Socialoholic Archives - Page 2 of 2

Breaking the Internet With Influencer Marketing

Users online on Socialoholic’s content website at one point in time according to Google Analytics

Since 2011, we have driven more revenue from influencer marketing than anything else whether it is for e-commerce, content websites or Ad Breaks (video monetization program of Facebook). Influencer marketing is really rewarding in one regard and that is you can often have a much higher reach compared to paid ads of the same platform for much lower cost. It is one of the best ways to scale your business on social networks with higher margins. I also feel no shame in acknowledging that we’ve been doing influencer marketing before we knew what it was called. That makes us one of the first ones to tap into this industry.

We have served as much as 60 million pageviews in a single day. That’s 700 pageviews per second or 42,000 per minute. We also served 240 million ad impressions per day making our content network one of the largest in the world. I mention these figures to demonstrate the power of influencer marketing.

We are also notorious for breaking the internet because we have crashed cloud servers, not only making our back-ends inaccessible but for hundreds of others as well. Of course the front-ends always stayed unaffected.

Our audience development was led by Musa Mughal who was only 16 at the time of contract. We identified him for his connections in the influencer-sphere when he was very young and that has led to a very rewarding experience for both Socialoholic and him.

Today, while Facebook penalizes content-websites for influencer marketing, it is still a booming industry for Ad Breaks. While Instagram continues to stay the top audience market for e-commerce businesses. I highly encourage you to explore this area of business as personally I haven’t found anything better in the entirety of my career.

I mean, Kylie Jenner became a billionaire by running e-commerce on her instagram, what further proof do you need?

How I Helped Sell $38,000 Worth of Biryani With $1,729 Ad Spend

It all started with friends complaining that you couldn’t get a decent biryani in Islamabad. While Socialoholic focuses on launching digital businesses as soon as possible with minimum viable product, I would see my friends planning features on top of features for a biryani delivery service which did not exist yet. And the discussion would always end with one big question.

Will it work? Is there enough market for this biryani delivery service we are planning to open? Are we going to lose all the money we are going to invest?

Sick of this continuous discussion with no end in sight, I wondered if an offline business can be launched like a digital MVP startup. I downloaded a beautiful biryani creative from Google Images, created a facebook page with a logo I designed in 2 minutes and ran a Facebook ad with $5 budget.

To ensure that people were actually going to order biryani instead of just liking and commenting on a beautiful biryani photo, I added a phone number in the Facebook ad and hoped to see the phone ring. Lo and behold, in about 10 minutes of my ad getting approved, the phone started ringing and everyone wanted to order the biryani which did not exist in real world. Being a growth hacker, I just told everyone that biryani is sold out which further hyped the biryani startup.

Keep in mind that there is no biryani to sell yet. We are just running a Facebook ad for a biryani restaurant while sitting in my bedroom.

Once we had the calls, everyone was confident that Biryani Express is going to work and Fasih, the CEO of Biryani Express got to work. But our focus still was that we have to test this with minimum possible investment.

Instead of hiring chefs, Fasih ordered biryani in bulk quantity and sold it on per serving pricing and hence pocketing the difference in revenue vs expenses. In earlier days, we were even doing deliveries ourselves just to prove that my thesis of running a small business with no money is true.

Once we had proven the idea, Fasih, started hiring chefs and created the logistics infrastructure for Biryani Express and today it is one of the most famous biryani delivery service in Islamabad.

What started with a $5 ad on Facebook is now a great small business which employees 8 people and has generated $38,000 against a life-time Facebook ad spend of $1,729.

This just shows that the concept of lean startup and MVP is as applicable in offline world as it is in digital world.

P.S I have anonymized the actual name of Biryani Express as my friend didn’t feel comfortable sharing revenue numbers with actual restaurant name.

About the writer: Saad is co-founder and CEO of Socialoholic. He can be reached on twitter.

How Our Dropshipping Business Grew by 837% in 4 Weeks

This is the third part of the three-part series of posts that I planned to write on dropshipping. The first post explained what dropshipping is. Second part highlighted our scaling strategies, and the third part explains the final trick that boosted our sales by 837% as we handled over 10,000 orders everyday.

By mid 2017, we were successfully running 3 e-commerce stores. I was extremely busy running day to day ad-ops for our company. Fulfillment had been automated completely. But Saad, my co-founder, still had a few things outside of our core business ops that kept him very busy.

We were doing nearly 2000 sales a day, and posting growth month over month. I was happy with the progress but also very busy launching new ad-sets and optimizing existing ones. We were constantly trying to scale globally. We were extremely proud that we had a major portion of sales coming in from Brazil, Mexico, Portugal and Australia. Combined, this was bigger than US.

Meanwhile, Saad tried to crack an altogether different code. If you remember, I mentioned in my last post the #1 trick to scale a dropshipping business. I said I can’t stress enough it’s importance. That is exactly what Saad was busy with. He hired a team of developers in Ukraine and we ended up with what we internally call hypersonic. A product spy tool, only to be used by us that gained us leverage against every other dropshippper. We scrapped every single dropshipping store in the world, and found winners in real-time.

This helped us find 3 more winning products within 4 weeks, allowing us to eventually scale 8x. At the moment, we only privately use this tool because of the kind of leverage it provides us against others and haven’t decided to offer this as a service. However, I highly recommend serious 7 and 8 figure dropshippers to develop something like this internally to ace this game.

How We Made ISI #1 Intelligence Agency In International Media

In 2010, a blog post was published on one of Socialoholic’s content websites titled top intelligence agencies in the world. The goal of the blog post was to initiate a marketing effort to honor the sacrifices made by the agency by trying to brand them as the #1 intelligence agency in the world. We genuinely believe that the rankings were done professionally with proper journalistic values after collecting & analyzing data, reading the literature & conducting a quantitative research.

Marketing

The content was then pushed on the social news websites by our team such as Digg & StumbleUpon. We performed Guerrilla Marketing tactics to create a unique, thought-provoking buzz. Since this was in the early days of the social networks with Facebook just emerging, and Whatsapp almost non existent, we honestly didn’t expect it spread like wild fire, but we are insanely proud that it did.

Coverage

It was picked up by all local news channels, print media such as The News, Express Tribune, international media (The Atlantic). There were hour-long shows hosted on local entertainment channels, including on Aag by Geo. It was picked up by ex-DG ISI, Lt. Gen Asad Durrani who took the message further, and also published it in a book The Spy Chronicles that he co-authored which was published in 2018.

Impact

On-site, the article was read over 1,234,475 times while the major impact happened off-site which we can not measure accurately. Our estimates suggest that the message was heard by over 85 million people. We have made these estimations by only including data from the known sources where we know it was published/broadcasted and by taking in account their estimated readership and audience at the time it was published or broadcasted. This doesn’t take in account, the discussions done in independent forums which we estimate further add about 10 million readers.

Authenticity

We published the content using a generic “Smashing Lists” website. The content was not published under a pseudonym but by the original name of the writer. The theme, over-all design, domain name didn’t imitate any popular publication. We created a genuine experience and maintained distance with fake-news and InfoWar tactics.

Responsible Journalism

Just 2 days ago, Vice Media unearthed a report of a shadowy Indian company that used 265 fake websites operated in 65 countries that mimicked news outlets by using similar names of popular publications like Times of Los Angeles, New York Morning Telegraph & Times of Pyongyang etc. The goal of these efforts is to confuse the user into thinking that the news that he’s reading is being published by a genuine trusted news agency. As per Vice, the larger goal of the campaign was to influence European lawmakers in favor of Indian interests in Kashmir.

We are proud of our efforts for publishing professionally researched content, using authentic distribution channels, and creating an over-all safe and genuine experience for the readers. This is the least we can do in the times when others resort to fake news to set the narrative for the readers.

Disclaimer: We are not affiliated with any organization or agency. This was an independent marketing effort for which we independently generated advertising revenue. We thank the writer of the post for her efforts.

How We Accidentally Got Into Flipping Domains, And Made $15K Per Piece

Starting 2011, our publishing company Socialoholic launched a large number of content websites mainly concerning humor and entertainment verticals. Most websites were social media driven with traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook & Pinterest.

A lot of our websites eventually became throwaway domains as the social media hype died down on them. We pulled off the plug and stopped editorial operations. The websites had served their purpose. We had already generated revenue and we weren’t thinking anything long term with them.

As we had previously monetized all of these websites, they had one common feature: all our throwaway domains were approved by some of the top ad networks, DSPs and RTB platforms and there was a buyer looking just for that.

The buyer was in the content arbitrage business which basically means that his core business was acquiring traffic on his content websites by the means of advertising. He would then display ads on his content websites in order to earn revenue. He was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in traffic acquisition and needed instant access to domains with top quality advertisers. As part of the agreement, no other assets including content, ad accounts or anything other than the domain was sold.

This was a perfect opportunity to sell something to someone at any price we found reasonable and we seized it. A lot of success eventually comes from being in the right network and knowing the right people at the right time. It is how we accidentally got into selling throwaway domains, and made $15,000 per piece.

We are under an NDA with the buyer and can neither disclose domain names nor his identity.