Today, I’m going to show you how one marketer cracked Reddit traffic.
First, let’s meet Ryan Stewart. Ryan is the founder of Webris- one of the top seo agencies in Miami.
Today, his blog averages 200K monthly visitors.
When he first launched his blog back in 2015, the numbers weren’t that promising.
SEO takes time to see results; Ryan was looking for new traffic sources while waiting for Google to rank his new blog posts.
Want to know how I made it happen? I’ll show you what I did. Click here to get instant access.
He promoted his blog using online forums and social media groups, but didn’t see good results.
He decided to work on Reddit.
How did it go?
Within his first 30 days of working on a brand new Reddit account, Ryan drove 1,691 visitors to his blog.
Not only that.
Each new blog post that he published gave him consistent traffic results.
Reddit became a traffic platform he could rely on for a steady stream of traffic to his new blog.
This is all organic traffic – traffic he acquired without spending a dime on Reddit ads.
Want to drive sustainable Reddit traffic just like Ryan did?
Let’s dive in.
Quick Guide to Reddit
To most people who are new to Reddit, the site looks like a mess – a ton of text links, upvotes, down votes, comments within threads, difficult-to-understand “karma” system etc.
If you’re totally new to Reddit, let’s cover some basics.
1. What is Reddit?
Reddit is a social and news aggregate web site where users share content and interact with other people’s content. Reddit’s participants share material they’ve written or found for the purpose of discussion within the subreddit.
2. Reddit is divided into topic-driven subreddits.
A subreddit is the same as a sub-forum, the only difference being that Reddit no longer has a Main Forum page. Based on your areas of interest, you can however many subreddits you wish to subscribe to.
3. A user (called a “redditor”) can contribute content in 2 ways: links and text.
Example of a link submission:
When the link is clicked on, you are redirect to the link’s destination page
Example of a text submission:
Note: Links are allowed in text submissions, too.
4. Every redditor has to pick a subreddit for their submissions.
5. Other redditors will interact with your submissions in 3 ways.
They can comment, upvote or down vote your submissions. The position of your submissions on a subreddit’s page is determined by the number of upvotes you receive. The more upvotes you get, the higher you’ll rank.
The Steps to Successful Reddit Traffic Generation
To be successful with Reddit marketing, you must first establish a brand new account with authority in the eyes of redditors.
How to do that?
Get more “karma”.
The more karma you have, the higher authority you are seen to have in the eyes of Redditors.
Karma is the scoreboard of Reddit- a reward earned for posting good stuff.
Redditors take pride in their karma, and karma is often associated with respect on Reddit.
How to collect karma?
You get karma when:
1. Your comments are upvoted (comment karma).
2. Your links are upvoted (link karma).
Redditors can view your karma at the top of the sidebar on your profile page:
What’s the fastest way to collect karma?
Replicate successful posts in large and active subreddits.
Here is how Ryan does it:
Since the account Ryan was using had a long history if spamming links, he registered a new account and began building karma for it.
NOTE: If you acquire a bad reputation in Reddit, you’ll be fighting an uphill, no-win battle to clean up your record. Don’t waste time; register a brand new account and start all over again.
Once he signed up with a new account, Ryan looked for large and active subreddits.
Within those, he looked for older link posts which received high upvotes counts, changed their titles, and reposted them.
He repeated this process a couple times every day over the next 8 weeks.
Here is one of his posts in the subreddit about wine:
This post got him an easy link karma score of 17.
Other than replicating popular posts on Reddit, Ryan sourced viral content on his Facebook feeds to post on Reddit.
After doing this for 8 weeks, Ryan built a score of five thousand link karma for his new account.
After you’ve built up your “authority” with karma points, it’s time to start driving some traffic back to your website.
How to do it?
Here are the steps Ryan took to start getting Reddit traffic to his blog.
Step 1: Join the right subreddit
Make sure you post in the right subreddit.
Before you post in any subreddit, check them out to see if the popular posts within the subreddit is aligned with your blog content.
Here is what you do to find subreddit within the Reddit website:
Login to your Reddit account.
On the main page, look for “edit” at the top right cornet. Click on it.
On the next screen, enter your keywords in the search column to find subreddits related to your niche.
Spend time going through the content in those subreddits for material related to your niche.
Pay attention to the content that has a lot of upvotes as this is the type of content that people are looking for and enjoy.
Make sure the content your plan to post is going to be well-receive.
If you share something that’s not related to the subreddit, the moderators won’t hesitate to ban your account.
It’s worth it to spend the time finding the right subreddit for your submissions.
Step 2: Share great content
Before you post anything, make sure you read the rules. Each subreddit its own rules in the right sidebar.
Most subreddits require you to build some “comment karma” before posting.
It doesn’t take long to do it as most of them usually don’t require you to build a ton of karma before you can post anything.
For example: this subreddit only requires 10 comment karma before you can submit a text post.
Only leave informed comments on other people’s posts and you should be able to attain the karma requirement pretty fast.
Once you’ve met the karma requirement, submit your content.
Don’t merely grab and post everything on your blog to the community, though.
Make sure you are submitting great, targeted content to the discussion community.
If you were to dumping everything on your blog to Reddit, you’d likely be laughed out the community.
Redditors hate self-promotion. And they’re not afraid to tell you that they hate you.
If you spam too much, they will badmouth you, and try to have you banned. So, only share good stuff that’s aligned with the subreddit you’re a part of.
Ryan made sure he wrote quality content on his blog, and shared the best targeted posts in the subreddits he joined.
Check out Reddit’s definition of spam here.
Step 3: Spend time on your title
Take a look at Reddit’s site layout:
Do you notice every post is fighting for attention?
When you submit a post, the title of your post will be the only thing shown on the main page of a subreddit.
It’s the only place you get to grab attention, so spend a lot of time working on your title.
You want to create titles that are powerful to force Redditors to click on them and read what you have to share.
How do you do that?
The world’s greatest living copywriter- Gary Bencivenga came out with this formula for powerful titles:
Getting attention = Benefit + Curiosity
Display some kind of benefits in your title, and make your reader wonder what the content is going to say.
That’s the formula to get the attention you want for your titles.
Check out these titles on r/Entreprenur subreddit.
These titles are applying the same formula and get tons of clicks and upvotes to their posts.
Apply this formula to your titles and you won’t go wrong… consider a crash course on copywriting 😉
Step 4: Timing, timing, timing
Most people post on Reddit any time they feel like doing it.
Ryan didn’t do that.
When he posts, he wants the maximum number of views he can possibly get.
How does he determine the best time?
He posts when most of the redditors for the targeted subreddit are online.
When looking at a new subreddit, Ryan spends a week to observing the activity to nail the peak time to post.
He visits the subreddits different times during the day, and records the number of active users for each time period.
Here is a week’s worth of data for 3 subreddits Ryan was interested in targeting:
The data indicated 6PM on Tuesday and Thursday are when most redditors are online, making that the best times to post.
All of Ryan’s submissions were posted during those peak hours to optimize views.
Spend the time to research the subreddits in which you wish to post, and only post at the peak time just like what Ryan did to maximize your post exposure.
Conclusion
Hopefully Ryan’s experience has shown you how to get your blog posts in front of enough redditors that you see a significant increase in number of visitors to your blog, or snag excellent traffic for your new blog.
Yes, it takes time in the beginning to build karma and research the prime time for posting.
But once you have your numbers ready, you will get traffic back to your blog every time you submit a post.
It’s hard work at the beginning, but easy at the end.
Give Reddit a shot.
If you do it right, Reddit is certainly a source your blog can rely on for targeted traffic time after time, and targeted Reddit traffic is the very best kind.
Want to know how I made it happen? I’ll show you what I did. Click here to get instant access.
Thanks for the great info, I have been negleting Reddit for a long time because of its confusing theme. But I will give it a try now. I hope it will favour me.
Awesome. Keep me informed on the progress, Chukwudi.
Hi, can you explain exactly how to look for older link posts in Reddit ? It seems I can only access to first 1000 links via the next button down the result list …
On the main page, look for “top” at the top navigation link. Click on it. You’ll be able to access more link posts. Another option: try more subreddits
Great post. Very actionable. Reddit suddenly seems much more simple!
That’s cool, I think I will implement this strategy with my blog. Hopefully I will get some results
Reddit is so underrated because it really can drive a lot of traffic to your website. I also know a lot of people who still don’t use Reddit or don’t even know about it. Yikes!