Propellerads – $300 per day with viral traffic

Several months ago I wrote an article on how to make $200 per day with Viral websites. If you want to know how to add $300 per day more with Propellerads then this article is for you. When I wrote that article more than a year ago I didn’t expect it to go “viral”. A lot of people contacted me in 2015 to learn more about how everything works or simply because they’re putting some work and wanted some feedback on the results they’re achieving.

With over 600 comments it’s one of the top 5 articles on my blog and I know the reason behind it is the “simplicity” of the game.

But as many of you can see, creating a viral website isn’t that easy. In fact, from over 600 comments I have in that article maybe just a couple dozens of them are from people telling me that they started their viral website and made it work. Some of them make $50 per day, and some of them are making more than $500 per day. The rest is just people asking questions or commenting about how good it looks but they don’t have the money to do it, etc.

So first let me explain what this article is going to be about:

1. I’m going to explain what you need in Facebook to go viral, WITH REAL NUMBERS, not the shitty articles that tell you go viral by creating something people love and that stuff that everybody knows but nobody knows how to put to use.
2. I’m going to explain what you need in Adsense to make money as it’s not that easy. It’s a math game and all relies in the numbers
3. I tried different methods and found that you can generate some extra income with popunder ads from networks like Propellerads using your viral website. This will be the final part of the post.
4. I’m going to show you a few tests I made and the earnings with PropellerAds

That’s it. As always I’m going to try to keep it short, but you know I normally write 2,000 words per article so make sure you grab a cup of coffee before you continue reading.

Facebook Ads and going viral

OK so as mentioned, this is a numbers game and Facebook is the main traffic source to tackle if you want to go viral with clickbait news and stuff. I already mentioned how I do it basically in the former article, however a lot of people email me or comment asking for questions like:

• Is my CPC too high?
• Which countries should I target?
• What do you put in your interests when targeting people?
• I’m making money but I spend more than I earn with Adsense

Those are the main questions I think I’ve received in the last 6 months and I’m going to answer them all so you can understand the theory behind going viral on Facebook and making money.

This is the first part of the equation and your target here is to get as many visits as possible with a low budget. Remember we are using Facebook ads, so you need to invest money to make money and you’ve got to have some decent budget to test A LOT of campaigns.

What is a Facebook Ads campaign?

In this case, a campaign would be the news/article you’re promoting, but keep in mind the price of the visitors could change a lot if you change your headline and image to something more compelling.

So the first step is to have a blog and start posting some news in the form of viral articles as explained before. That should be clear by now. But how do you make it viral?

Well, as surprising as this might sound, most of your articles won’t go viral. AND THAT’S FINE. It’s something you have to accept because you’re not the best copy writer in the world and you might not be expert at marketing either.

The thing is you need to test a load of campaigns and news until you find the golden ones. Sometimes it takes you 10 articles to find a golden nugget. Sometimes it could take you 30 or 50 until you find one.

Again, don’t worry. It’s normal to fail a lot of campaigns until you find the best one and scale it. Not even the best marketers in the world can make every product or campaign go pro no matter how good they are. However, you need to consider that if you’re going to test a lot of articles and fire campaigns on Facebook Ads, you need a budget.

How much do I need to get started?

Something a lot of my readers told me is why do they need $1,500 per month to get stared?

They just have $100 bucks and they want to know why they won’t make it.

The truth is they COULD make it, but most probably they won’t. Here’s the math behind it.

Let’s say this is your first time doing viral websites and you’ve got a small idea of how everything works. You write 5 articles every single day of the week and every 20 articles on average you find a good one that goes viral.

5 articles per day becomes 35 per week and 150 per month.

You create a campaign on Facebook ads for each article and pump $5 bucks to test it before deciding if it’s good or not.

• That’s $5 x 150 = $750 USD in just a month.

Now, if you write more articles or if you decide to test with a higher budget or with different images/headlines you’ll need more money, so it could easily become $1k per month or even $2k per month just in tests.

If you have $100 bucks to get started you’ll try a few articles and before the week ends you’ll burn your money without any success and you’ll move to the next shinny thing you find in the warrior forum. But let’s say you get lucky and find a campaign with those $100 and from 10 campaigns you launch 1 of them goes viral.

Now you need money to scale the campaigns and make a lot of money, but you don’t have it and Google Adsense won’t pay you until the end of next month… By the time you receive the payment your campaign will be long dead and the initial momentum you gained will be lost in space.

Now that I’ve explained the basics behind the budget you need to enter this business let’s analyze how your campaigns can go viral by answering the most common questions mentioned above:

1. Go broad and pick up a country. It doesn’t matter which country it is. Facebook has a ton of traffic from every part of the world so just pick up a country where you know the language and maybe the slang and things that are viral at this moment. You can use Google trends to do some research.
2. You’re going to write viral articles that appeal broad audiences, so initially you don’t need to worry about the gender or the ages of people you’re targeting on Facebook. Later you can go back and check your Facebook reports to see what’s working better. Initially just gather data.
3. You don’t need to target specific interests because you’re going broad. Don’t try targeting people who already liked other big viral websites or meme websites because they might have already seen the article you’ve written somewhere else or they are used to those kind of ads in their newsfeed.

Finally, let’s get technical and do the math so you can understand how to make more money than you’re spending.

Facebook Ads by the numbers

I’ll make it simple with an example:

Let’s say you’re running a campaign in France and your average Adsense CPC is worth $0.25.

Initially you start a Facebook campaign (Clicks to website should be your objective) and your average CPC is 0.05 with an average CTR on your banner of 1%.

What do you need to be profitable in this case? Do the math… I’ll wait…

OK so if you earn 25 cents from every click on your Adsense banners and every click from Facebook ads to your website costs 5 cents it means you need at least 1 click in your Adsense banners every 5 visitors just to break even. Right?

So if you need 1 click every 5 visitors it means you need an Adsense CTR of 20%.

Are you going to make money here? I don’t think so… Who gets a CTR of 20% when the average Adsense CTR is usually 1-2%? maybe 5%?

Now let’s image this example:

You’re running the same campaign in France and let’s say your average Adsense CPC is $0.3. You start a Facebook campaign and with a great image and headline you increase the CTR of your Facebook banner to 5%. This results into a CPC of $0.01 which is 5 times lower than it was before.

What kind of CTR would you need in your website to make money? I’ll help you with the math again.

If you get paid 30 cents per each click in your Adsense banners and you’re paying 1 cent per visitor from Facebook, then you need at least 1 click to your Adsense banner every 30 visits to break even. Anything higher than that and you’d be profitable!

1 click every 30 visitors means you need an Adsense CTR of 3.3%. Is that possible to achieve? for sure!

So, in conclusion, what you need to make money with viral traffic is to get your clicks from Facebook as cheap as possible and to increase your Adsense CTR as much as possible to earn more money per visitor. The second question is, how do I do that?

The key behind cheap FB clicks

What you need here is to split test a lot of images and headlines until you find the best ones. If you’re not sure how to tackle this go to your Facebook account and like all the Facebook Fan pages related to viral websites until you understand the style behind them.

I already mentioned that writing a lot of articles and launching campaigns is they key behind this business, but trust me, the same article can perform a lot better just by tweaking the headline and the image. One image could have a mediocre CTR (les than 2% CTR on Facebook Ads) while a good image could have a wonderful CTR (4% and above) and that will lower your CPC costs a lot. That’s simply the key behind Facebook ads and cheap clicks.

Bonus: You can also use retargeting and custom audiences once you start getting traffic in your website to launch campaigns that will perform a lot better (extra ROI) because you know those people already visited your website. Also, don’t forget to check the Facebook Ads report in your ad manager to see which genders and ages are clicking your ad more so you can create ads for them and lower the CPC.

The key behind a great Adsense CTR

You need to split test several themes and positions. Do the math and discover what kind of CTR do you need to be profitable as we did in the examples above and start testing like crazy until you find the best combination. You can split test themes (with WordPress this is quite easy), split test colors, positions of banners, colors of banners, banner sizes and more. Make sure you split test as much as you can until you find the best combination for your traffic.

Here’s a simple test that can increase your CTR by 1-2% just by making a small change:

Another good thing is to split test colors and mix them with the design of your website. Have a blue website with blue menu and links? test blue ads and blue links:

Once you start launching several campaigns and measuring all your statistics you’ll know how everything works and fell more comfortable spending money. You need to get out of your comfort zone and make it work. Otherwise you’ll never make it in this industry.

PropellerAds and viral traffic

Finally, let’s talk about adding some extra ROI to your earnings by using PropellerAds.

If this is the first time you’ve heard about PropellerAds, they are one of the largest networks and most of their ads are shown on a popunder (onclick ads, as they call them) format.

What is a popunder ad? Well, you know… the type of ad that pops in another window behind your original website. It looks something like this:

Yes, these are the same ads that most people hate and some of then assure pop under and pop up ads are dead but they can’t be more wrong. Pop Ads work wonderfully although I accept they’re very intrusive and sometimes I just hate to see them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Anyways, the real reason you’re here is because you want to know how to make extra money and see how I earned $300 extra per day, so here it goes.

First thing you need to do is to understand how to install and show PropellerAds in your website. I wrote a guide and a small review about them a few months ago, so make sure you check it out and come back when you’re done.

Back in September 2015 I started doing tests with a small viral website without Google Adsense just to see if I could earn any decent money with PropellerAds and my (already big) Facebook Fan pages. Here’s what I quickly achieved:

As you can see, I quickly noticed PropellerAds had some potential but the first I wanted to try it with a small website and decided to do the test just with my organic traffic from the Fan Pages I had grown in the past with my viral websites.

Some days I made $30 and some days the CPM (cost per thousand visits) was better so I made more than $70 per day with a CPM of $5.

My next step was to test the strategy with my biggest Fan Pages so I could make my $200 per day with Adsense plus whatever I could achieve as an extra with PropellerAds to increase my earnings and overall my ROI on my Facebook campaigns.

Here’s what I achieved back in September:

As you can see, I was earning pretty much the same with PropellerAds compared to Google Adsense, so I decided to contact my manager at PropellerAds and ask them if there was a problem if I used PropellerAds at the same time with Adsense.

My manager told me there was no problem and Google shouldn’t have problems either, however, they told me to be careful with Facebook because they don’t like pop ads when you’re running traffic through Facebook Ads.

WARNING, YOUR FACEBOOK ADS ACCOUNT COULD BE BANNED

If you don’t follow the steps below closely your FB ads account could be banned. There, I said it. So please read below to see my strategy before trying anything.

So I decided to check out Facebook Ads Terms and Conditions and yes, they don’t allow pop ups or pop unders on the destination of the ads. They don’t have problems with organic traffic (A.K.A. Fan Pages without Ads) though. So what I decided to do in order to use both Google Adsense and PropellerAds was to create an specific page with Adsense banners only for the articles that I promoted via Facebook Ads, and then clone the same article and put both Adsense and PropellerAds and use that specific link to promote it to my Fans without paying for Ads (organic traffic just by posting the links in my Fan Pages).

So in conclusion:

1. While you’re searching for your golden nuggets to go viral using Facebook ads make sure you’re using the URL of your article with Google Adsense banners only
2. For all of the articles that you promote to your fans organically (no Ads) use the URL where you have both Adsense and PropellerAds

What was the final result?

At the end of September and during October I was making $500 per day overall with my viral websites. Around $150-200 from PropellerAds and $300-350 from Google Adsense. Quite a nice bump in earnings just by adding a second ad network to the equation, isn’t it?

AGAIN, make sure you don’t use the URLs with PropellerAds when promoting via Facebook Ads or your account could be banned. DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU!

Anyways, even if you don’t have an Adsense account, you can still make good money with Propeller Ads and viral traffic, the only bummer there would be that all your FB Ads would need to be focused on getting likes to your fan Page instead of website clicks and then you can promote your viral website with PropellerAds organically to your fans.

Since November 2015 I have been split testing a lot of PopUnder ad networks like the ones mentioned here and found a few ones that sometimes perform better than PropellerAds. But as always, you need to split test the networks because what works for me could not work for you as there are many factors to count in like country of the visitor, operating systems, devices, etc. One of the best ones I tried was Pop Ads but overall PropellerAds has been more solid for this kind of traffic.

Conclusions

There you have it.

That’s how I added $300 per day with PropellerAds and viral traffic and overall how you can make more than $500 per day just with viral websites.

As always, remember to put this to test and never forget to split test everything until you find the best combination for your website/traffic. Don’t quit if you launch 3 campaigns and fail. That’s pretty common but the ones that persist are the ones who dominate it and make it big.

Finally, if you want to read more posts like this where I explain everything with numbers and step by step please don’t forget to share this post and leave a comment below. If you’re already running viral websites, I’d love to hear your feedback and know what’s working for you.

Talk to you later this week!