Hey to all my fellow Redditors,I apologize in advance for the clickbait-y title but I promise, it is every bit as truthful as it is clickbait-y.So to add a bit of context, my business/products are centered around the execution of black hat social media strategies on Instagram. For the last 5 years, I've specialized in providing obscure growth/lead generation services for various types of clientele. I was content with doing so for a while but as of 5 months ago, I decided to up the ante and start my own SaaS in which I aggregate and license out the very same scripts I've been using to run many of my unorthodox strategies, including the one I'll be discussing here - the Mass DM. So I got myself an additional dev, added a ton of new features and API-based integrations with other popular services and launched my own bot by the name of InstaInfantry.After a ridiculously extensive beta testing period and various bug-fixes, having released it for commercial use just this last week, I've come to realize that I've devoted so much of my resources to the development process, I've done practically nothing in terms of setting up the proper marketing channels. In fact, as I'm writing this, my sales page has yet to even be indexed on the SERPs because I made it so late in the process. It's also not exactly a product that I could ever market by traditional means (i.e. PPC) given its disruptive nature to the advertising platforms themselves. So in an attempt to drum up my first few early adapters, I thought, why not use InstaInfantry to market InstaInfantry? So that's precisely what I did.Initial Set-UpAfter a bit of brainstorming, I settled on executing a relatively small operation to kind of gauge the degree of success I'll have promoting a product of this niche via this type of strategy.I went ahead and used a proprietary script to register about 170 accounts which we'll be using as our so-called "Infantry". The reason I call em that is because they are to be viewed as expendable pawns whose entire purpose lies in spreading the word of our product until their inevitable demise (i.e. ban). Kinda morbid, I know...The accounts I’ll be using for this operation are labeled as “low-tier” accounts. Their quality is largely dependent on the methodology with which they were registered and said quality often reveals itself in their lifespans. The cost basis typically ends up being higher with these but they are the most noob-friendly way of executing black hat operations, requiring little to no experience within the field. Their retail value amounts to $0.14 per piece.Next, I simply proceeded to import the accounts’ usernames and passwords en masse into the InstaInfantry software whilst configuring the task to execute various actions within various time intervals. I won’t bore ya’ll with the unnecessary set-up details but you can always check out the set of guidelines within the Definitive Mass DM Tutorial if you’re keen to read about the full trajectory.I then added a singular low-tier 4G proxy to automate each of the accounts, the retail cost of which currently sits at $40/month. This one proxy enables me to automate a grand total of one account and then gets passed down to the next account in line as soon as its predecessor is finished executing their programmed actions (which in our case is sending 20 DMs per cycle).With limited delays enabled, assuming a DM is being sent out roughly every 10 seconds it will take just under 15 hours to finish sending out 5k DMs. If I wanted a greater degree of efficiency, I’d just add another proxy into the mix, effectively doubling the rate at which I’m able to send out DMs. But for the purpose of this small operation, a singular proxy will do just fine.Target Audience SelectionBlack hat forms of marketing do come with a set of advantages that traditional marketing channels sometimes just can’t compete with due to privacy laws and regulatory restrictions. Audience selection is one of them.Having worked in this semi-grey industry for a bit of time now, I knew that by devoting the bulk of my resources towards targeting marginalized industries such as my own, I would derive the greatest degree of returns. Industries that, similarly to my product, fall short of what’s considered socially acceptable enough to promote via the aforementioned traditional marketing channels (i.e. PPC).In spite of these promotional prohibitions by our beloved platforms, these industries are typically flushed with cash and are best suited to throw a bunch of money at alternative forms of customer acquisition tactics to see if anything sticks. So to put that into perspective, large revenue drivers + restrictions in their marketing capabilities = perfect clientele for my up-and-coming, black hat marketing product.Eventually, I settled on targeting a total of 5 B2B Customer Avatars which consisted of:Marijuana ShopsOnlyFans CreatorsGambling/Sports BettingVape ShopsDigital Marketing Agencies/FreelancersMarijuana ShopsScraped by followings of other weed-related shops. Pages like these typically tend to follow one another so by finding roughly 15 accounts to use as donors, we obtained far more than 1,000 pages whose sole content revolved around marijuana-related products. Targets included glass manufacturers, dispensaries, influencers, and various weed paraphernalia vendors.OnlyFans CreatorsArguably the broadest niche of all five targets, I found myself with significantly more leeway in terms of targeting capabilities due to the amount of OnlyFans creators native to Instagram. For this cohort of targets, I managed to find several promotional pages that charge content creators for a shout-out on their page. I then proceeded to scrape every profile that was tagged in each of their posts. I hypothesized that the profiles scraped from those pages had a far greater likelihood of converting into clients given their prior proclivity for purchasing promotional services to increase their Instagram exposure.Gambling/Sports BettingScraped via a mixture of hashtags and followings of other gambling-related pages. Hashtags such as #bettingadvice and #bettingtips are practically exclusively used by profiles with commercial ties to the industry. Once I scraped a sizable portion of those profiles, I populated the rest of the 1,000 profile sample using their followings.Vape ShopsAn industry that I’ve done a significant amount of work for in the past, the vape shops I’ve scraped for this campaign were almost all e-com shops and obtained via followings of vape-related influencers.Digital Marketing Agencies/FreelancersSimilarly to our OnlyFans sample, the degree to which digital marketers are prevalent on Instagram enabled me to be more selective with my targeting. I scraped about 100 pages using the followings of several small agencies and then proceeded to scrape the 1,000 profile sample using the comment section of each of those accounts’ most recent posts. Given that pages in this niche are all about boosting one another’s engagement rates, virtually 96% of all the comments posted on there had come from their friendly competitors. This methodology also enables me to ensure that I’ll only be sending a DM to users whom we know have been active within the last few days (given their comments on a publication posted within the last 48 hours).To decrease the amount of time and API calls it would’ve taken to scrape these targets, I didn’t use any filters. That means there is a possibility that some of the targets in our audience aren’t necessarily the accounts we want to reach but given my thoroughness in examining the sources I’ve used, they likely only make up a small minority of the sample.Upon completion of each scraping task, I now had a grand total of 5,087 targets, equally representative of their five respective niches. It was now time to craft a well-versed copy of my DM that my hyper-targeted audience will be receiving.Crafting the DMThe actual contents of my DM copy were relatively short in nature. In it, I’ve stated right away that this message was delivered by an automated script with an implicitly suggestive CTA, leading them to consider how effective it may be in generating leads for their business.As for the attachments, I could’ve played it a number of ways. You can include images/videos or do in-app media attachments to drive traffic over to your desired location within Instagram itself. Said attachments are either a general profile share or a specific post. If you’re hoping to simply increase your follower count, a general profile share tends to work better. However, if you’re trying to harness awareness for a particular product or some sort of movement you’re organizing (i.e. giveaways), then sharing a publication outlining said product/movement should be more up your alley. Given that I’m promoting my bot, I decided that a post share would transpire more favorably for my KPIs.The post I’m redirecting the targets to is a 1-min ad showcasing the software in action. The caption for it can be characterized as long-form copy, describing in detail what it’s capable of and why each of the five customer avatars should consider adding it into their repertoire of tools. If you’re curious to see what it looks like, I used the same ad to serve as an introductory video on InstaInfantry’s landing page.ExecutionThe execution occurred the course of 24 hours, with an additional subsequent launch until all accounts had either received a captcha, been asked to verify via phone/email or were serving a hard action block spanning several days. I could’ve likely extracted even more value out of the latter portion of our infantry but I didn’t feel like waiting that long to write up this report.ResultsHaving sent out a total of 5,084 DMs, here are the results I was able to achieve with an operation of this volume. I’ll also plot out the various costs and calculate the ROI in a manner I see fit.I waited a total of 72 hours after sending the final DM before writing this report to ensure the majority of the targets have had a chance to check their requests and to account for those needing some time to consider purchasing my bot.So in total, I received 17 DMs regarding InstaInfantry from semi-interested targets, including one major influencer who I later found out wasn’t even in the target list. Sports Betting pages had by far the greatest conversion rate, accounting for 9 of the 17 DMs I had received or roughly 55% of the whole sample. OnlyFans Creators came in second, accounting for 4 of the DMs I had received or just about 24% of the sample. Digital marketing agencies/freelancers came in third, procuring 2 of the 17 DMs (11%) and vape/weed shops both came dead last with a grand total of 0 messages. The last DM had weirdly arrived from an influencer whom I hadn’t messaged but I believe had found me by virtue of a target sharing my post with them.Over the course of these three days, I did sink quite a bit of time explaining everything to each user and answering a wide variety of questions and queries concerning its functionality. In the final hours leading up to the 72 hour mark, I followed up with some of the targets, especially ones I believed to have had the potential to be major revenue drivers.As for revenue, in total, I had five entities purchase the software. Four of them had purchased a $37 monthly license and one had purchased a lifetime license for $127. Three of five had also proceeded to purchase one low-tier proxy each, retailing at $40 per month and anywhere between 100 to 1600 low-tier infantry accounts, with one customer purchasing 30 high-quality, several-years-of-age accounts on top of that.A break-down of the revenue:ProductPriceMonthly InstaInfantry Subscriptions$140.60 (- 5% off coupon)Lifetime InstaInfantry Subscription$120.65 (-5% off coupon)Low-Tier Proxy Rentals$120Infantry Accounts$219Total Revenue$600.25A break-down of the costs:Infantry Accounts$23.80Proxy Usage (1 days’ worth)$1.33Monthly InstaInfantry License (/30)$1.23Total Expenditures$26.36Net Return: $573.89Return-on-Investment: 2,177%OverviewSo I think it’s fair to say that the operation was pretty successful in the general sense of the word. I was kind of surprised that the sports betting pages virtually dominated the entirety of this campaign despite being only a fifth of the overall sample. I’ll definitely be running a larger campaign focusing exclusively on this niche in the coming days.I was a bit disheartened by the fact that I received such a poor response from the digital marketing niche. I was kind of anticipating (or more accurately - hoping) that they’d jump on it considering its potential utility for their sea of clientele. The two DMs I had received from that niche were from supposed “agencies” but in both of the conversations, I had a really difficult time communicating with them due to language barriers and one of them devolved into haggling over the $37 a month subscription fee lol.I still believe that agencies will likely be my largest revenue drivers but it seems I may need to find some other medium to reach them through.I’m probably getting a bit too far ahead of myself at this point but I honestly do presume that this campaign may end up deriving over 100,000% ROI depending on how long my newfound clients stick around for. I’ve obviously yet to have accumulated enough data to determine what my average Customer Lifetime Value is but given that a few of them are aiming to do 1M per day, it doesn’t seem to be too far of a reach.Anyways, I suppose this is as good a drop-off point as any. I hope I was at least able to provide a modicum of value throughout this one massive plug of a case study and perhaps helped y'all learn a thing or two about the little known field of black hat marketing. I’m more than happy with the progress of our launch and hopefully this report may have persuaded a few of you to give it a go. You can check out the InstaInfantry sales page here or the definitive manual which covers its functionality in depth.Open to answering any questions :)P.S. Mods if I've broken any rules, let me know and I'll remove whatever you need me to remove. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
0 comments:
Post a Comment