Saleem's guide to gaming a Popular website

Zsaleem

ProductionHead's Womb
Jan 28, 2009
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Baller Links INC
googlehammer.com
I thought of posting it in Enlightened members section first, and thought it might not be worth it, so posting it here.


You have heard of it. You probably have an account on it. You probably visit it regularly. You hate it, but you still open it anyway. It’s huge. It’s – Reddit.

Gentleman, In this post I want to share everything I know about gaming Reddit, and to use it to drive more visitors to your website and generate more sales.

I will give you best practices for mainly three types of promotions you can do on Reddit, namely - Content, Funny & emotional material and Ads.

Cutting the crap and coming to Content


You need high quality content to get anywhere on Reddit, Grammar needs to be perfect especially in title you use in your post and website. If you are submitting a list – Rather than telling them “Here’s a list of 10 ____ “ , you should ask them “Here’s the list of 10___, What do you think is Missing”. The latter in most cases is expected to generate a lot more response. Reddit is full of people with opinion, you present them with any list in the former way and the top comment would be –“ ___ is not on the top, the list is so inaccurate. “
When you are presenting them with say, News stuff – Make sure its sounds more like an opinion giving or opinion asking content. Because for news they expect links to be from publications like CNN, if they see your xyz.com giving news, they might not appreciate it. The right way to use news article is using opinions.

What sort of subreddits should I submit my content to?

Pro Tip: Small subreddits drive a lot of traffic, and big ones are very hard to get into. Try submitting content to the most accurate subreddit (there are thousands of those), like if you have some article about iPhone do it on r/iPhone rather than doing it on r/technology. Enough said.

Most General way of Getting to main front page – Funny Material and emotional porn


You know what dominates the reddit main front pages? It’s funny stuff from imgur.com . So if you can come up with really really clever ads, host them on imgur.com and then push them from there. If there’s some way you can insert “Gabe Newell “into it, even better. The folks there love Gabe, and Cats. Weird products are the only one’s which get good attention there, example FreshBalls.

Hosting the funny material on your website won’t get you anywhere; you must host it on imgur.com

Another way of doing it is - Generous email publicity. It not always works , but when it works it does wonders. This is the strategy employed by companies like Steam, Microsoft, Amazon and Dell etc, but it has some history of working for small companies too. So this works like this – You send an email from different i.d. to your business email that you don’t have enough money to buy your product but like it, or something like that, and then your business email turns generous and offers the product for free to the user, and then this user goes on Reddit to appreciate your business.

Reddit Advertisements

You must have products which a geek would buy ( that consists of all reddit population who ever pull off their credit card ) and offering them some products for free / generous discount is the way to go. Your title must not sound like you are trying to *sell anything* but offer something.

So I submit my stuff on Reddit and I am done ?


No. Get your friends upvote your link from upcoming page. ( Avoid direct linking). Plant some genuine comments too. And then let it pick. You should try getting about 10-20 votes within 1-2 hours. Getting a hundred votes won’t help, you will only get noted by moderators and might get your website banned.

That’s all folks. I hope you enjoyed my post.
 


Reddit Advertisements

You must have products which a geek would buy ( that consists of all reddit population who ever pull off their credit card ) and offering them some products for free / generous discount is the way to go. Your title must not sound like you are trying to *sell anything* but offer something.


Good advice here. I've noticed over the last months (years?) one guy in particular build up a site through constant advertising on reddit: thisiswhyimbroke.com

Dude's probably making some good money and he built it all up using reddit ads and by catering to the stuff reddit already likes. Just look at /r/shutupandtakemymoney its full of people who are buying random techy bullshit, he just put all that random techy bullshit on his own website to make commission.
 
Here are a few more tidbits about maximizing on a reddit post that's gained traction. (Source: A year ago I had a post reach top of /r/all, it resulted in well over 200k visits to my site, these are some things that worked well for me.)

Rather than selling a product outright, my post was a hypothetical "would you buy this gadget if we made it?" type of submission. Like Saleem mentions in OP, by asking for an opinion, I was able to get a lot more interaction from the community. Sure, some of the comments were negative, some accused me of being a spammer. There was even a long thread discussing why it was ok for my post to get so many upvotes, while recently some author's self-post was buried by a huge negative backlash. Whatever, it doesn't matter, the more comments the better.

My landing page was tailored to the traffic. There was a big reddit alien logo and the title read "Hi reddit!". Bounce rate was very low and time on page was high. By addressing my visitors directly I was able to retain their attention longer.

On my landing page I was able to build up a pretty nice list by asking for ideas and feedback instead of just saying "opt in for updates". This goes back to the same idea of asking for an opinion to get more interaction.

I also got a shit ton of social interactions by asking for it. Pretty crazy concept... I told them the product would be out quicker and cost less if they shared it with all their friends and family. Providing simple social buttons next to a genuine reason to use them leads to a surprising amount of interaction. Like, thousands of percent higher than the social icons you have at the bottom of every one of your posts on every one of your pages.

Following up with re-sharers is also a great way to boost the organic SEO value a front page reddit post will undoubtedly provide. I'm sure everyone has their own ways to keep up with stuff like this, but the simple way is to check referral traffic, find where the link is and interact with the new site that's pimping your stuff. I also looked for places people were talking about my product but weren't backlinking, I sent them emails/messages and got those links included. When I noticed stumbleupon traffic started pouring in, I customized the page depending on referrer and interacted with those visitors directly. Generally, staying on top of what's happening with your viral post is a good way to maximize on its impact.

My situation was pretty unique and my advice probably won't work for everyone's sites, but overall I think the best advice for posting on Reddit is to be genuine.
Or, failing that, be really good at faking being genuine.

PS. for interesting discussions on reddit and how it works (and ideas for how to exploit it), check out /r/theoryofreddit