Growing Your Traffic With Reddit

I've managed to make it to the front page of Reddit 4 times since joining the site less than 2 years ago, the traffic & business you can get from this site is incredible. In this guide, I'll show you everything you need to know about marketing your business on Reddit.

Reddit is one of the biggest sites in the world. It can seem like a daunting place to post on, especially if you’re new to it, as the design isn’t exactly the easiest to use in the world. In this guide, I’ll be showing you how I’ve managed to get on the front page of Reddit 4 times, over 12,000 link karma and send a ton of traffic to my properties, and exactly how you can grow the same kind of traffic with this site.

Table of Contents

How Does Reddit Work?

Reddit is split into millions of “Subreddits” which each hold a different community, share different kinds of content, have different rules and moderators. Its essentially a mini-forum for each Subreddit.

Some examples of Subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/ – /r/funny, where people submit funny things they’ve found around the internet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/ – /r/aww anything cute.. Animals, babies, that kinda thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo – /r/bigseo, the #1 SEO community on the site (10k+ SEO Users)

And millions and millions more…

If you’re trying to get traffic, you need to learn the basics Reddit and it’s etiquette, which communities to target and how to target them. In this guide, I’ll be covering each of those steps, in detail.

[well]Bonus Tip: All links on Reddit are DoFollow, meaning you can build really nice, social backlinks across a range of pages on the site. You’ll see a lot of temporary boosts for certain pages when one of your submissions does well on the site.[/well]

Finding The Right Communities For You

As there are a ton of communities out there, we need to lock down the precise communities that’ll be good for your business.

In our case, we’re wanting to find subreddits related to “SEO”:

The first community has over 27,500 subscribers, which isn’t too bad, but isn’t very good compared to some of the traffic you’ll be getting from bigger Subreddits, but the digital marketing industry is fairly small compared to things like cars, technology or books.

When you click through to each Subreddit, go straight to the right sidebar which tells you all about the subreddit, links you to any further links for the community and generally will have a list of rules within it, example:

A lot of subreddits will link to other subreddits, like the one above, this means you’ll easily find more places related to the niche you’re targeting.

Once you’ve found a few subreddits, you’ll want to head back to the Reddit homepage, head to the left hand side, look for “multireddits” and click the “create” button:

Then go to the right sidebar and add in the subreddits you just found:

Having a multireddit means you can easily sort through the content within them, you can view my multireddit here.

Creating Your “Targeted Content”

Now that you have a multireddit made, you want to go to the “Top” button on your multireddit’s nav bar:

This will list the highest upvoted posts in all of the subreddits you’ve just found, giving you a clearer view of what kind of content makes it the the top of these subreddits.

In the industry that I’ve targeted, it seems that all of the subreddits like organized information and/or lists.

Here are some example headlines I could do:

Basic SEO: Covered in 29 FAQs – Example
A Collection of Over 100 Different SEO Tools – Example
How To Get Backlinks From The Best Websites in the World with This Black Hat Technique – Example

From testing, the best way to submit your links to any subreddit seems to be submitting a text post with a rundown of the contents of the post (or “TLDR” aka too long, don’t read) linking to the post (or several posts) in an informative way. e.g. A post that did really well in the /r/seo subreddit was:

Inserting one of your links, or several of your own links into a list form, with an introduction before the list. Content curation on reddit works really well.

[well]Bonus Tip: Try to provide value over clickbait for your own pages and you’ll see a lot more upvotes and comments on your posts. Becoming an authority in any community, especially on Reddit, is highly valuable.[/well]

Submitting Your Content

The submission form on Reddit is really simple, first you choose whether you want to submit a text post or just a link:

As I said above, text posts with links inside tend to work the best.

Next you’ll want to submit a title. Headlines are really important on Reddit, making sure you have the best possible clickbait to pull people in is essential, look at the headlines used on your top multireddit list and you’ll be able to get a better idea of what attracts attention within your target audience.

The next box will depend whether you’ve selected link or text, if you’ve selected link then just insert the URL of the content you want to promote. If you’ve selected text, then you’ll need to know a few things.

Reddit has formatting, like how you’d do <strong> or <b> to bold a word in HTML, you’d do ** at the start of the text you want to bold, and at the end, like:

[syntax type=”html”]**Example Bold Sentence**[/syntax]

Here’s the full list of formatting options:

It’s fairly simple, and you’ll quickly memorize how to do it once you’ve used the platform for a bit.

The next box is where you select the subreddit to post to, you can only submit to one subreddit at a time.

Then you’ll have an options box which asks if you want the replies to a thread to be sent to your inbox (you do, as you’ll want to see when someone comments on your submission) and a “submit” button, which submits the post you’ve just created to the subreddit.

Reddit Etiquette

Reddit actually has a dedicated page for this, but most subreddits will have their own set of etiquette.

There’s a more general list of rules that most subreddits will abide by:

Don’t be promotional, shoving your own content down people’s throats tends to not work on this site – Format it around helpful information and you’ll see a lot better traffic and engagement numbers.
Use proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.. Or the Grammar Nazis will get you.
Read the rules of every subreddit you submit and comment on.

Make sure to contribute to the communities outside of just submitting your own content, if you’re an avid reader of your industries news, then submitting other people’s work will increase your karma which helps with removing any new account restrictions, and gives you more “visibility” when submitting. As well as “cloaks” your own submissions with an array of other ones, most subreddits will just straight up ban you if you’re purely submitting your own content, or content from just one website.

Hitting The Front Page

There’s 2 ways to “hit the front page”, you can either hit the front page of a Subreddit (fairly easy for most subreddits under 50,000 subscribers) or hit the actual front page of Reddit, which I’ve managed to pull off 4 times with just one account.

Hitting The Front Page of a Subreddit

There’s been several occasions that I’ve hit the front page of a subreddit I’ve purposefully targeted with content.

Here’s a few examples of posts I’ve done that have resulted in hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to my sites:

I used to run a semi-popular league of legends blog, I made and submitted a meme to the “LeagueOfMemes” subreddit, and hit #1 on the frontpage within just a few hours, sending thousands of visits to an image file on my blog, which then converted to visitors going to other parts of the site.
I wanted to try and push journalists to this blog, so I found a lesser known news-related subreddit, made an article specifically for this subreddits community, and it hit the #1 spot within just 3 hours.
I used to run a 420-friendly blog, found a subreddit which wasn’t the biggest on Reddit, but enjoyed articles related to news and facts that bigged up the drug. So, I found a recent article via Google News, and essentially copied it, re-named the title to a more click-bait oriented title, and it hit the #1 spot on the subreddit within just 5 hours.

Hopefully these examples will give you an even better idea of subreddit-specific targeting. My Reddit profile also has a load more examples of where I’ve made submissions resulting in a lot of traffic for my websites.

Hitting The Reddit Front Page

You’ll generally need to be able to get between 3,000 and 8,000 upvotes within about a 5-10 hour period to be able to hit the frontpage of Reddit. Here’s the 4 posts I managed to get onto the front page, and a description for each:

Dear Santa – A cartoon of “louise” writing a letter to santa, ironic and sometimes dark humor tends to work very well on Reddit.
Budget Economy – A picture from the news on the Australian PM funding Anti-Terrorism initiatives, with a misspelling on the news agencies behalf. Though personally, I think the title made it so popular.
In Response – This was a meme about the “AMA” (or “Ask Me Anything” which is a popular Reddit post style) done by the Westboro Baptist Church, which ended very, very badly.
God & Gays – Another meme, this time by the popular online series “Cyanide & Happiness” which always do well on Reddit.

Increasing your karma on Reddit is like your badge of honor on the site. Submitting popular items to not get traffic is a good way to build up reputation on the site, and a strong account.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this post, and it helps you push those traffic numbers up on Reddit. Drop a comment with your experiences and tips for using Reddit in the comments below.

I just released my free 15,000 word marketing eBook here, if you haven’t already, check it out.