Using Reddit to Drive Visitors to Your Site

Reddit is a social bookmarking site that operates something like a cross between a forum and a social media site. As with either of those, it allows you to create your own profile and then share posts from around the web. And like a social media site, it lets you choose which content you want to see on the homepage when you log on.

Unlike social media sites however, Reddit is not about updating people on what you’ve had for lunch but rather provides a series of smaller communities (called ‘Sub Reddits’) for discussing a range of different topics. There are Sub Reddits on almost everything from Gaming, to Sonic the Hedgehog, to Fitness, to Agoraphobia. If it’s a niche that exists, there’s probably a Reddit for it. And if there’s not? You can quickly and easily create one.

Within those Sub Reddits, users can then post comments or links which will then get upvoted or downvoted, affecting their prominence and visibility both on the homepage for subscribed users and on the Sub Reddit main page itself. This is ‘social curation’ and it’s a great way to find the most interesting content in your niche.

The Benefits of Reddit

Right away, this provides an obvious and immediate opportunity for marketers looking to promote their content online. Posting in a Sub Reddit and getting enough upvotes can mean instant access to a huge audience of targeted users and potentially thousands or even millions of views overnight.

And there are more uses for Reddit besides this too. For instance, you can use Reddit as a great way to find trending content you can share to your own social media accounts. This makes it very similar to using something like BuzzSumo – but free.

Finally, Reddit offers you a forum to discuss with the community. If you’re creating a product, then Reddit is an excellent place to conduct research from a very enthusiastic audience.

How to Succeed

But there’s a downside to Reddit too – that being that the audience is very cynical and can be very brutal in their treatment of promotional content. If you want to share links without them being down-voted and picked apart, then you need to ensure that you’re only linking to very high quality work and you also need to ensure that you spend your time building your reputation in the community. You have been warned!