Driving traffic through Reddit
There are certainly marketing approaches more scalable than posting and engaging on Reddit.
However, I love marketing on Reddit because:
- There’s at least one subreddit, if not many, for each niche
- It’s easy to find discussions you can add value to, making it an easy way to get in front of your audience
- Links and comments you leave persist. A good post and comment will have a decent lifespan. Even once it falls off the first page of a subreddit, it’ll be found for years as people search on that topic.
- When you find your system, it doesn’t take long
- It’s free
Unfortunately, the links are ‘nofollow’, which means they won’t help provide SEO juice to the site you’re linking to. But that’s okay, it’s still well worth the time.
Posting on Reddit
Publishing posts there can be quite effective, but you need to know the subreddit you’re dealing with:
- Some don’t allow links
- Some look down upon links if done in a clearly promotional way
- Sometimes you’ll get away with links, but get a lot of haters in the comments
Here’s an example of a post of mine that drove a lot of newsletter subscribers:
Engaging on Reddit
An even easier, and less risky approach to driving traffic from Reddit is to leave valuable comments on existing posts, and periodically drop a relevant link to your product, newsletter, or blog.
Why commenting is better than posting
Most subreddit moderators are much more lenient when it comes to links in comments than links in posts, and I’ve never had any push-back or snarky comments with this approach.
How to find posts you can add value to
A simple way to find posts in your target audience is:
- Create a list of relevant subreddits for your niche(s). The easiest way to do this is to go here, type in keywords related to your niche(s), and create a list for each.
- Each day or so, go into each of those subreddits and scan or search for topics you can add value to.
How to leave an effective comment
Look, you and I both know we’re here to drive traffic to whatever it is we’re promoting.
But we aren’t here to go spamming links. I promise that won’t do anything positive for you.
When you find a post you can add value to, the key is the be genuinely helpful and thoughtful.
Every 3-5 comments you leave, find a way to add a link or reference to your products, newsletter, or even just a blog post of yours to generate awareness. And sprinkle links to products and sites that aren’t yours on occasion too. Done this way, your links won’t be looked down upon.
Here are a couple of examples:
A Reddit comment linking directly to a product
A Reddit comment linking to a blog post
Bonus tip: Ride a popular comment
Here’s a bonus tip that can work great:
If you find a hot comment on a post - that is, a comment that due to the number of upvotes has risen well above the rest, and is therefore the first comment listed below the post - you can piggyback off of it.
You do this by leaving the best comment under that comment.
If you manage this, you’re guaranteed to get a lot of eyeballs.
Monitoring subreddits and topics
I used to just keep links handy of all the subreddits I monitor, and go through them a few times a week.
That works, but now I use GummySearch, which helps discover and monitor subreddits in my niches significantly more easily and quickly.
I set up separate audiences for each that I want to monitor. Each audience in GummySearch is a group of subreddits.
I have separate audiences for each of my niches, sometimes multiple audiences for a given niche.
GummySearch lets me set up keyword searches within each of those that I can save and easily reference at any point to see the new posts that match those keywords.
I then get an email when there are new posts found, and I can hop into the conversation without missing a beat. It didn’t take long to get this set up and once I did, my process became silky smooth.
I aim to spend 5-15 minutes a day checking GummySearch to see what value I can add to my niche communities there. And when I don’t I still get the email digest which often has at least one golden thread for me to jump into.