I have one simple goal for my blog:
Increase traffic every month.
I’ve been doing a pretty damn good job meeting that goal, as traffic has doubled each month for the last 4.
However, in March I ran into a problem. Traffic was leveling off and beginning to decline.
I promote content hard through online forums and social media groups. These efforts were producing diminishing returns, as I wasn’t reaching new users.
I knew I had to explore new and larger platforms – I had to start using Reddit.
Well, let me rephrase that. I had to start successfully using Reddit.
I’d been halfheartedly promoting content on Reddit since my site launched but got no traction. I decided to put in the effort to figure it out.
I bought info products from “gurus”, asked questions in forums and I read blogs, but they were all telling me information I already knew:
- Redditors are a pain in the ass
- Redditors hate link spam
Come on man, anyone who has EVER posted a link to Reddit knows that!
I was desperate.
I took to Elance and posted a job:
I got an interesting reply from a 17 year old kid who’d been using Reddit for 8 years. He showed me screenshots from his Analytics account with over 400,000 referral visits from Reddit in the last year.
I hired him.
Over the next 2 weeks I paid the kid a consulting fee to show me the ropes.
At first, I was skeptical of his advice – he wasn’t telling me anything revolutionary like I expected. Nevertheless, I took his advice and implemented the changes he suggested.
In the last 27 days I’ve driven 1,691 visits from Reddit.
More importantly, each post I make drives consistent results. Reddit is now a platform I can rely on for quality traffic.
In this post, I’m going to share his consulting advice and exactly how I’m applying it to drive traffic.
Quick Usability Guide to Reddit (Feel Free to Skip)
Before we get into it, I need to cover some basics. I’d be using Reddit for almost 2 years and admittedly, I didn’t fully understand how it worked.
1. Reddit is, for the most part, an anonymous network. While you create your own username, you can’t change it. There is nothing to customize – no avatar, bio, links, etc. You are what you post, that’s it.
2. You can contribute content in 2 ways: text and links. When a text submission is clicked, it takes the user to an interim screen where you can add unlimited text to explain more (you can also include links within your text). When a link submission is clicked, it takes the user to the link’s destination page.
This is an example of a text submission. As you can see, you can still include links in a text submission. Text submissions are denoted by (self.subreddit)
Example of a link submission. When you click on the thread, it takes you directly to the link’s destination page.
3. You have to select a Subreddit for each submission. A subreddit is a collection of similar content (i.e. /r/marketing, /r/funny, etc). Each Subreddit has a corresponding list of subscribers – your content gets sent to the feeds’ of those users.
4. Submissions are interacted with by other Redditors in 3 ways: upvotes, downvotes and comments. The more upvotes your post receives, the higher it climbs in the Subreddit feed. Getting upvotes on your content is the key to visibility.
The Keys to Reddit Success
I can’t completely discredit what I learned from the other “gurus”.
Redditors are a pain in the ass. They hate link spam. They won’t hesitate to ban your account without notice. It’s really important you understand that.
With that being said, let’s dive into the advice the consultant gave me.
I can break it down into 2 main lessons:
- Establishing an account with authority
- Following Reddit best practices
Disappointed?
I was too.
I was looking for a shortcut, a way to growth hack Reddit. When I took the advice and started applying it to my own marketing, I realized he was right.
"The biggest secret to Reddit marketing is that there is no secret."
Everyone wants their content to go viral so they ignore the basics. When you try and hit every ball out of the park, more often than not you swing and miss.
By following the basics, you can drive steady traffic every time you post.
Lesson 1: Building Accounts with Authority
On Reddit, “authority” = karma and gold.
Karma comes from two places:
- When your links are upvoted
- When your comments are upvoted
NOTE: upvoted text posts (self.post) do not count towards karma, even if links are included within the text.
I’m a data driven marketer, so naturally, I had to test this out for myself.
The account I’d been using had a karma of 4, his had a karma of 34,567. Over the course of 2 weeks we both posted the same link, with the same title, in the same Subreddit (on different days).
The one with karma always performed better.
Why?
You can’t see the poster’s karma count:
Reddit is desktop network (site is not mobile responsive and there is no official app). That means Redditors can easily click on your profile to see your history.
The higher your karma, the more trust you command.
More trust = more clicks = more traffic.
How to Build Accounts with Karma
The account I was using had a total karma of 4 and a long history of spamming links.
We went to work building a new account with a clear history.
Before, I was pushing my own content over and over in the same Subreddits. Once you get a bad rep in a Subreddit, you’ll never get past it.
The best way to get karma is to find large, active Subreddits and replicate posts that are working.
I did this a couple of times daily for a 8 weeks and was able to build over 5,000 link karma on my account.
Example 1:
My mom drinks a shit load of wine (love you ma!). I was back in Boston last week for a wedding so I stopped by her house. When I tried to say hi to her, she was in the zone reading this article:
I thought to myself:
Hmm, if my mom loves wine and she loves this article. There’s just gotta be other wine lovers who will love it too!”
So, I searched for a Subreddit about wine and posted it. It got me 21 link karma.
Example 2:
I played football in college. A few of my teammates and I are in a group chat and keep in touch daily.
We’re a group of meat heads – most of the things we pass through are funny pictures, videos and sneakers.
All I do is take the content that they send and post it Reddit:
An easy 24 link karma.
This is something that gets a lot easier with practice. Some other easy ways I build up link karma, are:
- Repost articles trending on my Twitter or Facebook Feeds
- Repost funny memes or pictures I see on Instagram
- Repost new songs that just come out
Do this 5 times a day for 60 days – your karma will grow!
Lesson 2: Following Best Practices
There are thousands of web guides about Reddit best practices. I can summarize them into 4 buckets:
- Posting useful content
- Finding the right Subreddit
- Writing perfect titles
- Posting at the right time
I’m going to walk you through some basic guidance for each of these best practices. Then, I’m going to illustrate with a real example of one of my recent posts.
Best Practice #1: Posting Great Content
Before, I was dumping everything from my blog onto Reddit.
I was consistently link spamming bad articles:
- 5 Reasons to Live in Florida
- 5 Things to Ask your Marketing Firm
- 3 Things to Keep in Mind When Hiring an SEO
They were more unhelpful than the titles suggest; the responses I got support that.
Redditors do an incredible job policing their territory – if you post unhelpful links, you’re going to get called out for it.
Redditors can (and will) click through to see your profile. When they see you’ve got a history of posting unhelpful links, you can expect an influx of down-votes or bans.
Read through the content being posted in your target Subreddit.
Does your link align with it?
If it doesn’t, don’t post it! Redditors are smart, you can’t force feed them content.
EXAMPLE
Not too long ago I wrote a post about how to increase organic traffic to your blog.
It’s a killer 5,000+ word guide on the exact steps I’ve used to drive over 10,000,000 organic visits for my clients over the past year.
Not much else to say here – It’s a great piece of content and got a great response from my network. I knew it would perform well on Reddit.
Category #2: Finding the Right Subreddit
Before, I was making a critical mistake by posting content without checking the Subreddit.
This is an extremely easy mistake to make because the “choose a subreddit” field auto populates based on the keywords you type in.
This is deceiving for 2 reasons:
- Subreddit titles don’t always reflect what the Subreddit is about
- You can’t see Subreddit size or activity
For example:
- r/blog/ is the official Reddit blog. Posting a link in there would be considered spam and detrimental to my account.
- r/bloggers/ is the right community topically, but it’s small and inactive. It’s deceiving because it shows up in the top of the Subreddit drop down.
Before you post, do your research!
From your home screen, click “edit” in the top right corner. Then, enter some keywords in the search bar.
You’ll be given a list of Subreddits based loosely on your keyword. Click on each of them. Look for:
- Subreddit size
- Content posted in the Subreddit
- Content performing well in the Subreddit
- How many active users are in the Subreddit
Make sure the content you plan to post will be received well. If it’s not, keep looking. There’s a Subreddit out there for you.
EXAMPLE
I went with /r/Entrepreneur/.
The Subreddit has good size, activity and some very similar content was performing well at that time.
Best Practice #3: Creating Great Titles
Before, I was simply copying and pasting the article’s title.
Reddit has an old school UI – it’s difficult for your content to stand out.
Your title is really the only chance you’ve got to grab users’ attention. It needs convey 3 things:
- Why they should click on your link
- Why they should read it
- Why they should upvote
You also want to make sure your title aligns with your Subreddit.
In my example, I selected the r/entrepreneur/ Subreddit. I had to make sure that my title was geared towards entrepreneurs, not digital marketers.
EXAMPLE
r/entrepreneur/ only allows text posts. Text posts are useful in this case because you’re afforded more space to explain the post.
Here’s how I set up it up:
I chose to write it from the 3rd person point of view. Since I have multiple accounts, and Reddit is anonymous, I’ve had good success with this. Redditors are sensitive to blog spam and self promotion – if you can find a way to get a 3rd party to promote you, you’ll have increased chances of success.
Category #4: Timing Content Delivery
Before, I was posting around my time schedule.
If you’re posting to Subreddits with no active users, your content will get no views.
Reddit doesn’t care about your time schedule. Each Subreddit will ebb and flow based on when the user base is online.
I keep a spreadsheet tracking user data from my target Subreddits. This data helps me to figure out when mu audience is online so I can maximize views on my content.
I wish I could give you a set time to post on Reddit. The fact is, you have to do some research on your own. Here’s what I do:
- Bookmark target Subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/)
- Visit it throughout the day at different times
- Record number of active users
- Do this for a week
Simply visit your target Subreddit – each time you refresh the page you will see how many user that are subscribed to that Subreddit are online.
EXAMPLE
I kept a week’s worth of data on 3 Subreddits (see chart below).
I found that the peak times to post were at 6 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I posted my article on blog SEO on Tuesday at 6 PM.
Wrapping It Up
Reddit is a lot of work in the beginning. It takes time to build an account, research Subreddits and get used to writing quality copy.
If you do, you’ll have the keys to quality traffic every time you post a link.
How are you using Reddit in your online marketing strategy?
Leave a comment below.
Great post Robbie. Reddit can be a bit of an intimidating place to step into, and pretty confusing too. I agree with you that the moderators do a great job policing the subreddits, but often they can come across very unwelcoming. I guess they have to deal with a lot of crap!
I’m not yet convinced about the longevity of Reddit traffic and how it would convert – it still seems to me like a source of spikes of traffic, where your content is seen but then quickly forgotten. I guess it all depends on the quality of your content.
Thanks for such a detailed and useful post anyway!
Good points Mark! You definitely need to be ultra-targeted when posting content to reddit. I’m not too worried if the content gets forgotten on reddit, as long as the traffic spike hits my site and converts 🙂 Then I’ll re-engage through social retargeting and email 🙂 Thanks for the heads up on the beta.
ah and Reddit now has a mobile site, currently in Beta 😉
Hey
Robbie Richards,
Nice article regarding reddit and I have enjoyed. You are right Reddit is just Awesome ! and Reddit is not for everyone like facebook!
I have a subreddit named
http://www.reddit.com/r/MessagingApps
which I just related to growing messaging apps
Thanks once again. I will read your blog regular I ensure.
Hi Ryan!
Very awesome post I must say!
I have been curious about traffic from Reddit and never really found good information on the topic – I have finally found a very valuable post on how to drive free traffic from Reddit! 🙂
I’m going to implement what you shared here – and hopefully get some good traffic to my blog. Reddit can definitely drive a lot of traffic online. I always knew that – just didn’t really know exactly HOW.
Thank you very much for sharing this very valuable knowledge with us man!
Keep up the great work, Ryan!! … and Robbie! 😉
Have a fantastic rest of the week!
Cheers! 😀
Thanks Freddy! Let us know how you go with the implementation.
Fantastic advice, Ryan!
I’m keen to start building up my Reddit karma and keep working on acquiring traffic other than Google.
Cheers,
Jamie
Cheers Jamie! A huge pool of traffic to be tapped in virtually every niche. Ryan lays out a solid formula anyone can follow and get results. Appreciate you stopping by and leaving a comment.
Great post! Tried using Reddit last year and was so overwhelming to me and couldn’t understand a thing! Your blog post made everything so clear! Thank you! One quick question… instead of driving traffic to a blog, do you think your strategy would work if instead the lander was a squeeze page? I’ve been looking for strategies to grow an email list by driving free traffic from Reddit.
Hey Gabby,
Thanks for reaching out. The tips Ryan outlines in the post are simple but very effective. I think in rare instances you could drive traffic to a squeeze page, but for the most part wouldn’t recommend it. Sometimes a “show reddit” type post is cool if it sends people to an informative landing page set up to collect beta users. But, I would suggest installing facebook/ twitter targeting on your posts and sending reddit traffic directly to those page – if they click through they are likely interested in the topic – then retarget them on facebook with a relevant offer/ squeeze page. Reddit is notorious for low conversion rates, so you want to have a system in place to re-engage (and convert) those users.
Thanks Robbie. Makes Reddit a lot clearer and a lot of sense. Reputation and Post quality = success.
Next time can you teach me how to make the letters on my keyboard appear on the screen? Your guide was just a touch too advanced for me.
Not sure I’m following on this one, Oliver 😉
OMG, schooled by a seventeener! These young’uns taking all our internets! 😉
On a more serious note, I lurk around Reddit a lot (for anime discussions, nosleep, and AMAs), but I haven’t mustered the guts yet to market to the Reddit crowd. Like you said, these people are crazy smart and vigilant about policing their community (which isn’t a bad thing, of course). Now I’m inspired to try these tips, too!
Let me know how it goes it Meghan!
So what’s the long term strategy for reddit if you’re just focusing on one niche. E.g. If I gain karma by posting in r/wine and r/australia and r/football, will that in any way help me while posting on other sub-reddits relevant to my business?
Hey Sanchit,
Absolutely! As Ryan explains, posting in other non-business related subreddits with content that has a track record of engagement on other platforms is a great way to quickly build karma, which will help you business-related content weigh heavier in relevant subreddits.
Great Article. I’ve tried using Reddit a couple of times and have never been able to get into it enough to see the potential benefits. I think it is time to give it another go. You mentioned that you set up multiple accounts. Did you do this to separate different interests or was this just something that happened as a result of testing the system? Do reddit users care that you have “authority” in different areas?
Hey Amy,
It sounds like Ryan was using multiple accounts primarily for testing purposes. Karma will definitely have a baring on how your content is weighted in the subreddits. I think its a smart idea to leverage trending content (even if it’s outside your niche) to get engagement and quickly grow your karma. Then, as you promote your own content in relevant subreddits the increase in karma will help get your submissions to the top of the thread. More exposure and traffic 🙂
This is very a useful post. I have had a few posts get on the front page of Reddit over the years, and the amount of traffic can be server-crushing. Make sure your site and server can handle the load- cheap hosting will shut you down pretty quick and all that traffic will go to waste.
I found that for an ad supported site model, the CTR for the traffic was not all that good, but I ended up getting lots of good backlinks from bloggers and 2nd tier news sites.
Anyway, I’m going to give Reddit another try based on these actionable steps and see how it goes.
Thanks Ryan and Robbie!
Cheers Paul!
Let me know how you go.
hi sir !!! i tried ur strategies !!! but it doesn’t increase at all -_-
Hey Robyn,
Reddit is a tough nut to crack at the best of times. Tell me what you tried, and I’ll see if I can help…
Useful post Robbie. Landed here via a blog post from Matt site. Well even I have read many post on how to generate traffic from Reddit but your post is very easy to understand & suggest actionable steps. Will definitely try them out and just while reading it I got my Karma points from 4 to 5. Well the graph will rise sharply. Here is the link https://www.reddit.com/user/jatinchhabra/
Sweet, nice work Jatin! Keep me posted on your progress.
I think this is the most precise and shortest cut towards recording success with Reddit. The information here that I love the most is the part where REPOST what’s already been there. Thanks Robbie for sharing. I think I’m now ready to kick start my Reddit journey.
Keep me posted, Okolie!
“Be a redditor not a marketer” – very wise advice. I discovered this a few months ago when I accidentally posted a link to my personal account instead of my ‘business’ account. The result was a far more positive response in the comments, more upvotes and more clicks.
I’m surprised by how willing some/many redditors are to downvote companies or anyone who’s marketing something, even if their post and/or link is very useful. The personal approach is definitely the way to go, thanks for the excellent and very actionable post.
Sooo, this is how it works!
Thanks for your advice, I’ll start using them right away
If you have an account with authority, then it is going to be easy for you to drive traffic. My friend has a really old and strong account and it helped me drive traffic to my blog and it was amazing. It certainly works if you have patience!
Cheers Robbie, thanks for sharing those tips, I was looking for some new techniques to promote some content. I once had a post of mine get on the front page of reddit.. yea, long story short it crashed my server lol.
That’s awesome, Scott! I haven’t ever had that happen. I imagine it’s a tidal wave of traffic 🙂
Hey Robbie,
I followed your link from MarkinBlog.
I have read some articles, where said that the Karma is most of part of getting more traffic. So I was starting using Reddit for gain karma but no luck.
But today, your lesson #1 “Building Accounts with Authority” completely change the way of gaining more karma and traffic.
Thanks for sharing such a great article.
– Rajinder
Thanks Rajinder! Hope things pick up for you on Reddit 🙂
I like the way you wrote it. Thanks for sharing. It is of great help.
Have tried reddit before but with little success and didn’t really gave me the results that I was expecting but this post has given me some more hopes to retry. Will definitely come to comment on the results after trying out. Thanks for the idea.
Thanks Emmy!