This is a guest post from Dan Reifenberger. He’s a good friend of mine, and because of the strategies he’s sharing today, I quadrupled my traffic last month for one of my other websites. So pay attention. Take it away Dan!
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reddit earns a hundred million unique visitors a month.
Yes, it’s always spelled with a lowercase ‘r.’
And NO, it’s not all cat pictures and inside jokes.
In fact, what if I told you a portion of those visitors are looking for a business or blog just like yours…on reddit…right now?
It’s true.
But how do you find the hundred thousand people looking for you in a sea of a hundred MILLION?
How do you get massive traffic from reddit to your website?
It’s simple, but not always easy.
You’ll need to develop a generous mindset and know the right place to post on reddit.
And I’m going to teach you how to do both in the post below. Read on!
How I went from 8 year retail employee to online marketer in 10 months
My whole life I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to do what I want, when I want, and answer to no one but myself.
But by last August, I had just turned 30 and was 3 months away from hitting my 8 year anniversary in retail.
To keep my dream alive I dabbled in different types of businesses: multilevel marketing, freelancing, and a TON of online courses. All totaled, I spent close to $15,000 trying to “build” my own business.
It turned out I was far more interested in learning how to build a business than actually building a business.
That all changed at the beginning of 2013 when I decided to start building a business and learn along the way.
The next 10 months consisted of facing one fear after another as I slowly pushed myself into the world of information and online marketing.
After I developed a reputation with my clients for always getting the job done, I was asked by Andy Drish to be the part-time affiliate manager at The Foundation. I didn’t know what an affiliate manager was, but they offered to teach me, so I left my job, ramped up some other client work, and jumped in with both feet.
As the affiliate manager, I was responsible for lining up all the guest posts, interviews, and other promotions they were using to build their email list for their annual launch.
I didn’t know a lot about marketing, but I knew reddit had a lot of traffic, so I recommended they post about The Foundation. They were not familiar with reddit, so they put me in charge of the post.
I wrote a post that featured one of their most successful students and set the student up to answer all of the questions in the comments section of the post.
All said and done, the post introduced 5000+ new visitors to The Foundation homepage, 1,100 new viewers to The Foundation YouTube channel, and attracted 450+ new email subscribers that resulted in close to $10,000 in sales.
And the best part is people loved the post, because it added a lot of value to the reddit community.
The Spammy Mindset Versus the Generous Mindset
Imagine moving to a beautiful little town in your home state to start a lawn care business.
Before you even finish settling in to your new home, you rush out to make sure everyone knows about your new business.
First, you tell everyone walking down the street that your new business just opening up and you’re looking for people to help paint the outside of your office.
Then, you get to papering every telephone pole and fence with promotional flyers asking people to send you their mailing address and phone number so you can follow up.
Next, you go to the local paper and offer to write them one of three front page stories about your new business.
Finally, you stop by the most successful businesses in town and ask them to add a flyer for your business to their monthly newsletter.
No handshakes, no small talk, just YOUR business.
After a few weeks of that what do you think would happen?
People would stop listening to you. Then they would avoid you on the street. And eventually you’d find yourself moving to another small town because your business folded.
Now what if you moved to the same town with a different mindset?
You helped other successful businesses repaint their building, asked everyone on the street what would make their day better, volunteered for the neighborhood watch, and sent interesting stories to you local newspaper editor.
In no time people would know who you are, hold you in high regard, and happily spend money with your business.
So what’s different between these two mindsets?
The first is a spammy and the second is generous.
Most of the marketing on the internet is created with a spammy mindset. And you’ve been bombarded with it for years, so it’s what you think you have to do when starting your first blog or business.
But it’s not your fault, how were you supposed to know there’s another way?
I’ve been there. I’ve done every spammy thing you can imagine.
And the most frustrating part is none of it works, you burn a lot of bridges, and your friends stop listening to you.
You might even give up. I did many times.
But after working with a number of successful marketers I respect, Sean being a prime example, I started to notice one key difference that sets them apart.
What Sets Great Businesses and Blogs Apart from the Rest
Just last month I was putting the finishing touches on version 1.0 of my course that teaches people how to ethically promote their business on reddit, and I hit a brick wall.
I had no idea how to set up a membership site and the launch was in 26 hours.
Then I remembered a post Sean wrote a while back that addressed my exact problem.
So, I followed Sean’s guide on How to Build a Membership Site in 48 Hours and set mine up just hours before it needed to go live.
I had a problem and Sean had the solution that work for me in the 11th hour. Now I trust everything I read on Sean’s site and recommend it to a lot of different people.
Successful bloggers and businesses actively listen to their customer’s problems and provide them with effective solutions.
So, when you write something that fulfills someone’s deep or urgent needs, you’ll get their attention and maybe, eventually, their trust.
How to get massive traffic from reddit (and find new customers)
The reason reddit is called the “Frontpage of The Internet” is because it’s built on a democratic system of upvotes and downvotes.
If you start spamming your blog or business on reddit the community will downvote your posts until they’re removed.
Post something that adds value to the reddit community and it will be upvoted to the top of the page for more users to see.
But trying to get on the front page of reddit is impossible for you and me, because our blogs and businesses don’t interest enough reddit users to earn the thousands of upvotes required to hit the front page.
Also, there’s a lot of competition on the front page of reddit, so even if you did make it there, your post wouldn’t last very long.
So what’s the point of even trying?
Ah the beauty of subreddits.
Subreddits are subdivisions of reddit that focus on different topics of interest; they range from entrepreneurship to cat pictures, and everything in between.
So if you’d like to find your ideal customers you can start by finding what subreddits they’re interested in.
Here’s how:
- First visit reddit.com
- Search for a keyword in the upper right hand corner
- Press Enter
- Under the search box will be a list of subreddits starting with “/r/”
- Open each one of these subreddits in a new tab
- Skim through each one and close the ones you don’t think are a good match
- Repeat step 1 through 6 until you have around 5-10 subreddits
- Bookmark these subreddits
- I used the above steps and found these subreddits about entrepreneurship:
- /r/entrepreneur
- /r/business
- /r/smallbusiness
- /r/hwstartups
- /r/marketing
- /r/affiliatemarketing
This took me about a minute and shouldn’t take you more than 5.
Remember you’re looking for subreddits that your customers would find interesting, not just you.
So if you’re a copywriter for real estate agents don’t hang out in /r/copywriting, instead go find the subreddits your customers would be interested in like /r/realestate.
Ok. Now that you’ve got your list you’re going to need to do some research on each subreddit individually, because no two are alike.
The most effective research method I’ve found is to figure out what elements make up a successful post.
I like to look for these “success” elements in 3 places:
- Headlines
- Content
- Comments
What you’re looking for are pains, questions, and needs you see going unfilled within each subreddit.
For me I keep a Google Doc open to paste headlines, content, and comments that I find interesting or could add value to.
I found this at the top of /r/entrepreneur yesterday and it’s a perfect example of what to look for:
These are the types of posts you’re looking for when researching on reddit
Enough people had upvoted the post in the previous 3 hours to let me know it’s a pain point for the subreddit. I know this because I compared the number of upvotes to other popular posts in /r/entrepreneur.
So, how would you solve this for /r/entrepreneur?
Personally, I would start a new post explaining exactly what my business is, be extremely specific about everything, and share my future plans.
Speaking of which, I just checked /r/entrepreneur this morning and found the top post is from a smart blogger doing exactly what I recommended above.
12 hours after the first post, someone addressed the problem and got highly targeted traffic to their blog
How this gets you traffic
Well, I’m sharing every aspect of my business, so I would have to include a link to my site as proof. And if I’m being completely honest with the /r/entrepreneur community, I would be talking about my products and the pains they solve for entrepreneurs.
The post would directly solve the pain AND introduce my blog or business to the 73,000+ people subscribed to /r/entrepreneur. You can see the subscription number on the right hand side of any subreddit.
If I deliver and people find it interesting they will upvote the post and comment, which pushes the post higher and higher on that particular subreddit. The longer your post is at the top of any subreddit, the more people will check it out and participate.
And to make sure I give maximum value to the subreddit, I’d reply to EVERY SINGLE comment, even if they show up days later. A high comment count also tends to attract more readers.
I would also recommend commenting and upvoting on other posts in your individual subreddits. It helps you find a ton of new ideas and pain points for you to solve with your blog or business.
Doing all this proves you’re generous with your time and gives you a chance to talk directly with your ideal customers. It also builds your reddit history, which will show you’re an active participant in the community when users look at your post history.
So, will everything you post on reddit snowball out of control and get you massive amounts of traffic?
No. Of course not.
Just like building a blog you’re not going knock it out of the part every time you post on reddit. It also depends on the size of your niche.
But the more you try the better you’ll get at serving your potential customers on reddit.
The last piece of advice I can give you about gaining trust on reddit is getting your reddit account setup ASAP, because users can see your signup date (or what reddit calls your “cake day”). If you make your account the same day you’re promoting your blog or business, you’ll not look very credible.
Sean Ogle
Sean Ogle is the Founder of Location Rebel where he has spent the last 12+ years teaching people how to build online businesses that give them the freedom to do more of the things they like to do in life. When he's not in the coffee shops of Portland, or the beaches of Bali, he's probably sneaking into some other high-class establishment where he most certainly doesn't belong.Join over 40,000 people who have taken our 6 part freelance writing course. Sign up below and let’s do this together.
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Hi, I’d like to see the example Reddit posts. I am thinking of doing an AMA for my friend’s business in the next couple of weeks, and I don’t want it to fall on deaf ears.
Hey Simon,
I posted the link below instead of replying to your comment, my bad!
Here’s the link to to the post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1kf7wg/im_26_and_started_a_successful_saas_business_with/
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about AMA style posts on reddit, so it’s on the list of things to write about on my newsletter.
And I replied to your reply below!
Here’s my question~I have been told that I “know tons of stuff” about alternative health, beauty, diet, etc. and I’m pretty confident that I do but how do I get this content out of my head and to the right people when I find that my writing is extremely professional and not that engaging.
I would love to build a blog site that would bring folks to me and the products that I can get behind because they are chemical free and they do what they promise to do.
Thanks,
Mel
Hi Mel, I would love to see a blog about natural beauty with product reviews and do it yourself how to guides! I hope you figure it out!
Thanks Alanna! I would too. I’ve had such good luck with alternative health and I would love to see it get out to the general public. I also hate to hear someone say that they would rather take a drug with a huge list of negative side effects because something natural just doesn’t taste good! Really? I will hopefully get it going soon.
Melanie, this is a big ball o’ wax, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Find articles that you like to read, or that have been successful. Heck, use REDDIT as this example is teaching us. Go to a subreddit like r/health or something of that nature, and see what posts are popular.
Then write posts like that, with stuff that you know a lot about.
Then post them on reddit. Repeat this a few times.
There are many guides to building a blog. You can start for free really quickly on blogspot or wordpress.com
Hope this helps. You can ask me any follow up questions you’d like or find me on my blog. (Click my name.)
Hey Melanie,
I’ve been exactly where you are now and was stuck there for a long time. Without knowing too much about your situation, I’ll give you the advice I wish could have been given to me at that point in my life.
You might not like it, but it’s the reason I’m posting on Sean’s blog right now building an online business.
Melanie I recommend starting by helping people with their health, beauty, diet, etc. in person. In fact, I would pick just one of those to focus on so it’s easier to explain what you can do for people.
Then I would tell all your friends & family what your business is and how you can help people to see if anyone is interested in hiring you to help them.
I started my first successful business by telling my friends & family that I was looking to help people learn how to use their Apple Products in their own home. After a few days I had 3 paying clients, 2 of which I still have today.
Personally I like reaching out to people in person, phone, and email in that order when I’m starting a new business.
So, the short answer is: get specific about what you want to help people with and then see if anyone is willing to pay for your help.
After helping a few people you’ll have a much better idea of what to write about and spending time with new people can always wear down the professionalism and bring out your personality 😉
Does that answer your question?
Yes and now I find out that I could have charged for all the “free” help I have given out over the years (tons of research per question in most cases…lesson learned).
Hey Dan,
Great post. How long would you say is the minimum time between cupcake day and the day you could get away with?
You can post immediately if you have something that will add value to other reddit users, especially if it’s urgent.
I’ve seen people just call it out in the open when they post by saying something like: “long time lurker, first time poster.”
But I recommend signing up for an account and spending some time commenting on other people’s posts before submitting one of your own.
It will help you understand people’s needs more and how you can add value.
I wrote step-by-step instructions with screenshots of how to upvote and comment in my reddit guide which you can find here:
http://videophonehome.com/redditguide-location180/
That link seems to be broken!!!
Fixed!
PS Thanks for the great question Jub!
JUB,
I’m glad I read the comments because I was thinking of the same thing,”how long should you be active on reddit before you start posting.”
Hi Dan –
Question regarding when responding to a subreddit post:
Is there a suggested place in response that we should share our link? In other words, does reddit “look down” on linking near the beginning of the response?
I am not looking to spam reddit with links. I just don’t want to hurt myself by posting any links too early.
Thanks for any guidance
David Damron – – – reddit newbie
BecomeaBeast.com
Hey David,
There are no hard and fast rules on reddit.
What I would recommend is just be human and ask yourself if what you are doing would annoy you. If you would downvote your post, others likely will too.
The best way to find out if something is appropriate is to look at what other successful posters and commenters have done, because there will be slightly different “reddiquette” on each subreddit.
So spend some time in your ideal subreddits to learn what people like and what they don’t.
As you post, you’ll get pretty quick feedback on what people like and don’t like with the number of upvotes and downvotes you earn.
Great question!
From our experience, you’ve got to tread lightly with submitting to Reddit. This is a great resource though, Daniel. We recently wrote something similar that may compliment some of your material 🙂
http://www.siegemedia.com/how-to-reverse-engineer-success-on-reddit
I agree with you Scott if someone is approaching reddit as traffic source and not a community of people.
Working in retail for 8 years I never forgot who I was helping because they were right in front of me. I feel that too many online marketers forget there are people on the other side of the internet and try to “hack” sites like reddit.
I disagree with you if someone posts on reddit, is honest with their intentions, and is genuinely trying to add value to the community.
Celebrities launch their new shows and movies all the time, and they’re very up front about it. But they always bring a lot of value to the community by speaking directly with their fans and answer their questions, whether or not they’re interested in the new show.
Would love to hear more of your thoughts.
PS Pro tip – Always spell reddit with a lowercase ‘r.’
Dan,
Great article and insight on yet another “free” (with some sweat equity) traffic source. Also your brief bio is inspiring too – thanks so much.
I truly appreciate the feedback Mark I can tell you’ve got a big heart.
I think you’ll do just fine on reddit 😉
I love how fresh the screenshots are, lol. Right from today! Great guide.
Spammy vs. generous is so key – like Sean said on a podcast before, “you don’t need TRAFFIC, you need RELATIONSHIPS that will get you the traffic.” And your reddit approach does this exactly.
Your strategy is very versatile – can be applied similarly to blog commenting, Facebook posting, forum posting. Great stuff, and subbed to VHP 🙂
100% agree Andrew!
Yes, this approach can work on any forum.
I actually wish more people would take this approach to communicating on the internet, it would be such a better place.
It seems like you’ve got your head screwed on right, so I’m sure you’ll do great in person and online.
PS Thank you for subscribing to Video Phone Home, I look forward to learning as much as I’ll be teaching from folks like you!
Hey Simon,
First comment internet high-five!
Here’s a link to the post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1kf7wg/im_26_and_started_a_successful_saas_business_with/
Pay attention to how carefully written the entire post is.
After you check it out come back and tell me what you noticed. Some subtle stuff going on.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about AMA style posts on reddit, so It’s definitely going on my list of things to write about on my email newsletter.
Dan, right off the bat I see your headline starts with specifics, and used insider terminology.
– I’m 26. I have a successful SaaS business. I have X customers and Y revenue.
Then you address skeptics, and perceived blowback:
– I don’t know how to code. It wasn’t my idea. I spent no money.
Then you invite action with a coy question.
– Not possible? I’ll prove it. AMA.
IN THE BODY:
– First you state the reason why you’re doing this. “I saw a post full of buzzwords, it was confusing, etc.”
-Introduction. “Hey I’m a normal guy.” This link here is my site, and this link here is the educational site I used.
– Specific data on users and revenue
– Proof (in the form of a Presentation)
So ….
To conclude, you’re using a time-tested Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action formula for your headline. You’re making it seem like you just HAD to write this post after seeing a failure try to do so earlier. You’re giving proof so people know you’re for real, and you’re addressing skeptics early on.
Congrats, and I hope I can emulate some of this.
Wow. Nice breakdown Simon!
Absolutely right on all points.
But I didn’t just pull all that out of thin-air. I spent a lot of time looking at what people liked and what they didn’t like in /r/entrepreneur.
At the time I did NOT have a structured way of doing this, but I had spend the previous 6 months reading that sub every single day. So, all I had to do was write the ultimate post I wanted to see in that subreddit.
That’s why I heavily recommend everyone spend time in their ideal subreddits, so they can be a contributing part of the community instead of
Do you have any examples of your copy?
Thank you again for being a rockstar. You have any examples of your copy?
Thanks Dan, I think a good place to read some of my copy or at least see what I wrote about a copywriting course that I enjoyed (no affiliate link to be found 😉 is on my blog. It’s a bit of a hatchling, very small, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out. If there’s something specific that you’d like to see, just let me know. Best of luck to you.
I really like this post, and my new business is going to rely on reddit in a major way so I really appreciate this!
I am wondering, can you gives some tips on the best ways to push people from your reddit posts to your site? Reddit gets really “encapsulated”, so getting people to move away from a reddit page to your page seems like a little more of a challenge than a tweet or FB post.
Thanks again- I can’t even tell you how relevant this is right this moment for me!
Hey Ian,
Great question!
It’s a catch 22. If people leave reddit they might not upvote and comment on your post which helps other people find it. But if it’s hard for them to get to you site, they’ll never check it out if they find your content interesting.
I recommend linking to you site right in the text of your posts and comments if it’s relevant and adds value.
Now if you’re only searching for places that are “appropriate” to post your content and not contributing in other ways it will be very clear what your motives are when someone looks at your profile.
So, comment and post on reddit where ever you can add value. And if you have content that’s relevant to the discussion or as proof to backup who you say you are, then go ahead and link to you site as well.
The upvotes and downvotes will tell you if you’re doing something wrong.
And as I said in a comment above: always ask yourself if you would upvote or downvote your post or comment if you were another reddit user. If the answer is no, then you might want to think things over.
Does that answer your question?
Thanks Dan,
That does help!
Just to let you know, I closed my first sale to a guy on the other side of the world thanks to reddit. After reading this post, of course.
I asked for feedback on my product packaging, and had a great response – including several people wanting to know where they could buy my product 😉 .
As an aside, I would suggest that people use instagram links to post photos to reddit. It works just as well as imgur, and I picked up several new followers from the post thanks to the link.
Thanks a lot, this post has a ton of value.
Awesome results Ian!
I would love to learn more about them and maybe feature your business as a case study.
Please email me at [email protected]
And we’ll take it from there!
Great post- I can definitely attest to the power of reddit in driving traffic to your content.
Last June I did a social experiment that involved going out and starting conversations with three strangers every day for the entire month. I kept track of everything in a spreadsheet and wrote down what I observed during the experiment.
Not thinking anything of it, I put the text from the recap post on r/socialskills, simply to contribute my experience (and hopefully some value) to the board. I didn’t really think much of it or expect any kind of response at all (as it’s a fairly busy board), and I didn’t even include a link to my blog in the post at first.
Within 24 hours, my post had 1000 upvotes, was on the front page, and people were pretty much begging for the link to my blog and a copy of the spreadsheet. I also had more traffic to my site that day than every day from the previous two years combined. Today it is the second most popular post of all-time on that board, which has over 75,000 subscribers…I was absolutely floored that day and it’s still a little hard to comprehend that saw and liked something that just started out as a crazy idea in my head.
All just goes back to that contribute value and amazing things will come to you thing…
Amazing success story Andrew, thank you for sharing!
Yes, it is incredible what can happen when you provide something people truly want with no expectation of anything in return.
Keep it up and you’ll go far!
Love this idea! I did a quick search and it revealed that there’s really not any quality subreddits on my keywords of choice… I’m a complete newbie when it comes to reddit (brutal honesty – I don’t “get it” at all!) – can you point me in the direction of a post/article somewhere about building a good subreddit from the ground up as opposed to just commenting and contributing on an existing one? I’m sure that if I posted anything right now in the subreddits I found… no one would see it.
Hey Nikki,
Excellent question.
Yes you can start your own subreddit, but it will be on you to get people to subscribe and contribute.
The few ways that I’ve seen people grow their subreddit are as follows:
– Post about it in other subreddits where possible subscribers would be
– Direct message other users you see that might like to join
– Ask other users who join your subreddit to refer others they may know
– Get your subreddit listed on the sidebar of as many related subreddits as possible
– Buy some cheap reddit ads in the other related subreddits
Also, picking a subreddit name with keywords people would search for helps a ton.
Finally, I would post in there once a day until the page is filled up. If people come to a subreddit and there is nothing there, they won’t subscribe.
PS What is your niche? And what subreddits did you find?
Thanks for the quick response! I really appreciate it! I did a quick search for “health coach” (currently studying to become one!) – suggested subreddits included /r/leagueoflegends (I thought that was hilarious!)… I tried “holistic nutrition” and one of the subreddits was /r/CIRCLEF*CKERS (I didn’t even want to know!). There seemed to be some related suggestions, but nothing that seemed very active and nothing that had high-quality content by any means. I do see some very specific and narrowed down subreddits for the fitness aspect of health (ie, CrossFit) but I’m more geared towards nutrition and overall wellness. I probably need to spend more time brainstorming very specific keywords to get good results – or jump on the bandwagon to get a good subreddit going! 🙂
Nikki, I’m replying to your original post again, since I cannot reply to a comment more than 2 deep.
Right now you’re looking for subreddits for health coaches, not subreddits that a person who could use a health coach would be searching for.
You want to find people who need your help, not other health coaches.
If I search weight loss and fitness I get:
/r/fitness
/r/loseit
/r/BTFC
/r/gainit
/r/xxfitness
/r/health
/r/vegan
/r/nutrition
Slap reddit.com in front of any of those to check them out.
These are the places people who could potential use your help would be hanging out.
Make sense?
Definitely makes sense, thanks!
I believe I came across reddit but I found it difficult to use, so I deleted my account ages ago. This post is a revelation. Thanks.
But in hindsight, I am beginning to dislike Sean Ogle. I was working on publishing my ebook when he came into my life and tempted me to become an SEO Content Writer. So I studied all the wonderful materials he gave me. Now I am launching my SEO Content writing career.
Then this post landed on my email and now I have another mountain of information to study, digest, learn and try out.
But what they heck, in all my years of dabbling unsuccessfully on my online business, Sean is like the light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks.
Dude, Joseph, I’ve been there.
For the longest time I liked “learning” how to build a business instead of just starting.
So props to you for starting!
I try to think of location180 as a library that I can access anytime. In fact, I used his “How to setup a membership site in 48 hours” post to get my reddit course off the ground a day before launch.
So, just because you might not have use for reddit now, it’s a good place to starting getting to know, because when it is time to post, you’re already a part of the community.
Hope that helps and thank you for the great insight!
Question: how long do you spend on reddit each day building your “credibility”?
Also, do you find yourself falling into a pit of procrastination by reading everything else on reddit not associated with your objectives?
If so, how do you battle this?
Wow! Killer question Tate.
I got really good at reddit because I used to do just that: SIT ON REDDIT ALL DAY!
Not very productive and affected my health.
To combat that I unsubscribe from all of the subreddits that are a waste of time and only subscribe to the ones that have my potential customers in. This does two things:
1. Keeps me from clicking through hundreds of picture posts that can go on forever
2. Drastically reduces the amount of new content I have to look through on reddit
So I recommend getting your account setup if you haven’t already and then clicking on the “my subreddits” link in the upper left hand corner of reddit. You can then click “view all” and unsubscribe from all the one’s that suck away your time.
That way it becomes very inconvenient to find content that would normally waste your time.
I also use a extension for chrome called “Site Block” to block all my time waster sites during my working hours each day.
Hope that helps!
Daniel,
Heard you loud and clear. But I read somewhere that is easy to be motivated, but difficult to have the discipline to stay there. Right now I am following Sean track of building my SEO portfolio. Once this is done and I start marketing myself, I will definitely revisit reddit.
Absolutely Joseph.
Motivation is a big hurdle, especially if you work from home like I do now.
To stay motivated I meditate in the morning with the “Envisioning Method” from MindValley. It’s a free 20-minute mp3, to visualize my perfect day. Then at night I journal for 5 minutes on 3 things: what went well, what could improve, and what I’m grateful for. I do this for business and personal. You’d be surprised at how reflecting on your day will make you feel WAY better about what you accomplished.
For productivity I write out the three, and only three, things I’m going to do for the day the night before on a note card. If any of those things do not get done I write it on the card for the next day and try to chunk it down a little more.
If I’m not getting something done it’s usually because I’ve made it too big, so I have to make it really small.
Once you get progress doing 3 things for a week or two, then you can add a 4th, etc. But I’ve found if I go over 5 the tasks are either not big enough or I’m not going to get them all done.
Also, I find physical lists are a lot harder to ignore than a list on a computer. Going analog has help me a lot.
Hope that helps.
I guess I really don’t get reddit and am unfamiliar with it except for a basic understanding and that it’s one of Bill Gates favorite sites. On the bar to the left of the posts there are two arrows with a number in the middle and a number to the left of the arrows. Is the number on the left total feedback and the number in the middle of the arrows up, or down votes? The number of recent posts in the subject areas I am interested in, after doing a search in sub-reddit weren’t very compelling, so it probably isn’t a very viable platform for me. Thank you for the information, though.
Hey Chas,
The number on the left is the posts overall rank on the page you are looking at, so the top post is 1, the second is 2 and so on.
The arrows and the number in between is the basis for how reddit determines what is popular. When you’re logged in to an account and click the up arrow you are giving an upvote to that post. When you press the down arrow, that’s a down vote.
reddit subtracts the downvotes from the upvotes to get the total you see in the middle. The higher that number, the higher the post will appear on the page you’re looking at.
Also, the longer a post has been on reddit, the more upvotes it needs to stay on top, so eventually everything falls off the front page, but can still be found by searching reddit.
Who is your idea customer? Let’s see if we can work together to find some subreddits that are more up your alley.
Well, my core focus is shifting and I am in the process of launching a new site(not the one my Gravatar trackback goes to). When my new site is up and running I’ll change my Gravatar to direct to it. The focus of the new site will be on Conscious living and sustainability issues and when I searched on reddit for those topics there weren’t many posts and what was there wasn’t very recent. That lead me to the conclusion that those subjects weren’t very popular on reddit and that there probably isn’t a very large audience there for those topics.
Hey Chas,
That is a tougher one. I did some digging and found the following subreddits, let me know if any of these match what you’re thinking about covering:
http://www.reddit.com/r/sustainability/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Strawbale
http://www.reddit.com/r/environment/
http://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/
http://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/
http://www.reddit.com/r/energy/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Renewable
http://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/
These are some great tips. Often people overlook sites like reddit even though there is a ton of potential there. I think you are right about stepping beyond the spammy mindset. There are better ways to attract people than just throwing your stuff at them. Thanks for the post!
You are welcome Leonard!
Thank you for the kind words 😉
This is such an awesome article Dan, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with the rest of the world. It takes away all the mystery behind reddit. To be honest, I always ignored the reddit platform (I’m sure it has something to do with the somewhat messy user interface) but that’s besides the point.
Doing some research on how to promote some upcoming courses I’m putting together to present on Udemy, I approached this one guy that had almost 7k students on his course because I wanted to find out how he did it.
He told me that he offered a 100% discount to BlackHat sites as well as Reddit which brought him some good student numbers that formed his foundation, then the rest of the people bought with no hesitation because the course seemed to have many students enrolled.
So simple but I thought this was brilliant so I shared it with a colleague and she had just happened to have read this article so she shared the link with me 🙂
How awesome!!!!
I believe in the power of sharing and I’m grateful for your willingness to share your knowledge.
(That said, here’s a bit of Self Promotion)
In the spirit of sharing, anyone on here that might be interested in my courses coming out in the next month, just leave a comment below and I will post a 100% discount code for you.
The two courses are;
#1 Branding Yourself for High-End Clients
#2 How to Build a Web Agency from Scratch & Make Up to $15k/month
Both courses are from my own personal experience and it’s my way of giving back to the Internet community that has enabled me to gain the amount of success I’ve had so far.
Thanks all!
Tim (@BrandWithTim)
Hey Timothy,
Thank you for the compliments, I’m very grateful.
I have a friend who has done close to $60k on Udemy and he said to do this:
1. Create a redemption that can be claimed 1000-5000 times
2. Post that code on reddit and other sites as a free gift
3. Ask that for the free gift they leave your course a star rating and a comment
4. This will pump your student numbers and get others to sign up
5. Udemy says you get to keep 100% of the sale if you refer the customer. Well that only goes for folks who don’t already have a Udemy account ;-(
Thanks for sharing!
Wow! Those are invaluable pointers. Most people would charge a fortune to let you in on such info. I’ll definitely apply the steps you’ve outlined above Daniel.
Thanks again for taking your generosity a step further 🙂 it’s very humbling!
I’ll report back to the community on my experience with reddit and Udemy so that someone else can hopefully benefit.
Thanks again!
Tim (@BrandWithTim)
Hey all! I really enjoyed reading all of the posts, very educational and inspiring to see so much activity and conversation going on . The honesty and individuality of everyone is what leads me to ask this question…
My husband, and myself have been reading and researching how to create an income on the web by really helping individuals, coaching everything from educational to wellness .
Is this something that interests anyone? and is reddit of any use to my husband and I?
Hey Iris,
Personally, I believe there is a market for everything- you just need to research and pin-point where it lives.
You mentioned that your intention was “helping individuals, coaching everything from educational to wellness”
In my humble opinion (and this is something I tell all my clients) start with focus. Do your best to stay away from “Coaching everything” especially in the beginning. This will mean sacrificing most of the topics you could possibly teach and only selecting one to stick to.
What that does is (from a strategic brand development perspective) is enables you to stand for something. This is a powerful approach that will help your business propel because it will speak to a very specific audience.
Beyond that, what you will need to do is do more research to identify what you are passionate about and lean towards teaching that. The reason for that is, when you do something out of passion, it will most times never seem like work and your audience will take note of this something that will pull them in.
Another important thing to establish earlier on is your “purpose” for wanting to coach. This has to be a reason beyond just making money. Aristotle said that “Where your talents and the needs of the world intersect- there lies your purpose.”
As far as reddit is concerned, I believe this will be a powerful tool to use once you establish what it is you want to offer and then go out and find an audience on reddit that’s already talking/passionate about that specific subject. So in a sense, reddit will be a tool to help your with brand awareness and generate traffic and leads to your website.
I’m not saying all this to derail you but rather to get you started off right. I’m always excited to hear others start new enterprises.
If I can be of any help, don’t hesitate to reach out. All the best to you and your husband!
Warm Regards,
Tim (@BrandWithTim)
Agree with you on focus Tim.
No one can be exceptional at everything, but they can at a few if the focus.
To get people going ASAP, I recommend they find customers immediately after deciding on an idea. Before vision, before purpose, those can all come later once you need to bring more people on to your team.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Hey Tim,
This is where we may have to agree to disagree.
Putting building a brand in front of finding paying customers is a mistake in my book. Especially for beginners.
If you spend a week on defining a brand and then no one wants your service, you just wasted a week of work. It also causes people to get frustrated and start to think building a business is a waste of time.
Customers care more about their problems being solve than hearing a brand message.
I’ve run a company for 2 years with many happy clients and zero time spent on brand.
How?
I am my brand.
And my clients like my brand, because they like me. More importantly they like that I solve their problems and do great work. They refer me to friends who have similar problems and my business grows, so does my personal brand.
At some point if I get too busy and need employees, then I will hire people who are like me, so I don’t have to train them to be awesome people, just how to do the mechanics of the job.
It all comes down to the advice we give people just starting out. Maybe starting a brand makes sense for you and me because we have customers, but for someone who has never started a business I feel getting them their first customers is way more important than a brand.
And if they really need a brand, have the write down their own name, because then their reputation is on the line to do good work.
This may all sound very direct, but I’ve spent years spinning my wheels doing things that I discover don’t really add up to helping customers. So, I always recommend getting your first customers as fast as possible and adjust as needed.
Hey Iris,
Good questions.
Timothy is right to start with a focus. Take one of the things you would like to coach people on and let everyone know you’re looking for clients. You can even offer a discount to your first few clients as an incentive to try you and your husbands services out.
If you have trouble picking one thing, just go with the one you think you’d enjoy doing the most. You can always change or add services a long the way.
The most important thing is to start getting customers as quickly as possible, otherwise you will be paralyzed in research and second guessing where to start.
If no one bites, then it wasn’t a very good business to be getting into.
Starting with getting customers will save you a ton of time and money by preventing you from working on something that no one wants.
How long do you think it would take you to get your first client?
HINT: If it is longer than 48 hours, you might want to look into a different business.
Let me know what you think.
Dan, I can certainly see how your approach might yield some results in the short term and get someone up and running as fast as possible. The draw back with this in my opinion is that it produces an inconsistent message because the service/product provider is not clear to themselves on what it is they are really offering so many mixed messages tend to be communicated. Then eventually most often than not, you find yourself feeling very unfulfilled. I’m speaking from personal experience too.
On the other hand, if we decide to take a long term strategy approach, I would encourage someone to take the time to research on key areas especially clearly articulating their purpose & gain clarity on their branding message before they start communicating their value to potential customers/clients.
This method certainly takes more time but with today’s technology you can easily limit it to 1 week- mainly because we have so many resources online to help us expedite the research process. Not forgetting awesomely generous people like you Daniel.
Based on Tim Williams’ book, there are 7 things I would strongly encourage anyone trying to build a strong brand (yes, every business, product, person & even place is a brand 🙂 to figure out before moving forward (at least the first 4);
1. Purpose- Reason beyond making money that you are in business
2. Principles- Values that you won’t compromise no matter what, even when it means losing money.
3. Positioning- Based on your point-of-difference, you generally want to be #1 or #2 in the marketplace you’re competing in.
4. Practices- (Product, Promotion, Place, People, Process).
5. Priorities – If everything’s important, nothing’s important.
6. Performance- Ways to track how bad/well you’re doing, as well as your competitors.
7. Profit- What margins you are aiming for.
I realize this is an unconventional approach one that most internet entrepreneurs will shy away from due to it’s initial “tedious” approach but it saves a lot of time (and money) in the long run.
Any thoughts Daniel?
Regards,
Tim (@BrandWithTim)
Daniel, Awesome info. Wish you could have added a video. 😉
I was wondering your thoughts on using reddit for surveying people to see if you should even launch a idea.
I work for myself (solopreneur), and I would like to know if anyone would be interested in paying for my information.
I call myself a neighborhood pro because anything capable of producing money out of a neighborhood I can either buy or sell.
Mainly I flip RVs and travel trailers, but when times are slow or I get burnt out I can sell $2,000-$5,000 worth of home maintenance like painting, staining, and driveway seal coatings.
Buying and selling RVs one needs to have some pocket money at a minimum of five grand, but selling jobs and other services can be done with little money our no money down.
I use all door to door methods and free advertising sites to get customers.
I have a real knack for it, but don’t know if this has a market that’s even interested.
Do you think my idea would be potentially good for reddit? Sharing something similar to what I posted in this comment?
Thanks
Hey Nick,
Good question.
This is the best post I’ve seen for validating an idea.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1eowes/how_many_entrepreneurs_here_would_benefit_from_a/
They posted to the right subreddit and offered something people were looking for.
I would start by modeling what this posts did correctly and see if you could have the same luck with a local/door-door sales info product.
/r/entrepreneur
AND
/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
Are great places to validate such an idea.
After taking a look at the post above, write out what you’d post on reddit and share it here.
Also, use the tactics from my guest post and tell me 5 subreddits where you could post about your idea for validation.
Then I’ll give you feedback.
Hi
Any tips on a user-friendly way to navigate around reddit. Its awfully confusing for a first-time redditor like me. I would like to ( or at least I thought I have done this already) subscribe to subredits that interest me, but when I log in all I see are other posts on other topics. Help!
Hey Kashiefah,
I agree that reddit can be a little hard to find your way around.
The easiest way to get around is to signup for an account and then use the “subreddits” link in the top left of the page.
I break it all down in a 21-page guide here:
http://videophonehome.com/redditguide-location180
Once you do that then you can subscribe and unsubscribe from subreddits. This will allow you to only see the subreddits you want next time you login.
Let me know if works for you.
Great stuff Dan.
I love reddit (mostly for the cat pictures and inside jokes) but have done very little with it as far as growing a community or getting traffic. I’ve seen some others do it well but don’t think I’ve seen a ‘behind the scenes/how-to’ sort of post for it.
Thank you,
Steve
Thank you for the complement Steve!
And you’re welcome.
Hi,
I found reddit extremely difficult for my market – women! I’m in women’s empowerment and any searches with the word ‘woman’ or ‘women’ in it only result in dating tips for guys!! I found the site quite sexist and even with ‘women entrepreneurs’ there was very little value.
Guess the site will not help me drive traffic 🙁
Thank you for a very good blog post anyway!
Hey Miisa,
Agreed, reddit can be a bit of a boys club.
Without knowing a ton about your businesses I found the following women focused subreddits in a few minutes of searching.
http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/
http://www.reddit.com/r/women
http://www.reddit.com/r/ladybusiness/
http://www.reddit.com/r/careerwomen
http://www.reddit.com/r/WhereAreTheFeminists/
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/
I’d recommend posting an empowerment type question in a few of these subreddits and see what type of response you get.
The question would not be, “what do you think of my blog/article/etc?” It would be something like, “For the ladies! What holds you or a woman you know back from living a full life?” Or “Who here has overcome X ISSUE. How did you do it?” where X ISSUE is a common issue keeping women from feeling empowered.
Love to hear back with what you find!
Check out this sub reddit :
http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes
and if you scroll down, it gives you a ton of related subreddits on the right sidebar.
Even if you can’t find whole subreddits devoted to your niche, TONS of people come to reddit to ask questions – there are even subs for people to ask if they are ugly or not. People are looking for answers on reddit, and I am sure some of those are questions from women about being inspired.
With a little creativity, you can kill on reddit with something like women’s empowerment.
What Ian said.
Thanks Ian!!!
Nice post. I would also like to add that being generous is enjoyable while being “spumy” just makes me feel slimy 🙂
Agreed Erika!
The only thing i don’t understand about reddit community is they don’t care what you write or how good your content is all they do is just watch how many upvotes you got so that they can come and see your post, in other words if they see no such good upvotes they don’t care. Its really not getting inside my head honestly.
One upvote means one person recommends something to the community. The more upvotes a post gets, the more individuals are recommending the post/content to everyone else.
So if you can engage individuals you can build the social proof (upvotes) to get more individuals to check out your content and upvote.
People do care if it engages them.
Hi Sean and Dan,
You are both real go-givers.
The information you give here is specific, documented and certainly worth a try. Thank you so much … and a must share.
Much continued success to you both.
Patricia
P.S. My freelance writing website launches in early August 2014.
You’re welcome Patricia!
Thank you for the kind words.
“Be a redditor not a marketer” – very wise advice. I discovered this a few months ago when I accidentally posted a link to my personal account instead of my ‘business’ account. The result was a far more positive response in the comments, more upvotes and more clicks.
I’m surprised by how willing some/many redditors are to downvote companies or anyone who’s marketing something, even if their post and/or link is very useful. The personal approach is definitely the way to go, thanks for the excellent and very actionable post.
You are welcome!
so far so well this has been the best explanatory post on how on how to utilise Reddit, thanks so much but i have few questions that have not been able to find answers to and am sure you can
1. how do you add clickable link to content in reddit not just url
2. most of the sud reddit i post do not accept link how can i solve that or who will i know if link is accepted
3. is there other way to get notification either through my phone if there is a new comment to my post
Hey Osas,
Thanks for the question. Answers below:
1. In the body of a post you can use the reddit markup rules which are listed below the post or comment box you type in. Here is the markup for text links.
[text goes here](link goes here)
If you want the subject line of a post to click out to a site you need to make sure the subreddit you are posting in allows “link posts.”
If they only allow “text posts” they you have to link out from the body of the post.
Hope that makes senses.
2. Follow the instructions in this post to make it as engaging as possible and then include a link in the body of the post using the reddit markup rules.
3. There is a reddit app that should do what you are looking for.