How To Dominate The Tiktok Algorithm. Understanding The Algorithm and using it to YOUR advantage.

HOW TO DOMINATE THE TIKTOK ALGORITHM Understanding The Algorithm and using it to YOUR advantage

Dominating the Algorithm

Dominating the TikTok algorithm is a challenging task.

At least it was before you received this book. Now you have probably heard heard it all before.. 'the key to success on TikTok is to create engaging, entertaining, and high-quality content consistently. You should also use relevant hashtags, participate in popular challenges'.

This is BS, it's important to pay attention to every page in this ebook in order to truly understand how to maximize your time and efforts on TikTok. Stats like the ones above can easily be replicated by each and every one of you so long as you TAKE ACTION and stay consistent.

So you have just made your account chosen a username and filled in the profile. Great, what's next?

The niche I will be referencing in this ebook is Fitness and subniche Female fitness. Why? Because it is my most recent success and I can retain the most on exactly how I did it.

Step 1 Train your FYP (For You Page) - Training your FYP is absolutely crucial and should not be overlooked. We all know that TikTok has one of the smartest algorithms in the social media world, comparing it to the likes of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc no other algorithm compares to how TikTok captures your interest and feeds you more of it based on your interaction.

Read that again. TikTok captures your interest and feeds you more of it.

So we MUST train our FYP, If we are in the Female fitness industry we need to spend minimum 2-3 hours throughout the day watching female fitness related videos.

This has a limitless amount of benefits such as Giving us niche related content for ideas Allowing TikTok to understand what our content will be about Allowing TikTok to understand WHO to show our content to Finding trends early in our niche to act on Let me ask you this. Have you ever been scrolling TikTok and said to yourself 'Wow the FYP knows me better than I know myself'? Well this is exactly what we want our audience to say to themselves when they see our video. In order to achieve this we need to train our FYP. I can not stress this point enough, If you want to create gym videos but you watch and engage with pranks and social experiments all day, guess what TikTok now puts your account in the 'pranks and social experiments' category and thus pushes your videos to that audience.

How to train your FYP

Let's get straight into it, start searching general hashtags in your niche. In my case I searched #gym #gymgirl #glutesworkout #cutegymoutfit.

For the next 20-30 minutes I just watched the FULL video and then scrolled. Do not interact with the content. Just watch for now.

Alternate the hashtags and repeat the process. If for whatever reason the video being shown to you is NOT relevant to your niche despite you searching for the hashtags. CLOSE TIKTOK and re-open it again, What does this do? TikTok wants you on their app as much as possible so we use this to our advantage by watching videos but when content that we do not want pops up we get off the app. This further trains the FYP into thinking, 'Ok this user likes female fitness now we tried showing them a video of a man hitting a PR and they instantly closed the application we won't do that again'.

Perfect, this is what we want. Now repeat the process find some more relevant hashtags, watch the videos and refrain from liking or commenting on any posts just yet.

After 30 minutes to an hour has passed we can get rid of the hashtags and watch content on our FYP exclusively. When you are on the FYP you can start interacting with the content. Be very, very specific with the content you interact with because as this is a brand new account we have certain limits on the amount of actions we can do. My general rule of thumb is - For every 10 videos watched I like 1 of them.

The only time I will ever 'like' a video is if it has a female in it and the female is doing a gym exercise. I want to be as niche specific as possible when giving my likes out because I want TikTok to know that this is the exact content I want to see and the audience I want my content shown to.

We can start progressing into creating content if and only if you train your FYP. If you ever posted a video that got under 500 views and wondered why this is the reason, TikTok does not know who to push your video to so they push it to a random 500 users to see which of those interact with it. From that 500 lets say 10 people who are interested in Basketball like your content, your videos get pushed to those who like Basketball - Now the problem with this is if your content is NOT basketball related well they don't interact then you complain and say your account is shadowbanned. It is not you didn't train your FYP

Key takeaways

Search for relevant hashtags in your niche and watch full videos without interacting.

If irrelevant content appears, close and reopen the app to train the FYP. Repeat the process with relevant hashtags and refrain from liking or commenting on posts.

When on the FYP, interact with specific niche content and like 1 out of every 10 videos watched.

Train your FYP before creating content to increase visibility to your target audience.

Your recent search history should look similar to this, of course tailored to your niche

Creating a hashtags list Creating a hashtags list is pretty simple, all you want to do is look at what other users in your niche are using and copy. Not much more to it, you can get pretty specific with this by using the search filter and searching for your niche for example I would type 'Gym' in the search bar. Click the top right slider button, select 'Like Count' and 'This Week'. One of the first videos shown to me include the hashtags; #Gymrat, #GymTok, #GymCrush.

We can now add these 3 to our hashtags list and keep looking, as you search through more and more videos you will see the same sort of hashtags popping up, these are the tags you want to include in your video in order to maximize your reach for your targeted audience.

But Sol, How many hashtags should I use? This question comes up A LOT on various forums and discussions and the truth is there is no set number. I personally use anywhere from 15-20 hashtags and take 1 off for every new video, for example my first video will have 20 my second will have 19 and so on so forth. By the time I have 20 videos on my account (which by the way using the methods illustrated in this e-book should see you at around 5-10k followers) the page does not look spammy with so many hashtags.

Another tip is to use the 3x3x3 rule which is originally from Instagram but applies to TikTok as well. The rule goes as follows: 3 hashtags relating to what the video is 3 hashtags relating to what the problem is or the thing you solve 3 hashtags about the target audience To put this into practice a 3x3x3 hashtags for a squatting video goes as follow #DeepSquat #Squatrack #RateMySquat #ProperForm #Squattechnique #HowToSquat #GymGirls #GymLovers #GymJunkies As you can see we have tagged what the video is about, who it is for, and what the point of the video is.

Key Takeaways

Look at other users in your niche to see what hashtags they use and copy them.

Use the search filter to search for your niche and select "Like Count" and "This Week."

Use anywhere from 15-20 hashtags and take one off for every new video to avoid looking spammy.

Use the 3x3x3 rule for hashtags: 3 relating to the video, 3 relating to the problem/solution, and 3 about the target audience.

Use relevant hashtags for the video, target audience, and problem/solution to maximize reach.

What should your content look like?

Congratulations, If you made it this far you are considerably more ahead than you were about 20 minutes ago. You are now ready to put up your first post and blow up your phone with notifications. This section will be separated into x parts as it is important. Your content should capture the users attention within the first 2 seconds (since they are scrolling mindlessly), It should have a WTF factor to it or a twist giving people the opportunity to react to it and it should have some sort of manipulation to get them to replay the video multiple times.

I will cover all of these points individually so you have an idea of how your content should look like.

Creating content can either be super hard or super easy depending on niche and your plans for the account. For me this was easy as I am an active member in my local gym so I asked a girl if I could record her performing an exercise with slightly incorrect form and post it. Why incorrect form? Because I want to engagement farm, which we will get into soon.

Do not worry if your niche is not something you can create UGC (user generated content) I will cover everything in just a few pages to leave no question marks in your head.

Considering you have spent the last couple of hours scrolling on your phone and getting thumb cramps you should have a general idea of what type of content in your niche goes viral. Usually those who follow the fitness industry will have an unsolicited opinion on how the exercise or set if being performed. When it comes to fitness, everyone's got their own opinion on how to do things. It gets people talking and engaging with our videos. We don't take it personally if someone disagrees with us - our main goal is to get more views, comments, and replies.

The video that gained me over 30,000 followers was the one I mentioned above which was a squat with incorrect form. Now the content itself was short, 7 seconds to be exact but I created it in a way that it captured user attention and invited people to give their opinion WHILE the video plays in the background.

So lets break all of this down.

Engagement Farming

Engagement farming is a tactic used by many creators to 'manipulate' users into commenting, sharing or simply liking a video thus boosting it up the content ladder and racking up those views.

Using the example above, My tactic for engagement farming was posting a video acting really excited and happy for my new PR but the twist was it had incorrect form. This is a massive invitation to the average user scrolling their FYP to correct me in the comment section and then invites another user to reply to that comment, increasing interaction on the video

As we can see from the images above, people gave their opinions and others reacted to that debating them creating an 'Engagement farm'.

My Engagement farm was successful and allowed the video to not only net me 30,000 targeted followers. I also gained over 800,000 likes and 7.8 million views. On a BRAND NEW account, I did it, you can do it as well if you follow this book and TAKE ACTION.

Engagement Farming If you can not create your own content you are still able to replicate the results just as easily. Use the Text to Speech feature when editing a video and incentivize users to engage with the content for a 'reward'.

For example take a look at one of my old videos which ammassed over 1.5million views

As you can see from the image above the incentive I gave users was a condition which stated if their comment received 0 likes in 6 hours they would get a free phone screen cleaner (dropshipped). This blew up as Person A would comment on the video and keep checking back to see if their comment got 0 likes. Person B would come and like Person As comment so they would win the prize instead of Person A, Person A then went to like Person B's comment in spite and so on so forth.

This type of engagement farm works really well for Non UGC as it is super easy to do using the text to speech option on the TikTok editing section.

There is no excuse as to why you can not incorporate some sort of engagement farming in your video as if you can not do it directly by telling people to comment 3 times in a row or share to 3 friends then comment 'done'. You can do it indirectly by leaving something in the video that someone, somewhere will want to point out and give their opinion on.

Key Takeaways Engagement farming is a tactic used to boost engagement on social media.

It involves creating content that directly or indirectly encourages users to comment, share, or like the post.

One example of this tactic is to post a video with incorrect information to invite correction and debate in the comments section.

The tactic can be replicated even without creating original content by using text-to-speech features and incentivizing engagement with rewards.

Over 51,000 comments all hoping that no one likes their comment because of a simple text to speech engagement farm

Manipulating Users Don't be alarmed, all this means is we are designing our video in such a way that the user rewatches the video more than once (very important for virality) in a way that they do not even realise.

Using the 2 video examples that we talked about in the Engagement farm section, we know that having people interact with our content is very important and a leading cause of viral TikTok's in any niche and any form of content. What if we were to have this while boosting our watch time and replay time? How do we do this?

If we take the first video which was a squat with incorrect form, as this was UGC I was able to film in a way that created a perfect loop. I will attach an example in the key takeaways but essentially all a perfect loop is, is a form of video editing carefully curated in a way so that the user does not know when the video ends and begins playing for a 2nd time.

This catches a lot of people off guard and some of them even re watch it a 3rd or 4th time just to satisfy themselves that they have figured out the loop.

If your niche is one which you generate content yourself it will be of extreme benefit to learn how to edit and film perfect loops to post on TikTok. Manipulating the user to rewatch your video is a good way to shoot your video up the algorithmic ladder and GUARANTEE your video gets put on peoples FYP. Now, if your niche contains non UGC content the method is a little bit harder but nevertheless I will show you exactly how to do it. When you post content that is not yours, you need to be a little bit more creative in how you manipulate users to gain valuable rewatch time and watch time in general. The way to do it for non UGC is by flashing a text box on the screen for half a second so users feel as if they have 'missed out' on information and rewatch to try and pause on the right frame and read your text. This method is proven to work as I am sure each and everyone of you have seen a similar style video and then when you open the comment section there's a discussion on the text between those who caught it or those who didn't. Manipulating users for non UGC is a little bit less lackluster than UGC content but it serves the same purpose and benefits.

Key Takeaways

Designing videos to encourage rewatching is important for virality.

Perfect loops are a video editing technique that can create a seamless loop and encourage users to rewatch.

For UGC content, filming and editing a perfect loop can be effective in increasing watch time.

For non UGC content, flashing a text box on the screen can encourage users to rewatch to read the text, creating discussion and increasing watch time.

Encouraging rewatching and increasing watch time can boost a video's algorithmic ranking and increase the likelihood of it being featured on users' FYP.

Here is an example of a perfect loop. It is hard to distinguish when the video cuts to restart again.

Uploading consistency

How many times should you upload? How many times can you upload safely within TikTok's limits? What happens if I don't upload for a couple days? These are all common questions for creators on the app when their account starts picking up speed and gaining traction.

How many times should I upload?

Now this answer varies from user to user, some say twice a day, others once a day and some say 5 a day to target all timezones. The problem with these answers is that they still leave a big '?' in our heads when we hear them, this is because those that generate content themselves will have an extremely hard time uploading 5 times a day without compromising quality. Those that have non UGC content can easily post 5,10 even 20 times a day without worrying about quality.

In my personal experience, I find 4 videos a day to be the sweet spot between quality/quantity. I also like to separate my videos with at least a 4-6 hour gap in between and post in-line with my pages analytics. On the analytics page of TikTok you can see exactly what times your followers are most active, this is an underrated feature as posting during these times give your videos the highest chance of going viral as you have that initial boost of engagement that TikTok sees and then pushes you up the ranks.

What are the TikTok limits for uploading?

This answer also varies, not from person to person but from account to account, we know that aged accounts have a higher limit on actions than brand new accounts. This comes into play drastically when uploading especially for those with non UGC or 'churn and burn' accounts. As much as the name suggest you don't want to have to keep replacing accounts every day because you do not know the limits.

My limits for brand new accounts is 5 posts daily and for aged accounts up to 20 posts daily.

What happens if I do not upload for a couple days?

Thankfully, this answer does not vary and is set. If your account has an upload schedule of 2 videos a day and you take 1 week break your account will lose it's 'momentum'. There are 1000s of accounts being created a day and a 1000 more videos being uploaded, when your account is 'hot' you MUST stick to your upload schedule in order to keep the algorithm happy and more importantly your followers happy.

Key takeaways The optimal number of uploads varies depending on the type of content and quality. 4 videos per day is a good balance for most creators.

Posting during times when your followers are most active can give your videos a better chance of going viral.

The upload limit varies depending on the age of your account, with aged accounts having higher limits.

It's important to stick to a consistent upload schedule to maintain momentum and keep TikTok and your followers happy.

Taking a break from uploading for an extended period of time can cause your account to lose momentum.

Sticking to a theme

This section is pretty self explanatory but it is important to touch over Sticking to a theme is basically being very strict on your niche and more importantly your sub niche. Unless your niche is extremely low comp and you are very experienced in the field in terms of knowing how to monetize the niche traffic you must stick to your niche as best as you can.

My chosen niche is fitness and sub-niche is female fitness, I will only ever post female related fitness videos as in my experience and test these return the best conversion rates and highest engagement on TikTok. We will never post food related videos or calorie surplus/deficit videos as this is NOT our chosen niche, if we start branching off to different niches the TikTok Algorithm becomes confused as to what content our account is trying to push.

Key Takeaways

1. Sticking to a theme is crucial for success on TikTok, especially in competitive niches.

2. It involves being strict with your niche and sub-niche, and only posting content that aligns with them.

3. Diversifying into unrelated topics can confuse the TikTok algorithm and negatively impact your reach and engagement.

Milestone Dopamine

TikTok wants you to become addicted to their platform so as you approach certain account milestones the algorithm pushes your videos further, let me explain.

You just created an account and have been steady posting your way to 1000 followers. Along the way you noticed the closer you got to 1000, the more views you got on your videos. So you keep posting trying to reach 10k and in a matter of days you smash the goal and reach 15k.

This is due to TikTok Algorithm incorporating 'Milestone Dopamine' for creators. It is common knowledge that many social media platforms use the algorithm to engage viewers but very few capture content creators in the way TikTok does.

They do this by giving you spikes of virality to incentivize you to continue posting to replicate the level of success you saw just a couple videos ago. This is extremely common and applies to ALL content creators except those of which are celebrities or extremely popular public figures.

Take a look at any page and you will notice that they have certain spikes between videos where one video does extremely well compared to the rest of them, If you input their username into a tracker such as SocialBlade you will see that more often than not these spikes correlate with their following count as they approach significant milestones such as 10k, 50k and even 100k+.

TikTok's algorithm incorporates "Milestone Dopamine" to incentivize content creators to continue posting and engaging with the platform. As creators approach these milestones, the algorithm gives them spikes of virality, resulting in increased views and engagement on their content.

By providing these spikes of virality, TikTok encourages creators to continue posting and replicating their previous success, ultimately leading to increased addiction to the platform. This phenomenon is observable across all content creators, except for celebrities and extremely popular public figures. Who's videos perform well regardless simply as a marketing ploy by TikTok. Overall, TikTok's algorithm plays a significant role in promoting addictive behavior and incentivizing content creation on the platform.

Key Takeaways TikTok's algorithm uses "Milestone Dopamine" to incentivize content creators to continue posting and engaging with the platform.

As creators approach certain follower milestones, the algorithm gives them spikes of virality, resulting in increased views and engagement on their content.

This encourages creators to continue posting and replicating their previous success, ultimately leading to increased addiction to the platform.

This phenomenon is observable across all content creators, except for celebrities and extremely popular public figures, whose videos perform well regardless as a marketing ploy by TikTok. TikTok's algorithm plays a significant role in promoting addictive behavior and incentivizing content creation on the platform.

Monetization

Thankfully, this is a LOT easier then content creation and algorithmic domination. Monetizing TikTok can be done in a multitude of ways some of which include: 1. Affiliate Marketing 2. Brand Sponserships 3. TikTok Creator Fund 4. Livestreaming 5. CPA 6. Building and selling pages 7. TikTok Shoutouts 8. Dropshipping 9. Redirecting Traffic to a blog 10. Print On Demand As you can see there is almost always an avenue you can go down should you choose to monetize your TikTok. The ones I choose and will explain in the next couple of pages are Affiliate Marketing and Dropshipping. I find these to be the easiest as if you are diligent with your niche selection there is definitely going to be something you can sell to your audience by way of affiliate marketing.

I will cover Affiliate marketing as this method is the one I am most knowledgeable in and am currently doing to earn me over $4,000 monthly. So let's get into it.

Affiliate Marketing

Now, I am not going to put a bunch of earnings proof, put a big red arrow on the payment figure tell you to run ads and disappear.

What I am going to do is cut the BS and tell you exactly how and when I take a page from a standard niche to one I earn from. Lets take a look at the same female fitness account I have been referring back to throughout the book. TikTok does not allow a link in bio until 1000 followers, however by using the methods and tips and applying them to your own page this milestone should not be hard to achieve and most people will see results in just 1 week.

Affiliate marketing is simple in theory, build up a niche following, find products in that niche, sell niche related product to niche related followers. Easy right? Where most people get it wrong is by using oversaturated products, low quality traffic, poorly designed website, or a combination of all three.

The best way I have found to convert in affiliate marketing is to be somewhat interested in the niche, there is little to no point in trying to promote a product that you have either no interest in or no idea about.

For example I would never try and market any crystal stones as I don't care for them, don't know which ones are worth promoting and have no idea about the use of them. Of course this can be fixed at a very basic level by doing some product and market research before hand but for the time spent doing this it is much better to just pick a product you are interested in and go from there.

Using my gym theme pages I reached out to over 40 different gym clothing lines with the same message explaining how I am a rapid growing page with T1 countries as my predominant audience and sent them various analytics pages to back my case. None of them responded, so I sent out another 40-50 messages and got some responses back. The reason why I reached out to gym clothing lines is because I wanted to promote products that gym goers were already familiar with, brands such as ECHT, DFYNE etc. This made it easy to setup a coupon code using my TikTok's username and make a % of the sale price when people used my coupon code.

Key Takeaways

Building a niche following on social media, such as TikTok, is the first step to earning through affiliate marketing.

Choosing the right products to promote is crucial, and it's best to pick a product or niche that you are interested in or have some knowledge about.

It's important to reach out to brands in your chosen niche to establish partnerships and promote their products to your audience.

By creating coupon codes with your TikTok username, you can earn a percentage of the sale price when people use your code to purchase the promoted products.

With consistent effort and application of effective strategies, it is possible to achieve 1000 followers and see results in just one week.

The stitch method

What this method does is allow you to repost viral content (only 5 second clip) without using the same 'metadata' so it is as if you posted an original video giving it the same viral potential as the original post.

Obviously if you just downloaded the video and reposted it not only would it have the TikTok watermark it will also use the same metadata causing the video to get less than 100 views.

Here is how to do it: Step 1: Open TikTok and find a video you want to repost. (remember only 5 second clips so choose one that has an engaging or 'clickbaity' section to it I use gym videos because it takes 5 seconds to do a rep and thats all people want to see Step 2: Click the share button and click stitch Step 3: Choose the 5 seconds from the video you want to stitch and click next Step 4: Record 3 seconds (minimum requirement of a black screen, dont worry this will be deleted soon) Step 5: Save video to drafts Step 6 Open drafts, select your video and click 'continue recording' Step 7: Delete your 3 seconds input and SWIPE OUT of TikTok straight away Step 8: To remove the #stitch with @user, highlight the text and double click the text to speech button on keyboard to remove Step 9: click post, add some hashtags and your done

Support

If you have made it this far into the book then you will surely have some pressing questions that unfortunately were not explicitly addressed in the guide. This is why I am offering all customers a 14 day support chat room on Discord for any and all questions you may have along the way.

You can find a link to this server down below.