673: Reddit Marketing: How to Drive Traffic from Reddit

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1:21Now, it feels a little bit like if you can't beat them, join them kind of strategy, but there's no ignoring that Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the internet, has found itself on the front page of just about every Google search. Stick around in this one. We're breaking down how to get some of that traffic flowing back to you, the Reddit research and content best practices to be aware of, and some common mistakes to avoid. Now to help out, I've enlisted a professional content marketer who's been helping businesses and brands take advantage of this brave new Reddit dominated search world from redvisible.com, red with two Ds, Amy Aitman.

1:57Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Hi, I'm so excited. I love this show and I'm really excited to get into this. So much fun. And me as well. I've got some big Reddit news to share coming up, but maybe you can kick us off with an example of what is possible from a publishing standpoint of, well, maybe my own site is having a hard time ranking anymore, but I could publish the same or similar content on Reddit and have a jump to the first page almost immediately. So case study, really, I was looking at one of our clients today and in SaaS, I guess a SaaS tool. Okay, software product. And we have a website that we publish, reviews, comparisons, been around for a long time.

2:37We still do publish on our third-party publishers, but we will publish a full-scale article, blog, and then we'll share something in Reddit, and either a subreddit that we own and that we built out and we'll share. Often Reddit content is quite different than a full blog. It'll often be sort of a share and, you know, it has to fit the Reddit world and the Reddit narrative and the Reddit site. But if you go the next day, you'll see the ranking for our content. And what's really fun now is we're seeing that because all roads lead to Reddit, it's informing AI overviews. We're seeing results in chat GPT search.

3:19We're seeing results in Bing. Reddit has their own AI search tool. So you can show up there. You can show up in people also ask. You can show up in what people are saying. You can show up all over the place because all roads do sort of lead to Reddit. Yeah, from kind of late 2023 helpful content update to late 2024, like 12 months later, where so many publishers got hit by a series of algorithm updates starting with helpful content reddit was like 10x like 10 times the traffic that it used to get it so it's like oh there's this giant sucking sound and how do we you know get in front of that audience you mentioned there's there's going to be some nuance to it so i want to get into the best practices here it's not just copying and pasting the content that i used to publish on my website they're like maybe i still want to publish there because there's hopefully down the road like an opportunity to double maybe triple dip maybe i create the video like i could take up potentially a lot of real estate on that first page of google if i if i do it right but you mentioned okay i've got my own subreddit that i that i own and moderate and manage but then like tapping into potentially others that could be relevant maybe it'd be helpful to have an example of like a like a product review type of article or like a roundup, like best, you know, 10 best toaster ovens or like that kind of traditional affiliate content.

4:40Maybe we'll start there. Yeah, that's great. Well, 10 best toaster ovens, let's say that we're working on getting that ranking. Obviously, we still have our publication and I feel like that's to me is like one spoke in this internet realm right now. And it's an important spoke, but it used to be like the hub and that's where like all roads led to our publications. And now I look at it as one part in this entire landscape. Publication, meaning like a website, like your domain that you have full control over. Yeah. Okay. That you own. Yeah. And that you do want to lead people to eventually, which is nice, but it's only one spoke and that's the reality of it.

5:20And posting a best toaster roundup in Reddit is not just cuffing and pasting your blog. For example, like Redditors really, I think they're really suspicious generally of brands and of affiliates and they know that kind of game things like people squeeze in there we see it all the time there's a lot of reddit rules and best practices that you have to engage in but i would say generally be helpful and a lot of times when we're sharing those types of best of in ours it's you know we could take an angle of like we're looking into this like we genuinely care we come at through the side of like we're the users we're the curious people that are actually in their kitchen looking at toasters and and comparing them and you know like UGC but that's how I would probably approach that in a Reddit list like I'm looking at these and can you add some recommendations or have you tried these so that's the kind of content I think that does really well in Reddit and if you want to publish in your own subreddit That's great.

6:24I think it's a great distribution play. And I think all publishers, at the very least, if you are intimidated with Reddit, create your own subreddit and start distributing your content. That's where we really started. Okay. We would just distribute our content in Reddit and start to see some natural engagement. I mean, you can use the sidebar. You can link back to your site. You can add links back to your site. You can give them little teasers, like the full review is on my site, which is really great. that's a great technique to Reddit. Like, you know, I've been looking into this. These are three things I learned.

6:57Not just straight copy and paste syndication, but a little teaser summary. And hey, the full review is back on my domain. Yeah, there are subreddits that let you distribute your content. And I see a lot of like news driven content or if you have that type of a site where it's like, you know, breaking news or breaking like entertainment. So there are some subreddits that will do just that. and you can engage in that as well. That can be a strategy. But for a lot of my, like for our type of publishing or for review sites or affiliate sites, I think kind of crafting something that is valuable and answers a question or shares, and then you can bring them back to your site.

7:37So that's a really good baseline strategy for publishers out there. Okay, and this is very timely because we like just as of literally yesterday got control of the Side Hustle Nation subreddit. somebody had been squatting. I was wondering that. I was looking at us. It's like, wondered if you had control of that. Squatting is probably an aggressive term, but somebody was using that trademark term as their own subreddit in promoting who knows what, but it had kind of been abandoned. Yeah. And so we submitted a trademark request, submitted like a moderator takeover request, I don't know what it was, and was able to get on board with that.

8:15And so now it's like the question mark of, well, you know, obviously we We can invite the audience to come be members and contribute to the conversation and the content there. But from a publishing standpoint, like, do we start with like the archive, like the dozens and dozens of posts in the archive that like start to drip those out as threads in this community or in this subreddit? Oh, I mean, that is definitely one strategy that you can do and, you know, figure out what kind of works. The great thing about Reddit, I would say, one, it's great that you got your subreddit back. So for all the publishers out there, if you do anything right now, it's like, you know, get your Reddit subreddit name because anybody can create any subreddit for any brand.

8:58There's no there's no rule. It's the wild, wild west of the world Reddit. So it's nice when you can recover that and you can take it over. So, yes, I would generally say have that distribution strategy. But think if you if your goal is a traffic arbitrage, there's things that you might want to do. if your goal is to build a community, there's definitely a lot of community building things that you can do, you know, questions and engagement. Like you said, bring your audience back there. And what could that really look like? I would spend a few minutes actually strategizing what you want your group to look like and what it's going to lead back to and what you want people to do.

9:37Okay. But there's a lot of opportunity there for you to repurpose, share tips, build some excitement, get some more views ideas yeah i mean one thing that's that's top of mind is looking at some of the you know highest performing articles historically highest performing articles that have lost traffic and then saying well why you know they're still they're still on the first page but they're just lower down right and so it's like how could we create you know the reddit thread or the red you know some sort of post around that in an attempt to sure hopefully this, you know, still exists on the site and maybe we update it, make it more relevant and timely.

10:13Sure. But also, like, could we leapfrog that with some sort of Reddit in the search results? Like, do you see people going after that or trying to create, you know, some other little compelling little tentacle out into the Internet world to like draw people back in? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's great. I love the feedback loop that can come from that, too. So if you have an old listicle article that has done well and you can share some of that and ask people to you know weigh in on are these great choices or do you agree with this advice or any other advice you can update the article then you can actually share and write it we've updated the article we've updated the guide there's so many things you can do with your subreddit as a community as well and for brands i think and for publishers having that branded publisher subreddit is really great but you can expand your footprint as well and have like affinity subreddits with which are more like topical.

11:10So you can, you know, just like a topical content map, you can have a subreddit for almost anything. And I feel like it's almost like the old days of SEO when there's like exact match. The more topical and the more niche the subreddit is, I feel like the easier it is to rank for certain things as well. So sometimes having those brand new subreddits that are really, really topical, like wedding flower arrangements, let's say. And that's all you talk about in that subreddit. And it becomes a place where people can ask questions, but also where you can share really topical things. And I feel like that also helps you rank.

11:52It all will depend on the landscape. Just looking at if you, you know, do a deep dive and look at what's in the SERPs for anything, there's certain subreddits that are just dominant. Like moving is a dominant subreddit. a lot of business groups, you know, like project management, business, there's a lot of that. So like the broad terms have kind of been taken over. So going a little bit nichier and having those little mini affinity groups, you don't need to have a ton of content. You don't need to have a hundred pieces, a hundred posts in your subreddit to start ranking and start seeing results.

12:30the thing that people don't really talk about reddit a lot is that reddit will serve your content right away the very first post you create a you create a new subreddit you create a post a welcome post or a new post and it gets served to other editors right away yeah it's getting indexed and everything spending a lot of computing power indexing all this content our user generated content here. We've built a lot of websites from scratch and we know that it takes months to see those early results. And you're in Ahrefs and you're like, okay, are we getting every index? Are we getting some rankings?

13:06Are we doing that? It takes months to see if your original strategy is working and Reddit, it takes days. Yeah. Yeah. You get the quick feedback loop. Let's go back to this, you know, best toasters example. So maybe I put the list on my site and it's, you know, have the best kitchen gadgets subreddit sure and i can post you know the teaser of it there and then i'm going to r slash kitchens r slash cooking am i like treading carefully not to you know get in trouble for self-promotion or does it make sense to make like the best toaster like to create a completely separate subreddit like only for that day or to piggyback on the brands themselves like oh you know kitchen aid was you know one of the so i mean that probably already exists but like you know if it's an up-and-coming brand like if it doesn't exist like you could be the first you could be the creator of this thing and this is the exciting thing about reddit right now and when we even start to work with partners and work with clients or even do a reddit strategy for one of our sites it's like that's part of the strategy is figuring out it's like kind of like choosing your own adventure and reddit and where you want to go and it is really just like evaluating the landscape and saying, OK, the brands that's like that's already out there.

14:24There's already there might even be like a best toaster subreddit. So maybe we take a different approach and like where can we kind of see and also kind of evaluate the titles and the kind of thing that is ranking, but also is getting engagement from Redditors, because I think that's another factor in getting your Reddit post up is comments and engagement as well. and we really like to have great content. I'm a content purist, a content nerd. I don't want to have a bunch of, oh, no bots, but I don't have a bunch of people just upvoting things to upvote. I want great content that gets natural engagement and knowing that Reddit serves your content, if it's good, people will like it and comment and engage in it too.

15:08So that's another factor as well to keep in mind when you're creating these strategies. But there is a lot of initial, put things out there, put a few reddit posts together see what's working and then you can adjust the strategy yeah isn't it in a way it's just nuts like i miss the the eat whatever you know expertise and authority and trust it's like no any old joe schmo can now create this thing and it ranks instantly it's like well what happened to building domain authority i've been part of editorial and And I've been a big EAT champion for many years. And the goalpost for content quality, it kept moving and moving and moving.

15:49And that was something like my editorial got tougher and tougher. And we kept hiring more and more experts. And we still do that. I still hire the real deal experts, the real deal nerds. Yeah. But the Reddit thing coming up, it was like that was my first kind of like gut. It was like, oh, these people may or may not be experts. and I kind of had to like take a step back and embrace it. Because if you think about with AI overviews and AI content creation and all the things that are happening, content is a bit of a commodity. But at least with Reddit, as for the most part, it's real, it is real people.

16:27I'm not saying they're all experts, but they are real people. And the more that I spend time in Reddit, the more I kind of get it and kind of respect the ecosystem that is there. And I can't believe the things that people are willing to share. Yeah, it's a lot of anonymous usernames. It's like, well, who's to say? I mean, I guess you're speaking from personal experience in a lot of cases as a commenter, but you know, who's behind it? I don't know. I can see the pros and cons to that. But I think the anonymity really does help people express themselves. Let's just like say that. express, share things that they might not share, even like horror stories with work or insights, things that, you know, like even when you're doing a podcast, there's always going to be this thing where you're holding back.

17:15But on Reddit, someone might not hold back. They might tell everything and they often do. So I think that Ananemy, it's almost a trade-off, but it could almost bring out more expertise and more insights than without it, to be fair. Okay, more with Amy in just a moment, including encouraging that engagement, building your community and how you might do keyword research to figure out what kind of content to post in the first place. Coming up right after this. There are less than 100 days left in 2025, which means less than 100 days left to hit those goals that you said or to refocus your energy on what really matters.

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19:55There's still a lot to unpack here. You mentioned that comments and engagement seem to be a positive signal, right? Like if this is getting a lot of upvotes and comments, like that may be more likely to get more eyeballs to both on the Reddit platform and potentially through Google later. Do anything specific to encourage that feedback, to encourage commenting? I would say create good content and learn what works when you get it served. Like I said, you create a post in Reddit. It gets served to other people in Reddit. You'll see what's kind of ranking. And once people are there, are they actually clicking through?

20:32Are they actually engaging? Are they actually uploading? Those signals are really great. And you can work on the editorial from there. You can kind of make adjustments. And you have an example or two of a post or a thread that did get that level of engagement you were looking for? One of the things that we did in the beginning was we started just a subreddit for one of our websites. And it naturally got a lot of engagement and people joining in and saying, OK, can you look into this tool? Can you look into this review? Or I don't agree with you on this. So like sometimes even having like really strong opinions will get engagement, which is great.

21:10And I was looking at a post today and someone said, I don't agree with your list for CFOs. I think these are not really great recommendations. And it's a talking point. It's great. And they're making my post have more engagement. I can always edit the post if I agree with them. I can always disagree with them. And I think that back and forth is actually a really good starting point for Reddit. and bread. So I mean, just like sometimes you can, if you have a strong opinion, people are going to agree or disagree with you. It's not about giving everything away, like in a full blog. It's about sharing a strong opinion, showing your expertise, having a side.

21:49I think that works really well to get engagement. I mean, is this any different than blog comments, you know, back in the day? Or is this just, you know, nobody's, nobody's reading the blog anymore. So you got to go where the people are. Yeah. And that's a really good point. I feel like everything I've done for the past decade or more has led me to this. The way we've done editorial, even just how to get engagement, how to improve a title, what to look for and what works. It's just we're on a different platform. It's just a different place to put content in a slightly different way. Is there anything proactive that you're doing to build your own subreddit community on the platform?

22:30It's like, I'm like such a newbie user. It's like, does it just happen organically? People search side hustles and they find it? Like, how does it work? It can happen organically, but also like we do old fashioned community building. So we do reach out if somebody comments on one of our posts. I will reach out through the mod mail and say, thank you so much for your comment. Can you join our community? You can invite other mods and other people to contribute to your community. That's another thing that you can do. You can do cross posting on Reddit. I think Reddit is more friendly to cross post and sharing those kind of things.

23:08Self-promotion is you have to kind of play it a little bit safe. But I think if you bring something valuable and it makes sense and it's not all that you do. Remember, every single Reddit profile that we that you have, you can see in the entire history of what someone's done. So every single thing you've done is a cross post promotion. You've mentioned the same brand or same publication everywhere you go. Or that's all you talk about is the AI tool that you love. it's very obvious to other writers that you're not there to contribute to this reddit community okay yeah no no shortcuts there you got to be be a part be a good steward of the community can you explain cross-posting really quick this is like taking something from your subreddit into another subreddit and sharing and it's like there there is a way that you can actually cross like cross-post and share yes and that's also you can also cross-post a question into more than one if you ask a question in another subreddit you can cross-post the question if you feel like you need more answers.

24:09So there is that too. But yes, you can cross post your content into other subreddits. And again, every subreddit has their own rules, their own ecosystem, their own guidelines. So I just caution before you do any promotion, make sure you read the full subreddit rules. And when you control your subreddit, you get to control that too. You can literally say no cross posting. You can say anything. You can say no cross posting, no brand promotions, You have to start every post with a Yahoo to get approved. Like it's wild, wild. Let's say I'm coming to you as a new client or new prospective client. Like talk to me about the like keyword research strategy, if that's even the right term here, like to figure out where to go, what to post, what kind of keywords to target.

24:58It's a similar type of conversations working with, you know, creating a content plan or working with just like an SEO type of content strategy, depending on the client goals, like figuring out what they want to do first. Do they want, is it going to be sort of a traffic arbitrage? Is it going to be an awareness play? Is it going to be a brand reputation management play? Is it going to be, there's a lot of different things that you can do with Reddit, but we start like literally looking at the search landscape, like where is Reddit coming up? Where are their brand terms coming up what their brand terms are important to them obviously like review comparisons all those commercial intent terms are really important we also look at ai overviews because reddit's being informed like using reddit's and ai overviews now which has only been for a few months to be fair so that's really interesting to see like what kind what are they pulling and then determine the content strategy and keyword strategy and what type of content where we put it from there any tools or or tech that you like on this right i'm just trying to think of well in hrefs i could pull up like a competitor yeah report or like a content gap type of report and say oh you know these 10 similar sites are ranking for these keywords if you haven't covered that you might consider it because clearly there's interest in that well in ahrefs you can look up everything in reddit i feel like it's a little bit behind still like because there's so much reddit results that ahrefs can be a little behind and and displaying all the the terms and the keywords that are actually ranking in reddit but that's a good place to start like just look up reddit you know look up your brand look up your keywords see it and also see like look up the keywords with your brand and then append reddit so like you know nike review reddit so look to see that so kind of like look at that landscape like digging into those reddit results and and seeing if it's major subreddits that are coming up if it's if it's a geo play because a lot of times it could be something where it's a lot of geographical locations like you know ask in toronto or in canada or in north carolina or in la and those kind of things too and seeing some of the terms that come up a lot of times for brands we see things like is brand x legit that's a very something that comes up in reddit a lot as you can imagine yes if you have a review of that brand would you title that the third you know is brand x legit here i tested this out i found these results yes or no like here's here's the link to my full review yeah i mean for our blog we might our third party we might do a full review and that might be a subheading for a Reddit post that might be the title of a Reddit post, is blah, blah, blah legit?

27:46If we're seeing that, if we're seeing that people are asking that, or is it worth it? Is it legit? Those kinds of things. And you can see the type of questions that people are asking in Reddit results already and deciding what to do with the information is like the next step in the strategy for sure. But yeah, legit's a good one, worth it's a good one. Would you create a new thread in that case, like kind of with that same title, or would you just comment on it like yes it's legit no it's not like whatever your results finding was so a lot of times i evaluate sentiment of for the the reviews that are coming up currently at the when we first start working with a client and if it's negative sentiment if something's definitely negative sentiment one thing you don't want to kind of do is like add to the fire because comments and upvotes make that post better.

28:36Give it more juice. So we kind of have an approach of like love bombing around the negative sentiments. At least having more of an editorial approach or creating things around that. I wouldn't go and engage with a fully negative review and hoping to like turn the brain. And that's what brands have done. They're like, oh, I have a negative. Someone said something and it could be for something 10 years ago that happened and somebody was upset and it's actually, we could be opposed from 10 years ago on Reddit. Like this is what we're dealing with now. And so they'll go and they'll comment on that Reddit thread and just give it more juice and that it can stay in the ranking.

29:14But we like to kind of love bomb, let's say around those and to shift the sentiment. Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm clear on that. Are you saying like, don't jump on that overwhelmingly negative thread with a positive spin? You're just like, you're just adding more fuel and the consensus is still like, we want to bury this thing. Like we don't want this to have any more visibility than it already does. Starting something else that, you know, has a clean slate and can be more positive. Yes, I would say the exception would be if it's something that's in your own branded subreddit and it's a customer service type of question that's genuine.

29:48I think then brands need to address it and need to comment. And I think that's, you know, that's a different strategy. That's more of like a customer service strategy. but as far as like if you're for the ranking remember like the more you engage in a post and read it the more it's going to surface to the top okay yeah so maybe not adding more visibility to to something that you don't want people to read or you don't want people to see or even if you're just an affiliate partner it's like we don't necessarily want that to be front and center but i think evaluating that sentiment as content creators is really important and i I think that's part of the research and part of what I tell our writers as well, because we if we're we're talking about brands or products or things that we like and every single thing in Reddit is negative.