How to Use Meme Marketing for Newsletter Growth (ft. Jason Levin)

Cool. And we are live. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We got a, a packed stage up here. We are fortunate enough to have, uh, Jason Levin this session today. So thank you for joining us to learn how you can build your newsletters with memes. And speak of memes, memes is like a bit of a bat signal to Dan Burke. If you haven't seen him on socials, whether it's LinkedIn or X or Threads, go follow him because he's our resident meme boy. Over here. So it's like a bat signal. We said memes and he was like, where?

And I didn't even know this was happening like 30 minutes ago, which is all I have to be part of this.

Nice.

So he's here to add any color and feedback. But yes, thank you so much for taking time outta your busy day to, to learn about this exciting, relevant strategy. And with that, I will hand it off to Jason. He's really gonna be running the show. I'm gonna be here to moderate and keep Daniel under control. He's gonna be— someone's gotta watch out. Someone's gotta be there. To supervise. But yeah, take it away, Jason.

All right, let's do it. So I guess a little bit of background. I, uh, have been writing my newsletter Cyber Patterns for 160 Sundays straight on Beehive. So I originally started on Substack, and the man, the myth, the legend, Tyler Denk, DM'd me asking me to switch over, and I did. And I love Beehive. It's helped me literally achieved some of my wildest dreams. Like my newsletter has led to me publishing a book. Did you know that book publishers look at newsletter lists as number one signal of should they invest in you? Because that's where people buy. And every week I write about organic marketing, organic growth. And really when like 2021, '22 came along, ChatGPT era, when that, when ChatGPT started, I realized AI can't be funny, but I can be funny. Like I've always been a funny individual. And I've always been goofy. And so that's when I really doubled down on memeing. And so I wrote this book called Memes Make Millions, and then I built a meme software for meme marketers, for people who want to use humor to market their companies. So I'm gonna show you some examples of how I've done it, how I've grown my newsletter with memes. I'm gonna show you how other people have done it. I'm gonna show you how companies have done it, and then I'm going to show you how memes could be used no matter literally what niche you're in. It's really cool. There are people using my software who are Beehive, right? They use it to make memes about newsletters, but then you also have people who run freight and logistics companies making memes about that. You have salespeople making memes about that. So I'm going to show you guys how you can remix templates to what you need. So if it's cool with you guys, I'm just gonna share my screen. So here is a great example of a viral meme. And so I just made this goofy kind of thing talking about how Twitter is cracked, but it's also like dumbasses. There's a lot of stupidity on Twitter, but then LinkedIn's in the middle. And you can see like, all right, cool. So this got 200,000 views, 3,000 likes, who cares? But then if you go down here, so this is my guide to cold DMs. I talk about 'How I got all my jobs via Twitter cold DMs.' And when you click on this, it goes to my lead magnet hosted on none other than Beehive. And 2,000 views right there, 17 likes. And so this is like a very common strategy with memes, which is you post a meme, it blows up, and then you plug your stuff underneath. And this is literally how I've sold thousands of copies of my book, how I've gotten thousands of newsletter subscribers. Is just this basically go viral and attract the right people and then plug underneath. Obviously 2,000 views isn't as much as 200,000, but it's more than if I just posted it regular. So let's look at some more examples here. This is a fun one. So when, when they were talking about like Apple integrating ChatGPT, I just posted this, right? Very common template. I didn't invent this. This isn't me. Then underneath I I have my book. And so when people buy my book, I get their email address. I have a Zapier set up that goes and sends it to Beehive, right? So you can see how it all works together is this funnel, right? These are the, the top of funnel memes are the top of funnel, the goofiness to lead to the serious stuff. So I wrote this book called Memes Make Millions and yes, memes make millions, but at the end of the day, memes are a lever to pull to get attention on your more serious products. Your more serious writing. And it's just a lever to pull. So these are like all organic posts, right? Totally organic. Another good example, I've just been getting started on LinkedIn, starting to do well with it. I've always been Twitter first, but you can see these are getting a lot of new, new subscribers in general, new followers on LinkedIn. So these are all organic, but you could also use memes and ads. And so you've probably seen this on Twitter with meme ads. So I'm gonna show you the examples of some of the best. And so you guys might know Matt McGarry. He is like the OG newsletter dude. And so he did all the ads for ExecSum, which is Lit Capital or Liquidity's giant newsletter. It makes hundreds of thousands to millions every year. And something that Matt told me about newsletter ads with memes was like, they don't need to be like insanely funny, like an organic viral post. They just need to explain What does your product do and also catch your attention, right? So here's with ExecSum. Here's another one for ExecSum. And then here's one that he did for Ben's Bytes. If you guys know the newsletter Ben's Bytes, Ben is also, also a customer of my software. And so I'm going to show you guys a little bit about how we can remix and how you're able to do this. So let's go to— I'm going to show you some examples too as well, actually, first. So when you go to memelord.tech/examples, I basically made like a meme marketing gallery so you could get inspiration. This part is totally free. This is just out there on the internet. So let's look at like apps, right? So Duolingo absolutely kills it. Let's look at crypto, right? Coinbase, Monad, Phantom, right? Phantom, their head of growth is on there. Look at marketing. You can see these are all templates like this could be applied to your niche. So we're going to jump in and do that. So let's go over here. memer.tech/editor. Sorry, I, I was logged in as somebody else.

So Daniel, while he's working this out, what are you seeing from what he's sharing? I know a lot of what your strategies, you're always posting memes. One of my favorites is like the, I feel like you have a very unique, like nonsense brand at times. And that I remember you started out with the Charleston real estate ones where it's like, Very much playing on that rule of the best way to get people to engage is to post something that's like wrong on the internet. You want the right answer, post the wrong answer.

Yeah.

Like you'll always get the right one. So for people who aren't familiar, it'd basically be like, he'd be like a picture of a mansion in Dubai, just like this, one of the biggest houses ever built. And he'd be like, can you believe that in just a couple of years, like this is what 200,000 buys you in Charleston or something like that.

I don't know.

It's just ridiculous.

Alright, sorry about that, guys. I was like logged in as another user. Let's jump in here with like Polymarket. I was just testing shit out earlier. But so Polymarket, you guys saw them all around the election. They're one of our users. And so you can see right here, this is the trending meme section. We are literally like the first to have all these memes. We use a mix of AI and just humans doomscrolling so you don't have to. And we upload all the newest viral memes. That's this section here. And then we also have classics, all like the classics you love. We also have viral stickers, all sorts of crazy stickers here. We have your brand assets. So whatever your brand is using, you could do that. And then all your memes are also saved here, right? In your Dank Bank. So you never have to like lose a meme again, essentially. And something that a lot of people have struggled with and what I struggle with too is like a blank canvas, right? So let's just delete this stuff. That's scary, right? And for writers, that's called writer's block, right? I call it meaner's block. And so like, how do you overcome this? You just click on the ideas, right? And we upload ideas. So if you click the light bulb, all sorts of ideas, right? And so this is just an easy way to do it. Let's say it's RFK, right? He's the big health guy. We want to say CRMs are good for your soul, like stuff like that. So let's say like I'm Salesforce, right? And then we just download it and boom. Or let's say we want to. Do this meme. I love this meme. So I posted this the other day. It's a good example of like when you're getting screwed by whoever it might be. And so let's say your boss and your crazy marketing ideas. And we can just screw around here. I could add text shadows. I could add outlines, boxes behind it. And now let's say we want to, so this is like a perfect example for marketing. Software or something, right? But let's say you work on sales software, so like VP of sales. We could just tailor it to your niche. So whatever you are is like VP of sales. I don't know why I feel like VP of sales, you're— I feel like salespeople are always like flying around the world and stuff. Or maybe, let's see, something like our pricing. You could tailor it to exactly what you want, and ours is extremely unhinged and I take pride in that. But let's say, all right, I, this might get me canceled, but all right, ConvertKit. Oh, sorry, Kit. Let's call it Kit, what it is. And then you could just say beehive. So you could see how no matter what you're making, you could apply it. And we're adding new tools all the time. So we got, we got Mike Tyson's butt. So let's just do an AI here of that. And so we got Mike Tyson here and let's combine some memes. So we got Trump here, move them back. And you could imagine like where you're going here with this. Maybe it's, let's add some more memes. So I'm just going to keep showing you guys. There's literally endless examples. I tweeted this the other day about David Sachs waiting for his, his job, but like you could do this for anything, like VP of sales waiting to hear back. Or salespeople. What's the word? What's the corporate word for that?

There's so many of them. I danced one on there.

PC1 salespeople, because it could be any gender.

Yeah. Yeah.

So there's, there's SDR, BDR. I don't even know what all these acronyms mean.

So one of my clients is, it's called OneUp and they do this really well. Yeah. BDRs. They're like an AI sales platform, but you can see here, you just drag it. We could change the text size if we want to. All this kind of stuff and all here. And on top of this, we are actually sending you new, all these new templates we send you every day in a Beehive newsletter, obviously. And so you're getting alerted with new ideas as well. Oh, a lot of people are going viral with this one that just started yesterday. So I saw like this getting applied to everything. Like I tweeted about how, what was it like, girls do more due diligence than VCs, like when they Google guys. But then I saw somebody else tweet about like when you're like looking for coding examples, right? And so no matter what it is, like, you can apply it to your niche. Like, it could literally be anything. And that's why it's really fun as well to combine them as well. And so let's say we've got like the Disaster Girl, right? And so we could say, say, I'm— I hope it's fine that I'm just making fun of ConvertKit here, but branding. So let's change the font a little bit.

While you're coming up with that, I wanted to Note that I think what you do so well, Jason Levin, and why your product is performing so well for people is because memes really are the language of the internet. And you're probably already discovering this on LinkedIn, but like Twitter is a bubble of people who understand like relevant meme language and internet culture, like everywhere. Reddit, obviously as well. There's a lot of places in the internet like this, but LinkedIn is full of people that just don't. Like have it. I guess people don't get it. And so they see even like a 1 out of 10 hilarious meme and it's like the funniest thing they've ever seen in their entire life. And so I think what your product does really well is it, it's like the Duolingo of memes. It's, oh, you don't understand memes. You haven't learned this language yet. Here's like meme tech. It's gonna teach you what's relevant, what's funny, what's right now. And you'll, you'll bridge the gap. You'll be able to learn actually how to speak meme without being terminally online, which I know I can speak for myself and Jason, we're online like 36 hours a day. So it's, unless you're doing that, you just won't always get what is right now hyper relevant in meme culture.

Exactly.

And basically taking things up like one level from like the tactical, like creating memes, like for folks that are out there who may not naturally be meme people or who may be like trying to figure out where to get started. Why does this strategy resonate so much? And like, why does this work so well for— obviously there's like the mechanism of somebody sees it and they sign up for your newsletter, but like short of that, can you talk a little bit about like why this is such like a resonant type of thing for folks online? And why shouldn't they just post like informational content that people are going to be—

I think there's a couple of reasons. I think you should. Also post informational content and educational, but you need both. So like the silly memes are like the lever to pull you into the smarter stuff. If I just posted memes, I wouldn't be here. Nobody would take me seriously enough to have me on a call. But because I post serious stuff and silly stuff, it works. And I think it also comes down to the fact like the business world is like buying power in general is getting younger and younger. And so as it's getting younger and younger, it's getting chiller and more and more unhinged generally. And so there are founders who are like 20s, right? 19, 20. And so if you want to sell to them, like, these guys have millions in their pocket, right? In the bank account, right? Who raised VC money. Like, you need to speak that language generally. And so that's why memes and shitposting and humor are so valuable. And also it just gets through the noise. Like, at the end of the day, it just really breaks through the noise of boredom. Also, there's so many reasons this— I wrote a book on it, so it's— I have a lot to talk about here, but It's just the sheer fact though, memes are like, I say the smallest transmittable bit of information. If pictures speak a thousand words, like memes speak a million, right? Like this speaks like such a long story. If you understand this, if you're like in the indie hacking or in the software world, right? This is like that. You understand it immediately. Like all these indie hackers who build a product but forget to market it. Like it's so clear. And so something that I talk about a lot with memes as well is you understand your niche better than— I can't make memes about hockey. I don't know anything about hockey. But if you understand your niche and most importantly, you understand the problems that people in your niche face, that's where so many memes come from, right? And so if you think about it, like, this applies to indie hackers or software developers because the problem is they don't have time to market it. And if you think about what are accounting startups posting memes in, they post about Excel. You think about founders, what are they memeing about is VCs, right? What are dads memeing about? Maybe their kids or wife, right? Or whatever problems it might be or just lack of time. So that's why I think it's really magical where whatever niche you're in, like there are meme pages. My friend runs a fridge meme page, like he's making $10,000 a post getting ads from like Arizona Iced Tea because there is a niche of CPG and e-commerce. Like there's just for every possible niche, there is a meme to be made and there are people who are into that niche. Who are waiting to laugh. Sorry, that was a long answer, but I think—

No, that's like a great answer.

If I can add to that too, it's people will laugh at it and get it in greater number than the people who have the wit to actually create it from scratch. And so there's such a huge play for the people who can create it from scratch. Again, plugging your product here right now, but the wit combined with like actually having the tools. To make a meme, like, very quickly, like, reply to a post with a meme, create original content with a meme based on what's happening in the news or in your particular space or industry, like, people will, like, flock to that, but they won't necessarily try to become that good. They'll just think you're hilarious. And like you said, they'll spend gobs of their marketing spend in their particular industries to hire you to do it for them. We know all the thought boys and meme leaders in the Twitter space making $10,000 to $40,000 on just meme posts. It's crazy.

Yeah, 100%. And so that's what I was doing for the last 3 years was actually freelance marketing for a bunch of startups. And then, sorry, I just added— I just realized there was a chat again. People were asking about the app. It's literally, it's just memelord.tech. There's a free trial. Feel free to sign up. And then it's only like $6.90, so $6.90 a month. And then to answer other questions as well, specifically for Twitter, no, it works on Instagram, LinkedIn. Twitter's great. LinkedIn, like Daniel was saying, LinkedIn is cracked for memes because all everybody's just like craving real funny content on LinkedIn. They have to be there for work. And so if they're going to be there, you might as well entertain them. Like my LinkedIn growth since I've started posting 3 times a day, 2, 3 times a day, like it's just, I've doubled, tripled my following in the last couple months. So LinkedIn works really well. And then other questions, if you use somebody's video picture meme, do not worry about it unless you're a giant brand. I know this sounds like whatever, but unless you're a giant brand, you're not getting in trouble, right? Generally, you're all good. Nobody is suing you. If you use it for an ad, maybe if you're a giant brand, but like the whole point of memes is the remixability. And so people are constantly remixing other people's memes and ideas. There's literally no issue with that.

And that way there is the concept of like satire and like free use. It's, you're not generally copyright and that sort of thing is gonna get you in trouble if there's some sort of, you're trying to pass yourself off as like another brand. Like generally there's actually nothing against like just using a logo in media. It's like when you start, when you might confuse users to say, okay, I am this brand, but if you're remixing and creating some satire, that's like literally what, if you haven't seen the Nathan for You episode about dumb Starbucks, it's like, exactly, dude. Comedy is the funniest thing.

Yeah. You can, you're allowed to do parodies. That's if you guys know Weird Al Yankovic, like that was his whole thing was making parodies. And so I really. Would not worry about that. If you're like, like I said, if you're Coca-Cola, have your lawyers check it out. But if you're anybody else, like, you're fine. Do you have memes for wellness, holistic? I have not added them to the examples, but I will add them. That's a great idea. I actually used to work with some health tech companies, and so I should definitely add that. There's so many good memes to be made about it. Oh, Brian Johnson, he's using the software. Him and his team are making tons of sleep memes and rejuvenation memes, wink wink, um, all sorts of stuff there. Yeah, I did not have a Weird Al name drop. Oh, you should always have a Weird Al name drop when I'm on a webinar.

So Jason, what I'm hearing from like the previous question is, correct me if I'm wrong here, but what it sounds like is like, what makes memes so effective here is if we frame things in the more boomer, like traditional marketing that I represent as a millennial, it's you're really just grabbing attention. It's really, if you do use the digital marketing funnel, it's like awareness and attention. And then there's actually getting consideration. One of the things that early in my career, I was working with a CPG company building that and we had a product on the shelf and it's like the ultimate— when I realized this, it was mind-blowing. But if you go down a— I have people do this exercise, go down a grocery store aisle and consciously try to find a brand that you've never seen before. And it'll take you about a quarter of a second because you realize that when you start doing this very mindfully, that there is so much stimuli in a place like that. You just, your brain literally shuts out all of these different logos and things that you don't recognize. And it was such a fascinating lesson for me where I realized that like that awareness step is not just, oh, somebody knows my brand. It's literally the ability to pick out that brand from a crowded store shelf or a crowded newsfeed. And so what I'm hearing, and I think what this gets to in terms of tying it back to marketing, is that if you can show up in a feed and grab that attention, through something comical, you're— it has a very real kind of tie back to marketing because then the next time you're in their feed, if you are sharing something more serious or your next post, there's a much better chance that they— your face or your logo or your avatar, it's going to stick out because they're like, oh, I actually— I already consume content from this person. I love all this happening in the background.

Yeah, sorry. I love that. I am like super ADHD and somehow I've figured out how to monetize my ADHD, which is making memes. But so when people are talking, I'm just like thinking about funny ideas and making memes.

And I actually love that the, the Mike Tyson thing has gone viral, like the butt meme. I literally was watching that stream and I saw it happen and I was like, this can't be real. This had to be scripted because if you didn't watch it, literally, like they're giving it— he's giving an interview. His son was interviewing him. It's this very touching moment. He's prepping for this fight. He's locked in. It's so serious. And then he says goodbye. He gives his son a kiss on the cheek and it's just like a very touching moment. Peaked, very serious. And then he turns around and walks away and the camera kind of pans and like zooms out and it's just like bare ass. And it's just like the juxtaposition of that moment. I like lost it and I like paused it and rewound it. I found my girlfriend, I'm like, you have to see this. This is like the funniest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. This has to be memed. And literally within 30 seconds I went on Reddit and it was already blowing up. It's had to have been scripted. I don't know.

It was wild. Absolutely. What the hell is going on here? It keeps adding this back. But yeah, dude, it was absolutely crazy. The Mike Tyson thing, I could not believe that was actually happening, but there's, it was crazy. Also, as you guys are noticing, X is becoming more and more unhinged. And I think we're starting to see, we'll probably see other social media platforms going that way. If I had to guess with the new American kind of politics. Is like X is the leader in that, but I think we'll start to see that and we're already seeing it with LinkedIn with the rise of shit posters like myself, Alex Cohen, Jack Raines, all my, a lot of us. And so I think we will start seeing that as well. Like Instagram is very, um, yeah, I would lean into that, guys. Have fun with it. And my goal with making this was like make a software that's like just generally really fun to use. So I hope it is.

Very cool.

Any other, any questions? Let me see if there's any questions here. Groups on LinkedIn. Let's talk groups on LinkedIn. I, Daniel, do you use groups on LinkedIn? I've not touched that, honestly.

I do not use groups on LinkedIn, but curveball, I use groups on Facebook and go bonkers viral, dude. If you have a local newsletter, I'm like 85 years old. If you have a local newsletter, I posted something absolutely hilarious about this new coffee shop in my local area. I got 800 likes from all, literally 100% people that should subscribe to my newsletter just from posting it. It was like, it took me like 45 seconds to write this thing, but 800 likes on Facebook in a community for a local newsletter, dude, where else am I going to get that with such a hyper niche demographic? So I think like the LinkedIn model works on Facebook. If not as well, even better. Because like, I look at it like Twitter's like internet culture. It's like next to Reddit. Like people know what's going on. LinkedIn, 2 or 3 tiers removed from knows what's going on. Facebook, no one has a clue. Like Facebook and Twitter are on 2 opposite sides of the spectrum.

And so anything that works on Twitter—

I'm in Charleston, South Carolina.

All right.

Right outside of Charleston.

Like you could imagine this flapping, right? Something like this. Yeah, 100%.

100%. Yeah, absolutely. Or yeah, there's a whole lot of directions I could go with this meme, but I think it's people like, people will get the joke, but no one's gonna come up with something that funny on Facebook. It's so boring unless you get like, you actually post a good meme.

All right. So I think moral of the story, I've been underutilizing Facebook.

Dude, Facebook has 2 billion daily active users. I don't know how, I don't know if that's even accurate, but that's what I see. And I experience that when I go and I actually, it's insanity. Somehow they're still growing. Mark Zuckerberg is still building it. Like, I hate that I use Facebook and I didn't until 6 months ago, but I launched this local newsletter and there's just nowhere to tap into an audience as niche geographically as on Facebook in my experience.

I'm okay. So hot take incoming. So. Just like having been on Facebook, like I'm part of the generation that like was still on Facebook and kind of the youngest generation to have spent time on Facebook. I feel like given the younger demographic of like general newsletter folks, especially maybe people in this call today who are like interested in growing with memes, the demographic of people who like were native to Facebook and are part of this new generation is like two different circles. And this is my hot take. I think that if you were to rethink and give Facebook a chance in that, uh, you may not have ever used it, but like Facebook is like the new old YouTube comments in terms of the bar is just so low. And it's just like, imagine like all of just like the, not even dumbest, Dan has some like dumb memes where they're funny, but they're just like, so like basic and funny.

I'm saying like, I'm saying like self-deprecation is like my middle name.

It's like Facebook, literally like the stuff that goes, that's popular on Facebook is actually like dumb. It's just like the stuff that like, I don't know, I don't— not to be— it's just like the people on Facebook skew maybe a little bit older and are not as inculcated. So it's my point.

We're boomers. We're not streaming on Facebook right now. We can say that. I can say that.

I feel like you can take some of the memes and it's like the, maybe the bar is just a little bit lower. It's if you're having success in this very like attention driven, like very hard to— it's, there's a lot of stuff going on in X. There's a lot of stuff going on on Instagram where there's a lot of people competing. Go to where the competition's lower and I think you'll clean up. That's like my hot take is if you took some of your memes and went to Facebook and basically started targeting more of like the chain letter sharing folks that are, you know, there, you could probably do pretty well. And depending on your audience, that's where it comes to play. It's do you want that audience? And it's, if that is part of your audience, you can do quite well with a local newsletter or if your audience is a little bit older.

I think something else that I want to talk about as well is like you guys could see while I was making memes. It's a lot of editing. It's the same thing as writing. You're not gonna get it right on the first try. Sometimes you delete stuff. I just think that should be included. And it's one of those things where like the more online and more knowledgeable you are of like what templates are going viral, the easier it is in general to be able to think of it and remix it. That's also, we added this ideas feature so you could have ideas, but just something like important to think about is it's not gonna happen naturally. Or it's not going to happen like at first. It's literally like anything else, but you get better and understand it more the more you do it until you get to the point where I'll think of something and then I'll see the meme in my head and know which meme it is. And you'll think in memes. And it's— Daniel, I'm sure you've gotten to that where you're memeing enough and you know exactly which, which meme to do it.

I make probably 10 to 20 memes a day minimum and use maybe 10% of them, but I have so many go-tos that I'm ready when I see what I'm looking for, I'm gonna reply with a meme because it's already there. I have some that I'm waiting for things that have never happened to happen so that I can reply with the meme that I made. 100%.

Nice. Nice. That's the purpose of the dank bank. And so yeah, I would just encourage you as well to get more savage, have fun with it. There's always some risk with it, but it's quite fun to do. It looks like there's a lot more questions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If I could ask one, with people joining, I don't know how many we have joined right now, but you know, we got 60. So 60 here live and probably several hundred that'll watch the recording. What would your recommendation be for someone who really does not have any experience making memes? Of course you can plug your tool. I know it's a great place to start, but like how do you learn the language of memes so that you can start talking in this new language?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I, I would definitely say like familiarizing yourself with templates. So going to the classic section, so you can see here, like when you go to the classic section, understanding these, I'm just zooming in, is really helpful cuz these are just like the basic ones that you could use literally again and again. And then it obviously does help to understand some of the trending ones too and have access to those as much as you can. But at the end of the day, it doesn't happen unless you put in the time on it. Like it's silly, but like the more you spend time memeing generally, the more, the more you're gonna understand it. And this sounds stupid as well, but like literally scrolling the internet is valuable. Like when your business is run off of social media and you're getting new subscribers and followers or whatever from that. Then spending time scrolling and seeing like jokes and how you could remix it is actually a valuable use of time. You obviously have to like be careful, don't overdo it, but it's very, it's very valuable to spend time doing that. And if you go over to something like Twitter, let's share this tab. I'll show you guys like an example. If I go over to Twitter and I just see like a funny meme, right? Like I might have not seen this if I didn't spend time on Twitter. And so if I just want to copy it, I think it's already on Memelord, but if I just want to copy it. And paste it over, I could just do that where you get these ideas just from being on the internet. And so let's say me pretending to be a new customer or me pretending to be a new subscriber who, or, oh, I got the perfect one. Me writing my own product reviews. I'm sure a lot of people out there can relate. And there's a lot you could do and this inspiration comes from actually just being online and if you don't have time for it, we do it. We obviously help do it for you and find all these memes, but generally it won't solve it for you. You still gotta spend some time online and goofing around and having fun.

How do you go about almost like quantifying and experimenting and optimizing? Do you like post and then if it doesn't immediately get response, delete it? Do you just post everything and just not, and forget about it? Like how often do you review and that sort of thing to see what—

So a couple things. It depends the goal. Is the goal, this is like a niche meme for just like my homies and friends, or is it like one that I want to go viral? And it used to be a lot easier on Twitter generally to tell what was going viral. I feel like they've definitely randomized it a bit more, but generally it's weird. Like Twitter, you could tell within the first like 10 to 15 minutes. LinkedIn is like a lot slower. That's like a few hours or like 45 minutes, I would say, to tell. but it really also depends the goal. Is it to get subscribers? Is it to go viral? It's very different. I would definitely recommend when you're plugging stuff underneath, using UTM tracking is just like the way to go. If you guys aren't using UTM tracking, definitely recommend. My friend runs a company called Dub.co and it's just like the easiest way to make short links, UTMs, stuff like that. And I use that for everything. That's how you could really tell, is my meme driving subscribers and is my dream meme driving followers? And so if you tag, like literally you could tag by meme. Like I've done that before where if I have a meme that's going viral, I'll drop a UTM of UTM source equals Twitter, UTM medium equals Twitter or equals meme campaign equals Brian Johnson. And I'll see 50 subscribers just from that one meme. And so being able to like track that is super valuable. We're going to be adding that into the platform soon as well. But that's, yeah, I think that's the best way. Views are cool, but like you want the dollars, you want subscribers. That's what really matters at the end of the day. And it's, and, and what's funny as well is especially on Twitter, everywhere really is just cuz a piece of content goes super viral doesn't mean it converts. Like I've had pieces of content get 15, 20 million views and sell 5 books. And then I've had pieces of content get 10,000 views or 20,000 views and sell 10 or 15 books or, or same with subscribers. It really, that's why making content for your niche, going viral in your niche is a lot more important than just going viral on the internet. I truly believe. There's, it's nice to like brag about 10 million, 20 million views, but like how many of those people actually cared about what you were doing? Yeah. And also I'm going off on a rant here, but one more thing to add is just like a matter of reps. If you guys are familiar with the power law, it's this idea that you don't say 1 out of 10 is like a hit, right? It's just a matter of putting in the reps. So you could head over to my Twitter and I'll have some posts that absolutely slap and then I'll have other posts that have 12 likes, right? It really is just a matter of keep posting. Like this had 300,000 views, right? Yesterday, the next post had 1K views. It's just a matter of keep going through it and like, it sounds dumb, but just not giving it up. But what's also funny is this might only have 1,000, but it was getting subscribers, right? So it really— here's one with 40,000, right? So it really is generally just keep posting through it. I don't know how else to describe that.

And that's great.

Yeah.

We had some questions. I saw one a second ago and folks, if you're here with us, we got 60 people here. Drop your questions. We're going through the questions in the, in the chat. As I had somebody ask, how does AI fit into this? Obviously AI is super popular these days. Like you can do generation, you can do ideas saying, hey, I guess it's probably not great. It's not creative, so it's not going to say, hey, make a meme about this. But yeah, how does it fit into your workflow?

I don't use AI too much. I do use it sometimes for inspiration, and we're playing around testing out AI writing, and we'll see. We might be launching something around that if we can make it really funny. But generally, I don't use it too much. I think it's fun to like use for images and ideas. Maybe a lot of— maybe just asking for ideas is a cool way to do it. Also answering a couple more questions in here. Going viral in your niche is if whatever your niche is, whatever your industry is, like you should worry more about did 100 people in my niche or 1,000 people in my industry see this versus a million people on the internet, right? Your niche like matters a lot more. And then somebody else asked, how do you get views on a meme that is posted? Reply guy. So like reply to big accounts, reply to smaller accounts with 10K, 20K, but you need to spend serious time in the beginning, like a 10 to 1 ratio, like a 20 to 1 ratio. Nobody's going to see your posts in the beginning, so you've got to start replying, optimize your page for more, for to make it more attractive for your niche. But if you look at, if you look at like Elon's posts, like still like big accounts are like reply guiding him, like everybody is a reply guide to like somebody. And so this account, it has 300,000. There's no shame in just like reply guy. This account has 500,000. So yeah, I would definitely turn on notifications for specific accounts in your niche and just reply to them with either funny memes or just like funny smart tweets, ideas, whatever it might be.

Love that.

Any more questions? Does this work on Facebook business pages? I'd have to ask Daniel about that.

Yes. Does it work on business pages on LinkedIn? Yes. I believe business pages being reply guys. Or reply people for those PC. Does work. I've seen it work really effectively with Beehive, our own page, with Gong, Chili Piper, Apollo. You can name the SaaS company, but their company pages actually drive substantial amounts of niche followers, revenue, new sales, deal flow, top of funnel. And business pages outside of— oh, you said Facebook business page? I'm thinking of LinkedIn. No idea with Facebook business page. Not gonna lie. Totally outside of my scope, but With LinkedIn business pages, yes.

Yes. LinkedIn business pages are insane. Absolutely crazy. I definitely agree with that.

Do you guys ever bring in video to this, Jason Levin Levin?

Or, or—

Yeah, so let's talk video a bit. I'll, I'll share my Instagram here. I do a lot of video. I don't, and we're building out kind of video for Memelord as well. So that's coming up next, but it's very similar concepts, which is like, making memes in your niche, making videos in your niche, and, and focusing on that and making them funny and just remixing the same thing. I didn't invent this video. I found the video and just literally remixed on Instagram. The same with this one or this one. These are, these ones popped off because it's just original stuff, more original, but stuff like this generally. I would definitely recommend experimenting with video. It's the way the world's going. And that's why we'll be adding video very soon as well, actually.

Nice.

Very cool.

In the meantime, what tools do you use? Do you use like CapCut or native tools to the platforms?

I actually, I'm not insane at video, so I'm just more, I use Instagram's tools and just do that. I have used a bunch of other stuff, Final Cut and Premiere and stuff, CapCut, but generally like Instagram's tools are fine. TikTok's in-house tools are okay. Um, yeah.

Yeah, I was going to add to just video discovery. You can find videos if you're just scrolling TikTok, particularly TikTok in my opinion, although Reels is getting a lot better at being like hyper-relevant. TikTok, you can find videos that like, on the flip side, no one on Twitter has even seen yet. And so a lot of times I'll steal videos from TikTok that I think are hilarious and turn it into a video meme on Twitter to tap into a totally different market. A lot of people on Twitter aren't using TikTok.

Yeah.

And so it'll be funny. It'll get its own type of viral component from Twitter, but it's a video I found on TikTok. So it's re— remixing and repurposing these platforms directionally to where you're actually using content that's fresh for one platform that's maybe not for another. Again, being terminally online helps with that, but it's fun to juggle all the platforms together.

Yeah.

There's a really solid arbitrage as well of you find something that's going viral on one and bringing it over. I do that. I'm trying to find an example here, but I do that a lot on LinkedIn. All right. So LinkedIn is like 48 hours behind Twitter. I swear it's actually crazy. So you could go here, trying to find, this was trying to find a good example. This was out on Twitter 24 hours before, like this was popping off on Twitter and Instagram beforehand. Like LinkedIn is so behind generally. Like this was going off on Twitter, all this kind of stuff. Yeah. This I posted on Instagram. Oh, nice. Hey, somebody just messaged me. Nice. So you could tell, like, you, you could find stuff on the platforms that are already popping off and just bring it over. Generally works pretty well.

Real quick, in terms of— I noticed in the chat somebody was saying like video on Instagram doesn't work that well because they had a big channel that didn't really lead to that many subs. And obviously so many things go into particular scenarios. I'd say, would that takeaway be like being— you want to be where your customers are? It's if none of your if like none of you, if your content around your newsletter, whatever your goal is, if they don't live on, or if they don't interact on LinkedIn, then like doing this on LinkedIn isn't going to lead to that business outcome. If you're on, if you have a lifestyle, if you have a lifestyle newsletter about a dog, we saw a creator who has a dog who she dresses up in clothes, very strong presence on TikTok and Instagram. If she started doing that on LinkedIn and her audience aren't LinkedIn people, you're probably not gonna have the same success. So it's. Just because you can do stuff on a certain channel, would you say stick to where your customers are or try to—

I actually have a, I have a base take on this, which is like very contrary and which is, yeah, it's social media is big enough and each platform is big enough that your customers on there, there's enough of your customers to make money on every single platform. So you should do whatever platform you're most natural to. I've been on Twitter since I was 13, so Twitter's just very natural to me. I don't use TikTok. Like, I literally just don't use it because, like, I hate it and I just don't use it. Like, maybe I'm passing up on some money, but I don't use it. I don't use Reddit. Focus on the platform that you could not live without, that you could spend 5 hours a day, 3 hours a day on and be very happy. It's a very, like, contrarian opinion on that. I was like, just do the platform that you could do, like, for a year and not give up, even if it's not going well. There are millions of your customers on every single platform because they all have a billion plus users at this point. So that's, it's a base take. Yeah. Yeah. I just go wherever you're happiest. You can make money on any platform. Generally, I do also have an opinion, which is like either start on Twitter and LinkedIn or start on video platforms like YouTube, Instagram, generally do whatever's natural. I don't post much video generally. Like I post my podcast and I post silly videos, but I don't like talking head videos. Like generally this because I don't like reading scripts. So you gotta do what's natural for you. And if you hate it, if you're gonna give up after a month, like just don't do it. Also, if you don't like making memes, if you don't like being funny online, like that's also okay. That's totally fine. That's, you don't have to use memes. Like you, I think it's the best lever because it's free. It's basic, it's fast. It could go viral very easily. But if you just don't like it or if you wanna seem more professional, like you do you. Like, I have no judgment, but that's amazing.

Real quick, if you wanted to see, so obviously you're master at this, you're building your brand around this and Daniel's really good. So we got Jason Levin, we got Daniel Burke. Who are some other pro like accounts that folks should go for inspo that you respect and you look up to? Or even if you don't look up to them, they're doing great stuff.

So I interviewed a bunch of them for my book, which is just here. I'll drop the link here. It's memesmakemillions.com. But if you look at like VC Brags, I think he's really funny. He's a homie and a customer as well. This guy is pretty good, Vittorio. Generally, let's see, I'm just like scroll through to remember. Nice. This guy's good. He's a customer too. So you can see like he just found this and now it has 6,000 views on my, from my platform, which is always funny that I don't see what you're referring to. Oh shit. No, yeah, this guy's good. Jack Forge for like tech stuff. Trying to think of who's very unhinged or very funny generally. Oh, Liquidity is great. Liquidity, he's amazing. He's an OG. Elon, pretty good meme lord himself. He stole mine the other day. Yeah, generally there's a ton.

Yeah. Last question real quick. I don't think we covered it too much, but I saw in the chat very relevant to stuff that I do. When do you ever use the memes that you create within ads, would you create a meme specifically for an ad? Would you just see what works really well and what got organic stuff and run it?

Yeah. Generally, like the play right now is test organic and what's doing well organic, go put money behind it. That would be my recommendation. I don't run many ads. My, my specialty is like organic marketing, so I don't do too much of that, but that would be what I recommend generally is, is to do that.

Amazing. We got a couple minutes left, so we do a last call for folks in the chat. Could you pull up on your screen the, your book and just show them where they can get it? Amazon?

Yeah, 100%. It's just on memesmakemillions.com. You could get it here, like print or ebook, whatever's easiest. And then the software is right here. There's a free trial, so you could just give it a try for free. Um, and all sorts of features. So here's the get idea for every template, all sorts of fun stuff. And we've got even some other stuff going on that I just added that I haven't told anybody about, but we just added a free meme PNG maker. So even if you don't sign up, you could just use this and go make some PNGs of funny memes. Always adding new stuff. And also when you sign up, just shoot me a message and either tag me in memes or just send me a message. I'll make sure to like comment, maybe retweet and help out as much as I can.

So amazing.

See, any other questions?

Yeah, I was looking for questions. Somebody said they have questions, but they haven't dropped them. So we'll go into a little bit closing. If they drop it, then we can answer real quick, but thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Daniel, for joining such a useful conversation. I love kind of the fireside chat style of this that we did today. If you're in the chat still, or if you're viewing this still, and this was useful, we like to use this time at the end to plug the Beehive community. Through Slack. It's actually how Jason Levin got connected to get this set up. He was able to just ping me and say, hey, like we should do a webinar or virtual event on meme-driven growth. And I was like, that's a great idea. So not just connecting, but we have 15 different channels that cover everything around newsletter generation from requesting and offering cross-promotions, email 101 basics if you're starting your journey, growth tips, how-to. Introductions, milestones. You can celebrate 3,000 active paying Beehive customers. So people who are very serious about what they're doing, and it's one of the most like value-dense communities out there for newsletter creators. And so that comes complimentary with your Beehive subscription for paid users. So if you were on the fence, if you're a Beehive user and you were thinking about maybe making the jump, that might be the motivation you need. Otherwise, if you're not a Beehive user, Jason's a longtime user here. A bunch of the folks that he's referenced are Liquidity and others are longtime Beehive users and building their businesses and publications and audiences on Beehive. Daniel's local newsletters, he's got 10. I've got— I'm not— don't take it seriously, but I have 10 as well that I just, you know, maybe one local newsletter. Now he's got 10 newsletters. He got like Daily Mustache, Fatherpreneur, a local one that he doesn't like to talk about because then he'll get an influx of like irrelevant users, he's protecting that 80% open rate.

Dude, I don't even live in Charleston. I'm just going to subscribe so I know.

Exactly. You and everyone else I would ever mention it on the internet would subscribe. So don't tell anyone the name and people ask me for it and I ask them, are you a parent in this very particular neighborhood of Charleston? They're like, no. I'm like, sorry.

Mystery. I know. But anyway, it's great to have everyone here. Thank you so much for coming and spending your time with us today. Literally what makes it all worthwhile and like the reason why we do it. If no one showed up, it would be pointless. So thank you. Thank you. Let's give a little round of applause to Tony, who's been sitting in the background fielding questions, making sure that things go right in the backend. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Jason Levin. And then cool. What camera? So just running through the questions real quick, just make sure we caught them all. Thank you so much. Whoever asked what my camera I use, I just use the regular base camera on a MacBook, like a relatively new MacBook.

So sorry, Jason, you're the man. Loved this conversation. Super bullish on your product, man. Everyone should go buy memelord.tech.

It's only $6.90 for an early customer, bro. And, uh, of course, and, uh, I'll talk to you guys soon.

Absolutely.

Talk soon. All right, everyone, bye-bye.

Peace.