Although methods like SEO and PPC are a crucial part of any digital marketing campaign, traditional marketing on online platforms still plays a role. By that, we refer to creating brand awareness through posting on news platforms, in publications and on syndication websites.
Not only can these methods help to drive traffic to your website today, which is important for small businesses who can’t wait for SEO, but it can also lead to links. If any journalists or industry related writers are following the news, they might report on your link.
This has happened on our campaigns in the past and allows you to get traffic, revenue and links all at once. Therefore, this style of traffic and awareness generation is vital to the success of any digital marketing campaign.
What is Reddit?
If you’ve never heard of Reddit, you need to step outside of the rock that you’ve been hiding under. Reddit is one of the largest websites in the world. It allows users to sign up for an account with which they can share links, comment on posts and discuss with other users.
It’s essentially the future of information. Everything is crowdsourced, none of the work is done by Reddit staff. Instead, users submit comments or links that they find interesting and users can either vote for or against those comments or links.
Naturally, the highest voted pieces of content and comments rise to the top, giving that website hundreds of thousands of hits within hours. As you might imagine, this can transform the future of some small businesses.
However, it’s not easy to get on to the front page of Reddit. But it is possible, and the rewards are easily worth it.
How can you Market on Reddit?
There are two main methods that you can use to market your business on Reddit; you can submit a link to a page on your website, or you can leave a comment which includes a link to your website.
Submitting a link to your website has the greatest potential for you to generate huge amounts of traffic, but it’s also far more competitive. On the other hand, comments can be a quicker and easier way to generate smaller amounts of traffic consistently.
Any good digital marketing strategy will utilize both to create a rounded plan of attack.
Reddit works by having sub Reddits which are essentially smaller, niche communities on the site. For example; you have /r/videos, /r/gardening and /r/videogames.
Each of these is a specific community that talks about their passion. The first step to marketing on Reddit is to find the most active sub Reddits that are related to your business.
Topic Selection
Once you’ve established which communities you’re going to market your business within, you need to come up with a topic for a piece of content.
Some types of content will perform better in certain niches than in others, and it’s important that you strike the right balance to give yourself the best shot of hitting the front page. Within each sub-Reddit, you can rank the submitted content by “Top” and “All-Time”. This will show you the highest up-voted pieces of content of all time.
Take a look through the content and see what they have in common, what the users seem to enjoy and what you can create to submit to the community.
Reddit Community
Reddit has a very specific community across the entire site that has its unique personality and set of quirks. Like any community, to market within it, you need to understand it and be a part of it.
You will regularly see companies posting content to Reddit that is quickly deleted or down-voted because they aren’t a part of the community. They are obvious outsiders.
Take some time to learn about the sub-Reddit, contribute without a link many times and build up your Karma (reputation points on the site). This will make it more likely that your content will perform well when you submit it.
Title Tips
The reality of Reddit is that most people don’t read the content, they simply vote up or down based on the title of the link and the implied message. That’s why the title is so important.
Learn from the top pieces in your sub-Reddit and copy their title formats. Do they capitalize each word, do they use figures or numbers, is the title long or short?
Interaction
One of the easiest ways to improve the ranking of your post is to interact with all of the people that leave comments. This encourages others to also join the discussion and will likely lead to more up-votes, which will cause your post to rank higher.
Not only that, but high quality comments will also give you karma, improving your reputation within the community.