How To Use Reddit To Drive Traffic To Your Website
Reddit – the front page of internet has been a haunted place for many marketers.
Many just think of Reddit as another social media platform where you can just post and leave to the audience. If you do that, do will literally be thrashed, humiliated, laughed off and even banned from it.
But there are some who have effectively utilized this platform and have generated huge amount of traffic.
In this article, I’ll explain you how you can drive traffic to your site using Reddit by covering the following points.
- What is Reddit
- Traffic stats
- How it works
- How to use Reddit to drive traffic to your site
- Know your audience
- Let them to know you
- Type of content
- Timing
- Advertising
If you don’t want to read the whole article, I have prepared a cheat sheet in an infograph which you will find at the end of the article.
What is Reddit
Reddit is a social sharing platform founded in 2005 by two University of Virginia students, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The name Reddit comes from ‘read/edit’ and ‘read it’. Users of Reddit call themselves ‘Redditors’ which is also a combination of ‘Reddit’ and ‘editors’.
Reddit came into popularity during the SOPA Blackout and AMA with President Obama.
Traffic Stats
- 234 million unique users as of now
-  8+ billion pageviews per month on average
- Over 850,000+ sub-reddits
- 700,000+ comments in 2015
How it works
Well, Reddit as you might have understood from the video is not your typical social sharing platform. It is your “KARMA” that defines is counted. Jokes aside, redditors really take posts on Reddit seriously. If find that someone is just posting for marketing purposes, they will kill it, literally kill it.
But if you post something funny and interesting, you will definitely see yourself on the front page of reddit.
Let’s see how it actually works.
Posts on Reddit are judged by the amount of upvotes and downvotes it has. The more the upvotes, the higher you go in rankings. But you have to make sure you get them as quickly as possible.
Content of the post matter a lot. If your content isn’t good and redditors find it spammy, they won’t waste any time in downvoting it. This will directly impact your karma. Yes, I wasn’t joking. Reddit does calculate your karma. You karma increases as you get upvotes and decreases as you get downvotes. You might also get banned if your karma goes beyond a certain level.
Sub-reddits works the same way as hashtags works. You have to find the right sub-reddit to post your content. As you can see in the stats that there are over 850,000+ sub-reddits, so you are sure to find the one for your post.
Until now, I’ve been repeatedly saying that Reddit doesn’t like marketers and spammers. But what do they really like? What should be done in order to post promotional content and ultimately how to drive traffic from Reddit to your site? Let’s see how you can do it.
How to use Reddit to drive traffic to your site
Generating traffic from Reddit requires a particular set of skills just like Liam Neeson.
That’s not Liam Neeson, that’s one of us who don’t know how to market it on Reddit. The good thing is that you can learn these skills and they are not very hard either. Sorry for making it look like that. 
All you have to do is, read through this blog and follow the instructions and you can have your slice of Reddit traffic.
Know your audience
Reddit community is a no-nonsense place and you should keep that in mind before doing any promotions. Reddit itself states that it isn’t a marketplace in it’s user agreement document.
Don’t just start posting on Reddit like you do on other social sites. You need to know your audience, understand what sort of posts work on Reddit, how redditors communicate with each other.
Since you will be posting in your related categories or sub-reddits, you will have to keep a close eye on what’s going on in it.
Let them know you
After you have got an idea about how your target audience communicate with each other, the next important step is to let them know you. Before starting to do any promotional work, start just by commenting on other’s posts. The rule here is to talk to them and be active. But don’t comment just for the sake of commenting, it should actually be relevant and helpful.
By helping out others you will built a rapport and your comments might get upvoted and your karma will build up.
One thing that I’ve noticed in Reddit, that they love funny people. Most of the top posts are funny only, be it an image or funny incident, redditors love it. I will talk about what content to put next but just be funny, you will reach more people and hence more people will know you.
Type of content
Well, I just said, be funny. But more than funny you have to be relevant. Yes, being funny works most of the time, but might not be relevant to you or your audience.
It has to add value to whatever sub-reddit you would like to post. The more tailored and relevant content you post, the higher the change of getting traffic. You’ll also have to make sure that you don’t select a broader audience, then you will be like a needle in a hay stack. Avoid that.
Post your best content in an interesting and engaging manner. Suppose you want to post nutritional tips about reducing belly fat.
A topic like “X tips to reduce belly fat” won’t work.
You’ll have to make it interesting.
Say something like, “What belly fat? I never had any” or “I don’t know how XÂ minutes got me a flat tummy”.
So, you get the point. Even if it is a simple thing you want to post, you have to be creative. Generic post don’t work at all on Reddit.
Let’s see today’s top posts analyze their titles.
You read any of the titles, and I bet you will want to read or check out what’s inside. That’s how interesting reddit posts are.
Also read:Â How to Repurpose Your Content to Boost Traffic
The #1 post is one of the hottest post of today. And certainly it deserves to be.
Check the #3 post. It has 23,000 comments. What interesting about it is that its there’s a question in the title. And the person who posted it is asking for opinions about Beats headphones. Which clearly shows that if you want to communicate with your audience, post a question.
One more thing that I would like to add here is the upvotes on your post. Reddit gives huge importance to upvotes for post rankings. The quicker you get upvoted the higher the post will go. For example, getting 100 upvotes in the first hour will count more than if you get 100 votes in 10 hours. It is also said that, the first 10 upvotes have impact as the next 100 upvotes which has the same impact as the next 1000 upvotes.
The following chart might help…
Timing
Since most of the Reddit users are from US, it is highly recommended to post according to US timings. If you want to get local traffic then you can definitely post at your local time.
Here’s a chart which shows the traffic on reddit over time in a week.
In the chart, it is clearly written that Sunday, 9 AM (EST) is the best time to post on Reddit. Else, morning 8 to 11 you get good amount of traffic.
Apart from learning the best timing to post on Reddit, it is also important to know the frequency of posts. As I’ve mentioned many a times, Reddit is not a typical social media platform, it doesn’t like to receive frequent marketing posts from same user. For starters, once in a month will just do fine. Remember once you post, be active and reply to every comment.
Advertising
The easiest way to reach at the front page of Reddit is to advertise on it. I personally like Reddit advertising, since you Reddit allows only one ad per sub-reddit or you can show ads everywhere. DuckDuckGo achieved great results by doing Reddit ads.
If you want targeted ads, you can target a  specific sub-reddit and that ad will be show on that sub-reddit page to everyone. If you want it whole, go for the untargeted ad which will be shown to everyone. I would recommended to start with targeted ads as they convert better, but you just never know what will work for you.
Cheat sheet on generating traffic from Reddit
Final words
Reddit is a no-nonsense place. It comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. If you learn it the right way, you will grow your traffic exponentially.
At last one thing that you should always remember when you want to drive traffic from Reddit is:
Don’t be a marketer, be a redditor.
Let me know about your experience with Reddit and how you use Reddit to drive traffic to your site. Or if you are a Reddit user, help others to know about it in the comments section.
Other ways of generating traffic:
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