Making Money Making Memes

I never thought I'd make money making memes, but here I am.

I get paid to make memes and make millions of people laugh on the internet across the world.

Last October, I published a book about meme marketing called Memes Make Millions and have sold 1000s of copies from New York to New Zealand. But not too long ago, I didn’t know you could make millions making memes either. I thought memes were just dumb JPEGs.

So how did I start making money making memes???

A little help from my frenz

It all started with a podcast with viral memelord Jack Raines.

Jack told me that he was making thousands every month writing for a popular finance meme brand called Litquidity. That blew my mind. How did a dumb meme account have the money to pay writers that much???

I knew Litquidity was popular in the finance world, but I didn't realize they had that kinda budget. Oh man, how I underestimated them¹ .

Then, I talked to Charlie Light, the creator of a satirical twitter account who was making $40,000+/month ghostwriting tweets and memes for startups—and then sold this ghostwriting agency for $1M+!

These conversations taught me that memes aren't jokes. I’ve always lived by the philosophy that if you can make $1 doing something, you can make millions. So of course I fell down the meme rabbithole. I doubled down on meme marketing on my Twitter and grew my account with viral memes.

6 ways to make money making memes

After interviewing dozens of memelords for Memes Make Millions, I’ve figured out there’s 6 main ways to make money making memes:

1. Build a meme page and sell ads directly on it. This is the @FuckJerry method. The team at Jerry Media makes millions selling ads on their Instagram-based meme pages. This can be extremely profitable once you hit a certain threshold of followers. I’ve seen accounts with as few as 60k followers making $3,000/month with ads.

2. Build a meme page, start a newsletter, and sell ads there. Litquidity perfected this one. Rather than serving ads directly on social media pages, Litquidity uses Instagram and Twitter to drive subscribers for their newsletter ExecSum, where they advertise for companies like cooling mattress brand Eight Sleep, fintech brand Plaid, and more. Starting a newsletter is also great because you can still talk to your audience even if your social media account gets banned for posting too dank of a meme (this is a real risk in the meme biz lol).

3. Build a meme page, turn it into a meme brand, and sell merchandise. Again, Litquidity is the master at this. Walk around the NYC financial district on a busy Tuesday and you’re sure to see finance bros rocking Litquidity merch. To do meme merch, you need to master the meme-page-to-meme-brand pipeline. You need to build a brand so cool that people want it on a shirt. This is challenging, but probably has the most exponential ROI. There’s a reason why Warren Buffet only invests in companies with strong brands; in an era where building products is easier and easier, true brand loyalty is a moat like no other.

4. Become an in-house memelord, freelance memelord, or start a content agency specializing in funny content. Charlie Light did this perfectly and sold his agency for $1M. My #1 advice: to make real money, partner your meme skills with something like content writing, video editing, or podcast editing. The combo is extremely powerful.

5. Use memes as ads to sell products. Matt McGarry (interviewed in Memes Make Millions) is the master at this. Matt made memes and ran them as ads on platforms like Facebook and Twitter to promote newsletters like The Hustle, which was acquired for $27 million. With these types of meme ads, you don’t even need to be funny (see Matt’s ads). The goal isn’t to make people LOL, it’s to sell your product in a clever and surprising format.

6. Post dank memes to drive attention to your products. Chris Bakke used this strategy to sell $3M+ in SaaS subscriptions! He then sold his company for $100M+. YUP. $100M+ from dank memes.

A list like that makes the whole job seem easy. But real-life stories are the key to making these ideas actionable. So let’s go talk to some memelords.

1  In February, Litquidity was even profiled in Financial Times for his multi-million-dollar meme-empire.