Viral Stacker:

The 12 Million Views Case Study

(The Image That Started It All)

Brought To You By:

Jonathan Heusman
For this case study, I decided to piggy back on a recent event that had national
attention, just like you learned in the Viral Stacker videos.

A huge tornado had just hit Oklahoma and I thought it would be the perfect
opportunity to gain some viral traffic as well as give me a good reason to donate
some money to the relief efforts.

I have a Facebook page about animals that had 43,984 likes at the time of this
case study, so I decided to use that as my platform for jump-starting this viral
campaign.

To start, I knew I needed to find an eye-catching picture that would elicit some of
the most important emotions that result in viral activity. I did a quick search on
reddit.com for pictures of the Oklahoma tornado aftermath and found a picture
of a dog that had survived the tornado but looked to be in rough shape. The
picture literally told a story on its own.

I used that picture to post to the pet fanpage page and posted the following text.

"Let's see how much we can help all of the brave families affected by the
Oklahoma tornado.

**For every 100 likes that this post gets, My Kids Have Fur Will donate $1.00 to
the Red Cross**

Like and Share this post so we can make a difference!"

There are some key factors at play here and you’ll notice I stacked 3 or 4 of the
Viral Stacker principles on this one post to give it a great chance to go viral.

1) This picture will elicit a lot of key emotions. It will make some people happy
or joyful to see the dog survived. It will make others feel empathy or
perhaps hope. The key is that it elicits SOME emotion from every person
who sees it show up in their news feed.
 2) For the wording of the post, I hit on a couple of the key secrets to making
content go viral. I made the post interactive by telling them for every 100
likes that the post receives; I would donate $1.00 to a relief fund. People
could watch the post to see how much is being raised, they can share it
with their friends to help raise money and they can of course like and
comment on it.

The next thing I did was to ASK for the likes and shares and I also reminded
them of the reason to like and share the post... "to make a difference".

3) In this case I also rode the coattails of what was trending. Stories about the
tornado are all over the news and people want to help any way that they
can. This post gives them an easy way to do that.

4) The time I posted was right around 9:30 pm EST which is a little later than I
recommend in the training, but since all of the nightly news stations will be
covering the tornado aftermath, I know that this is still a very good time for
posting.

So just to recap, the viral stacker concepts that I stacked into this post are:

-Elicited the Right Emotions

-Created Content That Was Interactive
-Road The Coat-Tails of A Trending Topic
-Asked For The Share/Like
-Timing

So I was able to stack 5 of the 10 principles into this one little post… and you are
about to see just how powerful it was.
15-Minute Update:
800 likes, 340 shares, 54 comments and seen by 10,160 people. This is already
above average for the posts to this page. Page likes have increased to 43,999 as
well. Things are taking off pretty fast already!

1-Hour Update Picture:

4-Hour Update Picture:

I decided that I better do a couple of screen capture videos for the later updates
so that I could talk a little bit about what was going on in real-time. Check those
out below. You will definitely get some golden nuggets out of these.

24-Hour Update Video: Click Here

50-Hour Update Video: Click Here

Finally, here is a stats update that I grabbed on May 27th once the viral traffic had
pretty much wound down.

808,973 likes

106,722 shares

8,735 comments

12,492,800 Seen by

Crazy stuff!

NOTE:
One very important thing I just want to mention real quick is that when you go
and start generating your own viral traffic, have a plan in place for what you are
going to do with all of that traffic. Either have a way to monetize the traffic or
get them on a mailing list, or get feedback from. Just be sure to get some sort of
value from the viral traffic, otherwise, what are you doing it for?

Now that you see what is possible, take your new knowledge and start creating
some viral content and injecting some massive traffic into your business.

To Your Success,

Jonathan “The Heisman” Heusman