If at the beginning of this year you started a company to cash in on the intensifying craze for cannibidinol-based products, there’s a 97 percent chance you’ll be out of business by the time Christmas rolls around. Contrast that shocking statistic with the first-year failure rates of most other ventures – 20 percent.

The reason cannibidinol (CBD) startups run such an extraordinarily high risk of failure—despite the CBD market being poised to surpass $1 billion in annual U.S. sales—is that it’s almost impossible to attract customers from the two most influential digital platforms on the planet. Those would be Google and Facebook, which, together, deliver57 percent of all online advertising pitches to Internet users. Trouble is both Google and Facebook (along with Facebook’s subsidiary, Instagram) forbid ads that mention CBD.

Fortunately, however, there are workarounds you can employ to attract CBD customers via Google and Facebook. Before I walk you through them, you need to appreciate what’s happening in the CBD industry right now.

Relaxation of Laws

You perhaps already know that CBD is a chemical substance derived from the cannabis family of plants. The best-known member of that family is marijuana—under federal law, a Schedule I controlled drug. Marijuana qualifies as such because, in addition to CBD, it also contains tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). The intoxicating effects of marijuana come from THC.

What CBD does is create mellow feelings and a sense of well-being. But CBD enthusiasts have been very successful in using little more than word-of-mouth to convince growing numbers of consumers that the compound also offers myriad health benefits. These include pain relief, beautified skin, and successful treatment of a range of diseases.

Still, in the eyes of many law enforcers, CBD and THC are joined at the hip—and a menace to society. But that is changing. Thirty-three states now allow marijuana and its derivative substances to be used for medical purposes. Ten states permit purely recreational consumption of the drug. A grand total of 47 states let residents legally sell and buy CBD-based products.

On top of this, Congress last year authorized all 50 states to okay the making of CBD products derived from commercial hemp, a cannabis cousin of marijuana. Taken together, consumer demand and permissive laws are giving rise to forecasts that the CBD market in the U.S. alone will go from just north of $500 million in 2018 to $813 million by the end of this year and then close out 2020 at $1.3 billion.

And that’s without any help from Google or Facebook. Imagine how much higher those sales figures might be if the two platforms lifted their bans on CBD advertising (perhaps Rolling Stone magazine anticipates exactly that; it thinks the CBD market in three years will be worth $22 billion).

CBD Ad Workarounds

Currently, Google bars hawking “substances that alter mental state for the purpose of recreation or otherwise induce ‘highs’”. The online giant also refuses ads that feature instructional content related to buying or using recreational drugs. Facebook maintains similar guidelines for acceptable advertising.

Fortunately, there are workarounds. So it is possible to peddle CBD products on Google and Facebook without running afoul of the companies’ bans. Here are a few suggestions.

Create a squeeze page to act as a buffer between your CBD product and the restrictive ad policies. A squeeze page is a specialized web landing page that aims to collect visitor contact information, voluntarily given, for the purpose of generating an email subscriber list. What you’ll do in this instance is develop Google and Facebook ads inviting readers to learn more about the problem of, say, severe acne. Readers who click the ads’ supplied link will then be whisked to your squeeze page where awaits them a promise to send via email detailed information about treatments available for eliminating unsightly papules and pustules. However, the word CBD appears nowhere on the squeeze page. The first mention of it occurs in the email you subsequently send. It’s important to exercise this restraint because Google and Facebook monitor every page to which you direct traffic—and one of the reasons they do this is to see if that page violates their ad policies. If they detect references to CBD, you’re cooked.

Only hint that the advertised product contains CBD. There are ways to write a Google or Facebook ad to say you’re selling CBD without actually saying so. For example, CBD typically comes in the form of oil and is widely known for its ability to soothe jittery nerves. If you confect a headline that states “Healing Oil for Anxiety Relief,” readers looking for a CBD product will likely be able to infer that your advertised item contains ingredients derived from a cannabis plant. But you don’t have to rely on coded language alone to signal what’s in your product. You can strengthen the allusion to CBD by dropping into the background of your ad a photograph of a marijuana leaf. For some reason, the bots and crawlers Google and Facebook utilize to catch disallowed words ignore non-text content.

State that the product is made from hemp. Google has recently become less uptight about ads containing the words “hemp” or “hemp oil,” possibly because of that new federal law giving states the freedom to legalize CBD extraction from commercial hemp (the official title of that law, by the way, is the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, better known as simply the Farm Bill). Consumers dialed into the whole CBD movement will understand that when your ad speaks of hemp it’s really talking about CBD.

There’s actually one more workaround, but it’s proprietary so I can’t divulge it. I can only reveal that it employs totally above-board white-hat SEO techniques.

Thanks to the availability of the workarounds I’ve described, it is possible to run CBD ad campaigns on Google and Facebook that cost less than $1 per click (believe me when I say that such a low price is extremely rare for an industry as strong as this one is). But a word of caution: these workarounds carry the risk that Google and Facebook will catch on to what you’re doing. In the event that happens, they can respond by shuttering your account. My advice is to not try this yourself at home unless you’re confident you know what you’re doing.