Create Viral Posts & Retarget Your Audience for < $1

Ever wonder how Facebook pages like Buzzfeed, Vox, Gawker (eww) consistently create posts with over 1K likes? Well they have a whole army of content creators, an extremely targeted audience and have a massive budget to get their content in front of your face. Shockingly most of us don’t have those resources, so here are a few trade secrets I used at Spoil to boost our content. A big thank you to Eyal Toledano for some of the tips and tricks found here.

Check out that Per Post Engagement Cost ☝️

Let’s Get Some of That Sweet Sweet Content

Content marketing, it’s awesome but who has the time right? Well luckily for you, other people do 🙂. Let’s say you are a cat meme website and you want some really juicy content about cat memes. In order to find content that is trending right now on Facebook head on over to Buzzsumo. This site is an absolute goldmine for trending content. Search for content related to your industry (in this case cat memes) and rank them by Facebook Shares.

23.9K shares for a grump cat meme…. *sigh*

On a side note, I am not sure if Facebook will favor content that has already been shared a bunch of times, but let’s play it safe (thus ranking the articles by Facebook shares). Now that you have your content, you have the bait to lure in your audience and retarget them.

Now you may be wondering, “how do I retarget people who click on a link to a website that’s not mine?”. Well, this is the really really cool part and again, a huge thanks to Eyal Toledano for showing me this trick.

Retargeting traffic on other people’s sites

By this point you should have 1 or 2 article that really speak to and interest the people you are trying to target. You want to post it as your Facebook page, but you also want to make sure you can retarget the traffic that click on your link later. The way to do this is, is to use another awesome service called Sniply. You can do a lot of amazing things with this tool, but we will focus on one part of it specifically.

After you do the initial setup (setting up your facebook pixel, your branding…) create a retargeting CTA.

After you have done this, use the link you got from Buzzsumo and create your “snip” (fancy word for snipply link). This is EXTREMELY powerful as this will allow you to retarget the people that will visit this link EVEN THOUGH it’s on someone else’s domain 🚀 💸.

Get That Social Validation For Cheap

Question. Which of these 2 articles are you more likely to click on?

My guess is it’s the one on the right. Why? Because 3 900 people reacted to it (as opposed to 43). It has social validation, more interaction, and since more people reacted to it, Facebook will promote it more often.

Now the thing that sucks about Facebook, is if you don’t know what you’re doing you will blow a lot of cash, very fast 😢. So, how do you get that many likes (and other reactions) without breaking the bank? Easy, target people that aren’t being targeted. In my previous post I mentioned how you can bid by location, however in this case I am talking about going way out of the box. Bid in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Cayman Islands... I recommend bidding in countries that used to be English colonies, because then the names of the people interacting with your post will be in English letters and not Sanskrit. I created a cheap facebook audience so I can just select it whenever I want to use this strategy.

my cheap audience

Now you have all the tools to create cheap and viral posts.

Go to your power editor, create a boosted post, select your cheap audience, set a daily budget of about $5 and literally wait about 1 day. You will have, easily, over 1 thousand post likes for dirt cheap. At one point the decimal point shifted so much to the right it looked like I was spending $0.00 per post engagement!

After a day or 2, your Facebook posts will have a lot of social validation and likes, and now it’s time to target the people in your market. Go to the Power Editor and simply change the audience to target people in the U.S. (or wherever/whoever your target market is). Now, when they see your articles it will look like thousands of people have interacted with it and they will be more likely to click. Aaaand voila, from here on in you can start creating the top of your marketing funnel for very cheap 🙂 🎈

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My Twitter: @mlevkov

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