Before you can learn how to do what ALLOD does, you have to first understand what it is and how it came to be. There are a lot of misconceptions out there on the topic, the most common of which is that I started the page to make money. It’s actually quite the opposite. I started the page because I had money, which was a pretty new thing for this lifelong construction worker.
It was January of 2016. Busta Troll was kind of on the sidelines while my writing career took off. I was making a killing as a partisan re-blogger. Together with some people I haven’t associated with in years, a plan was hatched to create a right-wing page using Facebook ads that we could use for…who knows what. There were a lot of possibilities, especially for someone like me with serious trolling chops.
“The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense” was born. To truly understand why the page is such a glorious taterfest, however, you have to understand the ads we ran and the people we targeted. It was almost too simple. I picture of Trump giving the thumbs up with the caption “Do you love America? Like our page!” That’s it. That was the ad. as for distribution, the ad went out specifically to Americans over the age of 55 interested in very conservative politics, Donald Trump, and Sean Hannity. The first 100K likes on the page were exclusively…that. Throughout 2017 I did extensive “like farming” that I learned from watching other big pages. Dumb memes and videos. The likes got up to about 225K at its peak, all taters.
So the main reason ALLOD is so successful is because of that extremely valuable asset which would be next to impossible to recreate today. Facebook has changed, and the hoops you have to go through to run a political ad are in place to discourage “fake news” outlets from trying.
I built “America – Love it or Leave It” and “American Ladies of Liberty” the same way. I stole “America Loves Donald Trump” from a Macedonian kid goat style. The lineup gives me about 450K mostly-geriatric Trumpsters to work with.
You may be wondering how ALLOD has survived all these years with all the attention, mostly negative, from not just news outlets but Facebook’s own fact-checkers. The secret to that is honesty, believe it or not. There has ALWAYS been at least one disclaimer on the page that identifies it as a satirical trollfest. In my experience, if you stay honest and troll them right out in the open, they hardly ever realize it.
That brings us to content. Over the next few articles, I’ll cover first and foremost what DOESN’T work and my general guidelines for acceptable storylines. I don’t know if you remember, but I once asked my friends list to give me some headlines and I’d write stories based on them. The thread turned into some great reading. Tons of funny stuff. And not one single idea suitable for ALLOD. I’m hoping that this little instruction manual, followed by some hands-on playtime for those who want to participate, will help build a better understanding of how to hook the taters.