A Surefire Guide to Making Money with A Viral Website
Have you ever wondered how content goes viral? You’re not the only one, we promise.
There are countless ways to monetize your website; one of those avenues is viral content marketing.
Creating viral content has the power to drive thousands of users to your site. Once you crack the code about how to do it, it can be one of the easiest ways to scale your website and create a recurring income.
Luckily, we’ll take you through our simple guide to monetizing your website using viral traffic. With this monetization model, you can scale your viral traffic to get the highest eCPM rates with Monetag.
In fact, this is the very monetization model that we use with our clients. Check out the results from one of our very own publishers that used our monetization solutions and tips from this guide:
They generate as much as $200 per day! Want to know how? Continue reading.
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Getting Started
The recipe to success is simple, and thousands of successful marketers are using it today. The framework follows 4 basic steps:
- Build a website
- Create viral content
- Set up a social media page to promote your content
- Monetize traffic using Monetag
Steps 2 and 3 are the most important parts of this guide. Building a website and creating viral content are the foundations you need to set to drive traffic.
Before we break down the nitty gritty, let’s take a look at what exactly viral content is.
What is Viral Content?
Viral content is any piece of media that is shared rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another and becomes an online sensation. Topics are wide-ranging, but current news stories, sporting events, sporting events, or amazing nature stories are more likely to go viral.
Most viral content is visual, either photos or videos. Generally, people don’t like to read thousands of words, and visual content drives more engagement than text. In short, it’s true what they say – a picture speaks a thousand words!
Where Should I Post My Content?
Images and video-heavy content don’t normally rank well on Google, and publishing your content here isn’t the easiest way to drive viral traffic. Instead, we suggest using a social media platform like Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram or Reddit to trigger virality.
Tiktok, in particular, is fantastic for creating viral content. With over 1 billion active users who spend roughly 20 hours a month watching videos on the platform, it has a huge audience with massive potential for reach, engagement and virality.
Here you can look at some popular Tiktok video topics
Whether it’s storytelling, a snippet of a day in your life or even just answering questions related to your niche, Tiktok videos offer an uncomplicated and straightforward method of sharing content that is primed to go viral.
How to Build Your Site
It’s never been easier to build a website. The days of needing coding skills or tonnes of money to create a website. These days there are drag-and-drop solutions that get your site up and running in less than an hour!
We suggest using WordPress to build your site as it’s the easiest platform to use and grow your website.
To learn more about setting up a WordPress website, check out this startup guide from HubSpot or visit the WordPress site to learn more.
WordPress has thousands of themes to choose from, and the majority are mobile-friendly and work with Monetag. Most of them are paid, but we recommend you spend some money to get a premium theme with a lot of customization options and good support.
Some of the best-optimized themes for viral websites are TruePixel and Codelight. For more theme suggestions, check out this great post on the top WordPress themes optimized for ad placement.
How to Create Viral Content
The hardest part of this guide is creating viral content. However, with a little bit of patience, the right tools and research, it can be a piece of cake. The first step is choosing exactly what you want your content to be about. It can be about anything – here are some of our favourite options:
- Celebrity news
- World or political events
- Sporting events
- Funny videos, images, or trending memes
- Wholesome moments with cute animals
- Cat videos or pictures
- Niche-specific trends or Q&As
This is the internet, so as you would expect, cat videos still draw a lot of attention. Just take a look at this cat video by The Dodo – it achieved 2.1 million views, 324.9K likes, and 564 comments:
Here’s a viral video posted by The Sport Bible, which received more than 5.5 million views, 986.5K likes and almost 3K comments:
Aside from cats and sports, viral content can bey anything interesting, fun, weird, wacky or downright disgusting. If it elicits a strong reaction, then you’re onto something.
Where Can I Source Ideas for Viral Content?
There are a few places to check for ideas. Good places to start are:
- Google Trends. It’s a fantastic platform to source topics that are trending and frequently being searched by users.
- Tiktok’s search bar. Trending topics will often show up here that can give you ideas for content topics to try out.
- Subreddits in your niche. If you plan to post specific, niche content on your website, check out relevant subreddits to see what people are talking about most often.
- Twitter’s trending hashtags and topics. Although this is personalized to your user behaviour, this is a good place to do some research on trending topics.
No matter what you choose, just remember that your content must be original and organic!
Create Your Social Media Pages to Publish Your Content
Now that you’ve built your website and started creating your content, you need somewhere to post it.
Start by setting up pages in your brand’s name. We recommend setting up pages across all platforms: Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and even WhatsApp and Telegram!
As you grow your audience, one or all of these platforms have the potential to become your main place to distribute and promote your viral content.
What Social Media Channel Should I Focus On?
The days of Facebook dominating the social media sphere are over, however, it’s still a strong choice depending on your chosen audience.
When it comes to traffic referrals, Facebook is a strong contender, as it is still the top social network for referrals back to websites.
However, if you are targeting specific demographics, one of the other social networks may be stronger.
- Facebook: This is the number one platform for website referral traffic. Perfect for broad audiences, audiences in tier 2 and tier 3 countries, and older demographics in tier 1 countries.
- Twitter: A strong contender for targeting male audiences or specific niches in tech, politics or entertainment.
- Instagram: A strong platform to use to target millennials.
- Tiktok: Perfect for achieving virality, especially in niches. However, the demographics typically trend younger.
Once you decide which social media channel to focus on based on the audience you’re trying to reach, you now need to drive traffic to your social media channels.
How to Drive Traffic to Your Social Media Page
It’s hard to drive traffic to a brand-new page. Your options are either using paid advertising or organic discovery. Let’s take a look at both:
1. Paid Advertising
This is one of the most powerful forms of promotion on most social media platforms, especially Facebook. The objective is to promote your content on users’ newsfeeds so they interact and engage with it. When they engage with the content, it will distribute to their friends’ newsfeeds, and so on.
You can spend as little as $10-$20 a day to run Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok or other social platform ads. This can drive thousands of likes and shares every month. In turn, this growth will directly affect the growth of your website traffic.
Remember, most social media advertising platforms have strict content guidelines. For example, driving traffic from Facebook ads to a page that contains pop ads is against their rules. Instead, you should use Facebook ads to promote your post, and then drive traffic to your site.
Make sure to acquaint yourself with their policies and guidelines before running your ads.
2. Organic Discovery
Growing organically is harder on Facebook but easier on other channels like Instagram Reels and Tiktok. Experimenting with things like trending sounds, topics and hashtags can help you get stronger organic growth on these platforms.
Viral Content Creators
Aside from the obvious Facebook social media content creators, this category of social publishers has greatly increased over the past few years and now it also includes:
WhatsApp Traffic: Websites focused on hot topics to do with world events and politics use Whatsapp as a tool to drive traffic growth. They do this by running quizzes or sweepstakes that ask the users to share a link via WhatsApp as many times as possible to get a quiz result, or win something.
Predictably, these websites don’t have a long life span, as their traffic comes in waves. You can easily recognize them, as they usually include a button enticing users to share their results/links on WhatsApp.
Traffic coming from Apps: This traffic is monetized with Monetag tags. These tags are integrated with the apps or landing pages to which users are redirected.
Educational Websites: With the growth of remote working and remote learning, educational websites drive traffic by offering answers to common questions that come up during a remote work or school day.
Lottery Results Website: Since more people rushed to make a quick buck, these sites sprouted like mushrooms after the rain.
Traditional Social Sites with Articles: These sites have been around from the dawn of time, and will continue to prevail as they encourage users to contribute to the content, share, and engage.
Paid Surveys: Who wouldn’t want to find out how good of a driver, what Mortal Kombat character, or what kind of bread they are? Following the example of demand and supply, these websites work wonders and go into the ‘social content websites’ basket.
Sweepstakes Shared via Facebook: These do exactly as they say on the tin – just sweepstakes shared as Facebook Articles.
Using Content Discovery Networks to Drive Traffic
Content discovery networks are ad networks that place native ads in the “Recommended Stories” section that is commonly found on entertainment and news sites.
These ads are designed to look “native” to the site, hence the name.
These promotions function as a great tool for new websites, as the cost of clicks is low if you send visitors to a content-rich page.
However, if you’ve filled your site with high payout ads like Monetag’s’ Onclick ads, you can make money through ad arbitrage. Just don’t forget to optimize your website advertising placements to make as much ad revenue as possible.
Here are some of the largest content discovery or native ads networks to choose from starting out:
How to Use Monetag to Monetize Your Traffic
If you are successful using this guide, you’ll bring in thousands of website visitors every day, and you’ll want to monetize that traffic.
The big benefit of driving viral traffic is its sheer volume – with very little work behind it.
However, one of the major downsides is retention.
Once a visitor lands on your site, it is very hard to retain them or trigger repeat visits. Unless they like your Facebook page, they are unlikely to visit again. To combat this, we recommend using multiple ad networks to make the most of your traffic and different ad formats to maximize profits. Luckily, that’s exactly what we specialize in at Monetag!
We are one of the few networks that offer ad formats that will monetize every visitor that your viral content attracts. In fact, we are so good with social traffic, that we have created a special segment on our Self-Service Platform (SSP) that our social media publishers can choose when they register.
However, we do draw the line at incent traffic, as well as when it comes to sites and landing pages that are obviously misleading the users. But, as long as you’re carefully crafting your content while respecting our common-sense regulations, you will find a partner for life with Monetag
Onclick Ads
Onclick Ads, a form of popunder advertising (also known as Onclick Popunder), appear in a new browser tab next to the main page the user is viewing. This way, the user sees our Popunders once they close the main browser window he was watching.
Onclick is the most effective Ad format, that allows you to get paid for every visitor that views your ads, instead of getting paid for the number of clicks on the ads.
Onclick Popunder ads don’t require any optimization or testing, and this is why the CPM and revenue amount is a lot higher than traditional banner ads, making them ideal for viral traffic. They also don’t impact any existing banner ads (or Adsense units) you have placed on your site, allowing you to monetize your traffic further by using other ad formats.
Some website owners avoid using Popunder ads because they’re afraid that such advertising may have a negative effect on their site’s audience loyalty or harm the website’s ranking in search engines.
We work with thousands of high-ranking websites, and our experience shows that if your content is of high value and provides your visitors information, entertainment, or any other positive outcome, Popunder ads (or any form of advertising) will not harm your audience or your website search rankings.
This isn’t to say you should place as many ad formats as possible on your site. Too many ads will impact the user experience on your website, and more ads doesn’t mean more revenue.
If you have any concerns about the negative impact on SEO or user experience that these ads may inflict, our managers can manually configure your ads to behave how you want them from each unique traffic source. They can adjust frequency caps per user and even set up delays based on the user’s session time and clicks.
Monetag Monetization Solutions
Here, at Monetag, we offer many other formats that publishers can use to monetize their websites. This way, you will always have new ways to make money from your traffic, by using our:
- Push Notifications
- In-Page Push (IPP)
- Interstitials
- MultiTag
- SmartLink (Direct Links)
In fact, you can use our Direct Links both, on your social media channels and the website, but also in messaging apps and emails as well.
We recommend combining all our ad formats because all of them can be easily customized. Moreover, even if your audience is more sensitive, it’s always possible to set a lower frequency on ads and leave only a few loyal ad categories.
However, if you only boost your traffic a few times per week, you can try increasing your ad frequency and using all our formats.
Luckily for you, we have the MultiTag, which will make it much easier, as it effectively combines all 4 monetization formats to match your traffic’s ad viewing appetite.
What Are the Rates?
The amount you earn with Monetag as a publisher depends on a number of factors. Some of these factors are in your control, while others depend on traffic performance.
But we could say that viral websites with a large share of traffic from social networks like Facebook get higher rates than websites with other traffic sources and almost reach $ 7 per 1000 impressions (including the traditionally “hard to monetize” countries). Below are some examples of our publishers’ statistics.
Case Study: In-Game Currency Website
This website allows users to get in-game currency and use it to purchase in-game upgrades or avatar accessories.
- Traffic sources:
- Ad Formats: OnClick + Push Notifications
Results: past 14 days revenue = $ 1,675; avg. eCPM = $ 6.74
Case Study: Pinterest Traffic
- Traffic sources:
- Ad Formats: OnClick Ads
- Results: past 14 days revenue = $ 2,127; avg. eCPM = $ 4.85
Case Study: Malaysian Recipe Website
- Traffic sources:
- Ad units: Push Notifications
Results: past 15 days revenue = $ 3,976; avg. eCPM = $ 0.75
Summary
It’s easier than you think to earn as much as $500 per day or more with Monetag. Using your chosen social media platform, you can promote engagement when you share great content, ultimately driving traffic to your site.
If you can find the right topics, craft engaging headlines, and use incredible imagery, there is no reason why you can’t start the next viral news site.
Setting up a small advertising budget of as little as $10 – $20 per day is enough to get the ball rolling and your content in peoples’ newsfeeds.
With this information in mind, it’s only a matter of time before you start making money from your new site and growing as a viral publisher across your favourite socials.
Happy monetizing!
