How I Used Reddit to Double My Newsletter Subscribers

Reddit is an excellent place for two things:

1 - Getting a massive amount of traffic from a viral post

It requires many things to happen. The perfect post with the perfect title on the perfect subreddit and a bit of luck. That's hard to do, and even people who have done it before can't do it again. It's not easy.

2 - Getting your first customers/subscribers and validate your ideas

This is for everyone. You don't need any luck. Just to know a little bit about Reddit and find the best approach to follow.

For the last couple of months, I've spent hours analyzing what works and what doesn't on Reddit—trying to understand the magic behind promoting while adding value to the platform.

Today I want to tell you how I applied the second approach to validate an idea and how I doubled my email subscribers so you can do the same.

Some Context

I started a newsletter 15 days ago. The newsletter is about my path to freedom. My learnings, what works, and what doesn’t work. Having freedom includes money, an important piece, a good lifestyle, traveling, cooking, reading, writing, drinking good coffee, etc.

So as a part of my newsletter, I wanted to have something fun to do and share and wrote this:

52 Tiny Challenges to Try Something New Every Week in 2021

The purpose is to include every week one thing that I will explore and share with my subscribers on the newsletter to try it together.

Things like: Meditation for one hour during a week, not drinking coffee for an entire week(this is something I definitely do not want to do…), or walk 20K steps every day for 7 days.

I want to do it because I want to improve and try new things. Maybe something feels amazing, and I can add it to my daily routines.

But I also wanted to have something concrete to share on Reddit.

If instead of this, I try to share something like: Join my newsletter… that’d be spam. It doesn’t offer anything.

Sharing a link without any context, benefit, or value for the reader will never work.

So once I had the short article written, I entered Reddit and shared it inside a post, like this:

I created 4 more posts, but I didn't publish them at the same time. I did it slowly, with a couple of days of difference between them, and I changed the title and the copy a bit.

These are the list of the subreddits where I posted:

r/Habits | 31 Upvotes - 2 comments

r/IWantToLearn | 13 Upvotes - 9 comments

r/WriterMotivation | 21 Upvotes - 0 comments

r/InternetIsBeautiful | 11 Upvotes - 0 comments (the post was removed)

r/getdisciplined | 3 Upvotes - 2 comments

Results

The post wasn't valuable enough to get a massive result. I just did a quick test to check what people have to say. You don’t need a perfect plan to test if something will work. Do something small, test, and think about what to do next. Feedback helps.

Numbers from the post

These are the views and subscribers from people who visited the article. Many many people subscribed, considering that it had only 588 views.

Subscribers

You can see the jump between the 23rd and the 27th. That was basically the effect of sharing the post on Reddit.

Visits

I don’t think the numbers coming from Substack are 100% accurate, but it’s enough to have an idea.

I basically went from around 100 subscribe to about 200 subscribers doing this.

I know that the numbers are not large, but 100 people express their interest in my idea. I think that is an excellent indicator that I was on the right track.

Reddit is a perfect place for this. You can find a niche and get your first subscribers.

I just tried it for 2/4 days and got 100 subscribers and some feedback.

If I wanted, I could keep going and:

• Test other titles and offers.

• Try to repost at different hours on the same subreddits.

• Create another post, with more detailed and useful information, like adding the first 8 challenges for the first 2 months.

• I could also try another subreddit or go to do the same on other platforms.

The key to this is that you can early get feedback and learn if what you do make sense and keep going or try a different approach.

If you want to try something similar, I have a final piece of advice:

• The smaller the ask, the better. But there are no rules, and you need to test your ideas yourself. Think of it as a staircase, one step at a time. Ask for the next step.
• Also, make sure that whatever you ask makes sense and goes along with the post you share.

I hope you find my experiment useful.

Support my path to freedom here.

Thanks for reading!