You can also get a super fast VPS at Vultr or DigitalOcean for just $5, but it’s an unmanaged service so only works if you know how to do it.
sara williams says
Hey Silva
i have a question, can Adsense Accept Paid Facebook Ads Traffic ?
please reply
with best regard
sara williams
Servando Silva says
Hi Sara.
It’s a gray area because they don’t like any paiD traffic sources to their ads, but at the same time most big websites will have paid traffic campaigns going on and display adsense and other networks without problems.
It’s very important not to incentivize the clicks, no matter if your traffic is organic or paid.
hicham says
hi my name is hicham i have a question for you in step 4 You said if it was a big article can be divided into parts
what is the tools for this in wordpress website ?
thank you
Servando Silva says
There are plugins to do this. Look for “WordPress pagination” in the WP repository or Google to find some of them.
hicham says
Thank you
But I can not find anything positive ..
I found some paid additions that do not hold to buy
Can you direct me to someone from a site fiverr.com solve the problem Li for $ 5
I have another question
What is the difference between Adsense account, US and Arab?
Knowing that my English website content BEST AVAILABLE
If you created an ad in which targeted America
And what will happen if you create announcement by US account
And what will happen if you create announcement by Arabic Account
Sorry for any inconvenience
And be sure I am of you loyal Followers
You will see me a lot
Servando Silva says
No. I never recommend Fiverr for those kind of things. A quick search in the WordPress repository gave me a plugin for that.
Also, i don’t think the account makes a difference. The traffic you receive is what defines your revenue. The country of the account defines payment methods.
hicham says
Thank you
If you need to you will contact you
Thank
hicham says
What are the different cases in which close my Facebook Profile?
What payment card used by you on Facebook?
how site should you have to edit a $ 200?
How personal account permitted by Facebook from the same place?
sorry sorry sorry
Anandu says
What If I Outsource contents for my website from professional firms?
What if I use only CPM ad networks such as POPADS or proppeller ads?
I think FB ads are still expensive for me, SO I think stumbleupon and reddit ads will be cheaper will you recommend it?
Waiting for your valuable answer.
Servando Silva says
I have tested Stumbleuppon and reddit and they’re not cheap, but you can try them and if it works for you, that’s great.
Asif says
IF THE CONTENTS ARE COPIED OR FROM OTHER VIRAL WEBSITES , IS IT NOT GOOD FOR ADSENSE ACCOUNT ?
Servando Silva says
Not good. One thing is to copy the whole articles, headline and images, and another thing is to get inspiration form a good article and write it on your own words.
Asif says
how is it fine for adsense account if i copy all the images , headlines and text as you said copy material is not good .
Servando Silva says
I didn’t say copy.
I say take it as an inspiration, and then write your own words, articles, headlines, etc.
Using the same images as others is a common practice in any news paper, so that’s not really copying somebody else, but if you copy the headline and text, then you’re copying all and Google won’t be happy.
Armando says
Hi Servando,
What are your thoughts regarding strategies for increasing facebook page likes organically in 2017? Personally, I’d rather boost a post and get organic page likes than pay for FB likes and for this reason I was wondering if videos are the way to go.
I ask this because Facebook videos seem to get more engagement nowadays and my personal newsfeed is full of them. Many pages are simply re-purposing videos from youtube but crediting the full video. other types of videos are simply slideshow videos of a popular viral post with text overlays telling a story and they also seem to get tons of views, likes, and shares. Even when that popular viral post is 3-4 years old.
I’d love to do what these other pages are doing but wondering about copyright since these pages seem to post popular videos from social media with just a video credit.
Servando Silva says
Growing pages organically is completely different. Boosting viral posts helps a lot, and also getting mentions from other big pages in your niche.
If you have constant good content in your page it will keep growing slowly all the time, which after a few weeks or months makes a difference too.
Videos are super engaging. In fact videos are the type of posts that has more interaction in Facebook vs. text, images, links, etc. If you want to do videos add your own stuff (maybe an intro or outro) and give credit were it’s needed to be safe.
Pete says
Thank you for sharing this info! I’v been on the other side of the fence for quite some time and have made a decent income writing articles, but I want to get on the other side of the fence.
I can write my own content to start. It usually only takes me about an hour to write 3-5 articles. I know several niches that always work and can design my own websites.
My question, is this method still worth it compared to putting my time into building niche sites? I’d value your opinion on this matter.
Also, you kind of lost me on the VPS part. Is it dedicated hosting that’s needed? You mentioned a link to CPa offers. Is this available now?
Thank you!
Servando Silva says
Both methods work (viral sites and building niche sites). One is more scalable but at the same time you know they’re both difficult and require time and patience.
The VPS is not a dedicated host, it’s just a shared host with more resources and faster loading times vs. a regular shared service.
Shella Martin says
Thank you so much for the information! It’s very helpful 😀 😀 😀
Now i will learn to build a news website, wish me luck 😀
Servando Silva says
Good luck!
gorio says
WITH facebook’s LATEST crackdown on click bait articles, do you think this strategy still works?
Servando Silva says
You’ll have to give it a twist.
Keep in mind a viral article isn’t a fake article, which is what they’re going after too.
They started tuning down clickbaits back in 2013 but a lot of websites still do it. If you pick a good niche you’ll be fine though.
Fitz says
Are we suppose to put the fan page ads we create on our website, or should we simply link to our website from the fan Page in order to push traffic to the website and generate CTRs for the google ads?
Servando Silva says
The second strategy is what works.
kim says
wHY SHOULDN’T THE AUTHOR HAVE HIS OWN WEBSITE/ARTICLE WITH AFFILIATE LINKS? ITS ANOTHER SOURCE OF INCOME ONLINE, WHICH COULD VERY WELL BE PASSIVE OVER TIME.
YOU DIVERSIFY YOUR PORTFOLIO TO REACH YOUR DAILY OR MONTHLY INCOME GOAL AND TO STAY SAFE IF ONE WAS TO DISAPPEAR.
IF I COULD GENERATE 3 INCOMES FROM 3 DIFFERENT SOURCES, WHY WOULDN’T i? ESPECIALLY IF IT MADE $50.00 FROM EACH. I WOULD BE CONTENT WITH $150 A DAY.
Servando Silva says
Thanks Kim for the comment.
Yeah, it helps building passive sources and helping people at the same time.
Some people just hate everything but they’re free to do so as long as it doesn’t affect others.
kim says
Wow, THIS ARTICLE IS AWESOME. i HAD THIS IDEA IN MY HEAT ABOUT THIS AWHILE BACK. COOL, SOUNDS LIKE REALLY SOLID ADVICE.
websiteeco says
I had a budget of $20 a day but i only ran it for one day as the cost was too high for low return.
Servando Silva says
It was too soon to kill it.
As a rule, most people don’t kill any campaigns the first 2-3 days until the Facebook algorithm stabilizes and your costs go down.
Kevin says
1.Some of my friends told me that with 1m likes on facebook you could make easily $100 from google adsense,is this true from your experience?
2.i have a page with philipines (ph) mostly ph likes, can it still make money from google adsense? i know not alot like usa or other countries but it still can make $100 right?
3. I have a page with 300k+ likes but only drive 100 traffic to it everyday and it makes me only 15 cents per day, so i dont know how can a 1m like can give me $100 a day lol…. please help
Kevin says
Can you please let me know how much do you suggest to make at least $50 a day? i have a fb page with 300k but only make 20 cent per day if i post links 🙁
Servando Silva says
To increase CTR you need to split test different ad sizes, positions and colors. It’s all about that.