Want to make extra profit?

Was explaining this to a friend yesterday over coffee and his face did that thing where you can tell someone’s brain is rewiring in real time. So I figured I’d share it with you too.

Here’s your stupid simple high ROI insight.

phantom funnel

Here’s the idea: you create branded search demand that doesn’t exist yet… then you capture it at near-zero cost

Let me break it down

Step 1: You build a listicle page. Something like “Top 5 Mother’s Day Gift Sets for 2026.” Your brand is #1. The other four brands? Completely fictional. You made them up.

Step 2: Before you name those fictional brands, you research which brand-name keywords have literally zero competition on Google. No search volume. No advertisers. Nothing. Names like “LunaBloom Gifting” or “Marigold & Fern Co.”… they sound real, they look real, but nobody’s ever searched for them.

Step 3: You create simple whitelabel landing pages for each fictional brand. Nothing crazy, just a clean page that redirects to your actual store. Takes maybe an hour per brand.

Step 4: You run Meta Ads driving traffic to that listicle. The listicle looks legit (with hyperlinks linking only to your ATC/IC). People browse it. Some click your brand directly (great). But here’s where it gets interesting, some people see “LunaBloom Gifting” and think hmm, let me google that later.

Step 5: When they google it, your google ads branded campaign is sitting there waiting.,, You’re bidding on “LunaBloom Gifting” and everything around lunabloom… at a discounted CPC because you’re literally the only advertiser in the world for that term. They click. They land on your store.

Every road leads to ROME (or you… 😅)

Why This Works

The reason it works is because you’re hacking the gap between demand creation and demand capture. Meta creates the awareness while google captures the intent. And because the brand names are yours, nobody’s competing with you for that intent. You manufactured it.

(P&G has been doing a version of this forever, by the way, they own both Tide AND Cheer in the same detergent aisle. Luxottica owns Ray-Ban AND Oakley AND Persol. The difference is you don’t need a billion-dollar portfolio. You need an AI and an afternoon…

this isn’t some theoretical framework. I’ve been running variations of this for Q4 campaigns for years. Mother’s Day, Black Friday, Valentine’s Day… any moment where people are actively shopping for “best [category]” content

How to Set It Up

The full setup takes 3-5 days. Build the listicle. Create the landers. Set up the campaigns. Test it on one seasonal moment and see what happens.

A few things to keep in mind - make sure your fictional brand names are unique enough that they won’t conflict with real businesses. Do your own keyword research and keep the listicle genuinely useful, if it reads like an obvious funnel. people bounce.

One more thing, you can scale this… Different listicles for different audiences and different fictional brands You’re basically building your own little media ecosystem where every brand points back to you. Here are some screenshots of the demand capture on google

Try it for your next seasonal spike then reply and tell me what happened

P.S.

If you missed it - I put together a subscriber-only framework page with the 7-step system I use for every landing page, 10 copy frameworks, and an 80+ page DTC swipe file. It’s free

Talk soon,

Kris

Kristijan Arapov is a DTC growth consultant who has managed $100M+ in Meta ad spend. He helps consumer brands break through revenue plateaus with AI-enabled marketing systems. Work with Kristijan