Cashing in on a Rising Meme

Making money on the internet is, generally speaking, tied to the amount of traffic your site generates. In short, success is contingent upon your site being popular. We’ve already discussed how generating content, such as done through blogging, can increase the attention your site receives. Today we’ll discuss the importance of targeting your content to those topics that interest the masses. In short, by identifying memes pertinent to your target community, particularly those that are new and growing popularity, and producing meme-relevant content, you can increase the attention your site receives.

Ideas quickly trickle through the internet, particularly through community driven sites such as those found on forums, social news sites (ala Reddit and Digg) and widely read blogs. When a large enough subset of an online community latches onto an idea (i.e., the idea is popular), community members seek out and share online content relevant to the idea. Paying attention to community discussions, then, can lend clues about popular content topics which you can exploit for the purposes of acquiring web traffic.

Put it into practice
Let’s take the social news site Reddit as an example. While many online memes come in the form of jokes or entertainment (such as the phrase “All your base are belong to us“), particular professional, economic and political concepts can be memes. During the late 2007/early 2008 American Republican party primary, a large enough subset of the Reddit community supported the candidate Ron Paul and routinely submitted voted for content relevant to that candidate. Websites that produced information (in this case, favorable information) relevant to Ron Paul’s campaign saw spikes in web traffic as more and more Reddit members voted for the website, increasing its popularity and, hence, accessibility throughout the community.

So there’s a lesson in this example. Website owners were smart to recognize a meme (the candidacy of Ron Paul) that was growing in popularity (many other articles about Ron Paul were voted up) and produce content relevant to the meme (written facts or anecdotes, pictures or youtube videos about Ron Paul’s campaign). You can be sure that for many sites, this awareness resulted in the largest spike of traffic in the site’s history and those smart enough to place ads next to the content made some money. Those sites that routinely produced good content about Ron Paul (and as an extension, libertarian thought), established a sustained readership along the way.

So how do you make this tactic work? We recommend keeping up with your community of interest: see what kinds of topics/sites are routinely posted and read the comments to see if the general impression is favorable. If an idea keeps showing up, it may be one worth capitalizing on. Social news communities are particularly good for this because their democratic nature makes it easy to determine what is popular and what isn’t. Pay attention, participate, and produce and you could find yourself cashing in on a rising meme.

April 30, 2008 |

Cashing in on a Rising Meme

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