How I get traffic from Reddit
I think we all want to get some of that sweet sweet Reddit traffic. I've tried tons of stuff and lots of marketing tactics for my SaaS Boilerplate getparthenon.com. But by far my biggest source of traffic is Reddit.
At first, my approach was to just create blog posts. And to be fair, this works for getting traffic and generating brand awareness. With the idea of content marketing that people need 20 touches before they buy, it's a long strategy. Also, it generates, in my opinion, low-quality traffic. People are interested in the topic I'm writing about but not in my actual product. While they may be in the target market they're often not in the right place to buy.
My latest approach which is generating about 30% of my traffic and getting leads is being active in the community. I realised that one way to find people was if I replied to threads and comments that were related and where people were showing signals that my product is something they want to use.
I've also realised that when you're one of the first ones to reply you normally end up with more upvotes than the ones who reply with better comments later. So the speed of response was also important.
So I built SpyGather.com to help me do that. It lets me monitor subreddits for specific phrases and sends me alerts when it finds a match. And since I'm an expert and passionate about the subject I'm able to reply with something that is thoughtful and helpful which leads people to clicking the link to my product.
Over time I've been adding more and more search terms to find the best quality conversations to be part of.
In the last 2 months, I would say this has been the best marketing move I've made by far. When people said to engage with the community and talk to people and go where the customers are, they were right. I was just too lazy.
From my own experience, I recently had a post that got to the top within hours even though I was selling my company's service. The reason it went so well is because this was a programming language community and I was posting a course that is going to be taught by the creator of this language. I believe that with the excessive criticism culture that goes along with Reddit my guideline on posting things on Reddit is always keeping in mind "listen, you're talking to diehard fans of X"
If you get to the top of /r/programming it's super good. I was at the top of that once and I got 30,000 hits in the first 24 hours.
Getting to the top of /r/php gets you about 500-1,000 hits within the first 24 hours. Midway on /r/php will get you 200-500 hits within 24 hours.
"I've also realised that when you're one of the first ones to reply you normally end up with more upvotes than the ones who reply with better comments later."
@that_guy_iain This is a really good marketing hack. It could also work for twitter, where if some accounts post on a topic with relevant keyword, you could get a notification for it. Targeting popular accounts with lots of followers might do the trick!
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Also quick feedback on the your website SpyGather, the blue really seems very high contrast and grey text on it may not look the best. Can try a more subtle shade of blue. Looks cool otherwise!
It does work for Twitter. Lots of folk put their notifications on for when a big account tweets so they can reply and be one of the first to get followers.
Moderators on reddit are pretty good in my experience at blocking spam. I shared something I was working on once (rather than meaningfully contributed to conversation) and the moderator sent me a polite message that it was not the proper forum. Fine line between marketing and contributing sometimes
How do you go around Reddit's rule of no self-promotion? I've even had to go so far as to create a new account because of account removal. Congrats on your success, by the way!
Reddit doesn't really have a no self-promotion rule. Some subreddits do and those that do the moderates are tough. But in my experience, if you don't promote all the options and not just your option they let your comment stay. But I've only posted a few times on subreddits that have a hard no self-promotion rule so maybe they just skipped by the moderators.
Good to know. I'm new to this, so I'm wondering: Do you just look for subreddits that are not as strict but still within the niche of your product? And do you do more of creating posts about your product, or lean towards more commenting and responding to other posts/comments about your product?
So I write blog posts. These get traffic - sometimes a few hundred sometimes tens of thousands. But the quality of the traffic is poor IMO.
I've started to reply to people more and find people who may be interested. I am not overly bothered if the comment gets deleted since often the person I was replying to read it and they were more likely to be interested. But the amount of traffic I was getting from just the comments on subreddits I thought would hate it has been a lot higher than I thought.
And as I said in the post, people have been talking about this route for ages I was just too lazy to do it until I could automate it.
Feels like this could be like a TweetHunter for Reddit.
Very cool!
Thanks for sharing this - I am just starting with Reddit and will definitely give you product a try.
Reddit is always underrated by founders, probably because of self promotion rules. But it's super efficient!
That's also a big source of traffic for me, I'll give your product a try for sure!
I had a bad experience with Reddit Ads. I was promoting a SaaS product and I picked some related communities for my ads. I had zero conversions. But on the other hand, I saw on Google Analytics that I was getting countless impressions within just seconds after I publish. So I decided to transfer my budget to another platform.
Been thinking about using reddit, just not sure what subreddits to target for my product. Any Ideas? I run SocialJutsu.com, a Hootsuite alternative basically that lets people schedule posts and a few other goodies. Should I just go into the hootsuite subreddit and try and look for people bashing hootsuite?
What was your process for sharing blog articles on Reddit?
Did you use any other third-party apps for distribution?
I just post them normally. I've found timing is important. Doing it while the Americans are awake gets the best results.
My personal experience: a few weeks ago I launched a small side-project directly related to Reddit. I posted it to /r/SideProject and /r/somethingimade. The result was positive, lots of feedback and around 12k users in a couple of days.
However after that it plummeted. Once it left the first page in those subreddits it was over.
My product is very tied to Reddit's own content. And for those who don't know, there is a lot of NSFW (as in, adult) content on Reddit, and consequently on my side-project.
I thought about marketing it specifically towards that, but most NSFW-centric subreddits are very much against self-promotion. So I ended not going through that route. I believe this is true of many other communities there.
At the end of the day, I generated around 5€ of ad revenue and learned quite a bit. My conclusion: Reddit is a good platform for getting your product to be known, but it's not that good for continued efforts on making your brand known.