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2017.04.26 - Hack-PR.com - How We Hacked Reddit to Generate 5 Million Media Impressions in 3 days
- HN discussion
- Summary:
After a quick brainstorm, I set my sights on Reddit. I follow various threads on Reddit on a daily basis and understand the power it has to make something go viral. I just didn’t know how to do it. I knew that if I could get one of my links to the top of Reddit Politics, I would have a pretty good chance of making the idea spread, so I set that as my goal: Get to the top of Reddit Politics within 24 hours.
What I did next was simple and cheap. From my own personal reddit account (Probably should have used a fake account or someone else’s), I posted a link to our Washington Times story on Reddit Politics. Then I went to Fiverr.com and bought every UpVote package that was offered. Total cost: $35. Two hours later I came back to check the results. We were number one with over 500 comments already.
We had media lists built of every journalist and writer in politics and began blasting them with “anonymous” tips from fake email addresses. [Examples: 1) Subject: 'Have You Seen This?'; Body: 'Just saw this at the top of Reddit....thought you might find it interesting.....<br>link'; 2) Subject: 'Is this law for real?'; Body: same as in (1).]We sent these types of emails out to over 20,000 media contacts from 6 different email accounts.
The media requests began to pour in like we’ve never seen before. We had so many requests coming in it was challenging to respond to them all. That is a great, great problem to have.
Vice, Al Jazeera , US News , even Anonymous wrote about the idea, and every time we got a new media hit, we followed the same process on Reddit. Post the link to various Reddit threads and then go on Fiverr and buy UpVotes to make sure we got to the top. In just the first few days, we had over 50 media outlets covering our story.
As the idea continued to spread like wildfire, our website began to crash. In 3 days alone, we had received over 2 million hits to the website, but most importantly, we had had over 4,000 volunteers sign up.
To keep our momentum going, we sent out this urgent request to those volunteers, pleading for their support to spread our idea. We turned our 4,000 supporters into a media pitching machine.
[He shows an image of a fairly standard email urging people to 1. contact journalists that cover politics, 2. tell the journalists that they support this cause, and 3. giving them three recent articles to choose from as a reference to link to.]Another wave of media requests came in from this push and we just kept up with the same process: Post on Reddit, buy UpVotes, repeat.
In less than a few days we had generated over 5,000,000 media impressions and received over 6 million website hits. Total cost? $255 from Fiverr.com.
Content Marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
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The PayPal Wars, p. 57:
"Oh, yeah. So what we need to do is go out and start buying stuff on eBay and insist on using PayPal to pay for it."
"But there are over three million auctions on eBay--we don't have that much money!" I rebutted.
"Well, we don't need to buy every auction," Luke replied. "Many sellers list multiple items at a time. Instead of buying all their items, all we need to do to introduce them to PayPal is just purchase one."
"So how do we do this? How do we buy something from every seller on eBay?"
"OK--there are a couple of ways we could try. First, have you heard of the Web farms in Asia?" I shook my head to indicate I had not.
[...]
"Either that, or we could build a 'bot."
Billboards
2004.01.21 - Talk at Stanford Technology Ventures Program
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMater ... l?mid=1021
Speaker(s): Max Levchin , Peter Thiel
advertising (billboards) wasn't cost effective b/c it had started to cost $100,000 for 1 month and each sign was only seen for 6-10 seconds
Don't use noreply@yourdomain.com on emails
http://customer.io/blog/dont-use-noreply-on-emails.html
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