REDDIT: The Quick and Dirty Guide to Targeted Traffic

In the following post you are going to learn how you can get targeted traffic on tap from Reddit; no really! Learn how I sent 400+ unique visitors over to my website by spending less than 5 minutes of my time.

A question that I hear a lot is “how can I get targeted traffic from Reddit?” and today I’m going to answer that question for you.

Before I go any further I want to make this completely clear; if you’re looking for a big magic red button that will send “floods” or “stampedes” of traffic to your website then you’re out of luck.

What I will show you is how to get targeted traffic and also open a dialogue with other users.

Where most people go wrong

So many people have been indoctrinated into a believe that by submitting your link to a big social bookmarking site like Reddit will get them this magical amount of traffic without having to actually put any effort into it at all.

WRONG

Anything worth doing takes effort.

So why do people peddle this BS? Well, their business models depend on it but they don’t always tell you the actual “secret” to getting the traffic.

There’s a keyword that is being forgotten and that is – SOCIAL.

What most people are doing is unsociable bookmarking, not social bookmarking.

Reddit is no exception and in fact the social part I think is even more important on Reddit as they don’t tolerate spam and why would they? It just harms and degrades their community.

The key is to add value; this should be the end result of any of your promotional efforts, not just social bookmarking.

So make sure you drop any auto bookmarking software or anything like that because it will not help you here.

Ditch the home page

There’s a bunch of software on the market that I’d class as nothing else but a “spam machine”.

These usually just allow you to submit your links and that’s it – no social element at all.

This is the worst thing you can do; there are a few reasons why.

• It’s seriously difficult to get on the home page – that’s not to say it’s impossible but it’s a huge time suck and no guarantees that it will work.
• Let’s say you got on the home page and your site was actually flooded with traffic; how targeted would those visitors be? Would they really be interested in what you had to say or would it just melt your web server and crash your site? Generally speaking you’d most likely get a huge bounce rate and low average time on site which aren’t the signals you want to be sending to the likes of Google.

You can have all of the traffic in the world, but if they’re not interested in what you have to say then that’s not going to do you any favours.

So what now?

The answer is – Sub Reddits.

There is a Sub Reddit for almost everything; the important thing here is that the traffic you will get back will be a lot less, but it will be targeted so there is more chance that they will care about what you have to say.

Don’t just submit links

This makes more difference than you may think; the community on Reddit is more accustomed to discussion than link dropping.

So when you click “submit a link” make sure you click the “text” tab and submit as text instead; include a link to your post somewhere in the text and try to spark up a discussion.

This method usually leads to users sharing your content more on other social networks so it’s a win win for you.

Engage

Don’t just leave it with dropping a comment and a link, when people respond to your comments you need to get back into the conversation.

It’s just as important as replying to comments on your blog.

Remember, it’s called networking and that’s what you’re doing. Building relationships is important whether you own a hobby blog, run a big website or a full on business.

You may not see instant results; but believe me the results will come and they will be great.

Why listen to me?

I struggled with Reddit to start with, but I went wrong where most other people have been going wrong.

Not with the automation, but just with manual link submissions – I never saw any traffic until I stepped back and really thought about it.

Then I put an action plan together and figured out where I was wrong and tested it.

Then on one of my sites I got this from a single comment when I started testing the steps mentioned above - 

Sure it’s not “floods” of traffic; but then again it’s all relative. What’s a lot to one person isn’t always a lot to the next person.

Still; the main thing is that it was targeted traffic and I had gone to getting maybe 1 or 2 visits here or there to over 300 within a few days.

Summary

There’s a saying that I quite like;

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

It’s true and sometimes it might just take a bit of a kick for us to try something new, but once we do it’s worthwhile.

You may not get the same results as me but whatever immediate results you see; it’s the long term results that will really make the difference.

Have you got any additional Reddit related tips that you’d like to share? If so I’d love for you to share them in the comments.