Yep. I said it. Ugly. Terrifying. Weird Looking. Crazy Smiling Alien with Red Eyes Staring At You…ALL THE TIME.

In this case…

Don’t judge a site by its homepage!

What’s the massive traffic source? It’s Reddit.

Reddit is a goliath of a traffic source. You can get instant traffic and even instant customers (in any niche) from Reddit pretty quickly…if you use it correctly.

This is one of those cases where you have to really go beyond the looks of the site and dive in head first because there is a ton of opportunity on Reddit…if you use it correctly.

If used wrong, you can get eaten alive on Reddit.

In this post, we are going to discuss the power of Reddit and how you can use it to get turn Reddit traffic into buyers. Pay attention closely because it’s easy to screw this up and we want you to succeed here because if you can make it on Reddit, you can make it anywhere (it’s kind of like the New York of traffic, if you will).

Now let’s get started!

What is Reddit?

Reddit is a Unique Hybrid of a Social Network, Forum, and Democratic Content Curation Engine that sorts content based on popularity within its community.

Because Reddit is such a different kind of environment than really anywhere else on the web, if you are not adding value or you are too self-serving in what you are posting, then you will get eaten alive on Reddit and it will not work for you in a positive way.

Picture how Facebook would be in it had a “Dislike” Button. Well, Reddit has and fosters that type of environment where people can upvote and downvote a post. If you get a lot of downvotes, your post will gain popularity, but not in a good way. You want to avoid that at all costs.

When it comes to Reddit the one thing you constantly have to think of is what we call AAV: Always Add Value. When you follow that rule, you should be golden! If you are too self-serving, Redditors will see it right away and you might as well just go and bury your face in the sand. Adding value and truly helping will pay off big time for the long-term success of your business.

Redditors can see right through Bullshit!

Hint: The ”style” of content and communication that Redditors really like is called AMA (Ask Me Anything). This is where Redditors can ask ANYTHING about the topic they are interested in.

Example 1: “I’ve been self-employed for the last 4 years making a full-time living from home…Ask Me Anything”.

Example 2: “I’ve lost 10 pounds in 30 days eating all of my favorite foods without starving myself…Ask Me Anything”.

Find something unique about your business and the AMA-type strategy should work very well for you.

Reddit Case Studies: What Works and What Fails Miserably?

Physical Product Success Case Study

Beardbrand – For guys who want to keep their beards looking good.

One of the reasons why the company Beardbrand blew up was because the CEO, Eric Bandholz, actively went on Reddit talking to guys about their beards and he also answered questions and interacted with his fellow beardmasters. He would recommend solutions to problems and he also recommended his products in full disclosure that he was the owner. This goes over very well with Redditors. Eric was constantly adding value.

The best part is what Eric does next. After he made it big, he then was able to help others business-wise because his business got so successful! He was able to cut across subreddits right into the business world because he went on to share his success stories.

How Does This Apply To You?

In this case study scenario, Eric grew his brand from in less than a year  from $0 in sales to $120k/month in sales. Not everyone can tell that kind of story. However, the great part about Reddit is that 1) Redditors love stories and 2) Everyone has a story.

If you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner (even if you are not profitable yet), you have a story. Let’s say you work a full-time job and you are making an income on the side, you can tell people about what you do from day to day to make that happen. What does your day look like? Where do you spend your time? Where are you finding success? What are your challenges? You see? Every story is not about going from making $0 to $120k a month. The point is that you can find an outlet for your story on Reddit and if you tell it with heart, you will be just fine.

Content Curation Success Case Study

Helping people and saving people time is very popular on Reddit.

This person put together a post on all helpful links revolving around the topic of Growth Hacking. He rounded up 7 topics and posted a ton of resources in each.

Growth Hacking Resources
Growth Hacking Techniques
Growth Hacking Tactics
Growth Hacking Communities
Growth Hacking Examples
Growth Hacking Books
Growth Hacking Tools

How Does This Apply To You?

Do you think you could round up a bunch of links to help people in your niche on various problems people face in your niche? Do you think you could pretty much copy this strategy and apply it to your niche?

Of course! You would be seen as very helpful and many would appreciate such a gesture.

Hint: You can link to your own stuff as long as you are adding value!

SAAS (Software As A Service) Success Case Study

ScriptDoll – Software as a service that saves time and money with copywriting.

“AMA Type” Reddit post.

The AMA style post works very well on Reddit and starts a great conversation. The more the person who writes the post interacts and answers questions honestly, the more people will upvote the post and the more you will get noticed and the more your story will be “picked up”.

Redditors love stories like this. They love the good, bad and the ugly.

Reddit Failures

As said above, Redditors are huge fans of honesty. If  people are asking you questions and you are not answering honestly or you are just steering every question back to your “buy button” for lack of a better term, you will fail miserably. Just like Ford did here.

 

Every question leads back to “the offer”. That approach doesn’t fly well with Redditors.

How Does This Apply To You?

The type of traffic you should be looking for from Reddit is long term traffic. Reddit is not a “make a quick post and leave” type of atmosphere. You could do that on your blog or an article directory. Look at Reddit as a long term traffic source where you could get traffic as soon as you post to a year from now because of the great content and interaction you are building. Have the intention of interacting and answering questions about whatever it is you are posting. Don’t make the mistake that Ford did where they didn’t want to bother with any of the Redditor’s questions.  Redditors see right through that bullshit so this is a fair warning not to make that same mistake!

Woody Harrelson made that same mistake too.

 

As said above, Reddit is a powerful place for traffic, but if you don’t know what to expect and you don’t know what you are dealing with, you are heading for muddy waters.

 

 Want to Learn How to Succeed With Reddit And Successfully Get Instant Traffic Now and For Years To Come?  
Click Here to Learn more About it Now. 

Cutting Through The Madness Of Reddit So You Don’t Waste Time

Reddit might look a bit intimidating at first site. This might scare many marketers away but since you are reading this post, you won’t be scared….right?

Your goal is to cut through the madness so you kind of find where you belong and then focus on just those places. What you want to look for is about 15-20 subreddits in one Reddit account and that’s where you are going to add value.

Here are the subreddits for our Whiskey Baller Example:

Your subreddits that you belong to will be what appears on your front page. When you log on to Reddit, you can avoid wasting any time because you simply sign up for your subreddits and then you are on your way. Those are the only things you want to pay attention to.

You will want to add tons of value to the subreddits you belong to. You want to have discussions with people about your niche (not about your product). The marketing aspect comes naturally as you build up your posts and interaction.

How To Avoid Wasting Time

The only reason why someone would get onto Reddit and become overwhelmed and frustrated is because there are too many unknowns. If you don’t know how something works, then it could potentially be stressful and overwhelming.

 

Avoid Wasting Time With Reddit – Click Here Now To Start Using This Goliath of A Traffic Site Without Aggravation So You Can Start Getting Traffic Easily & Immediately

 

Another important way to avoid wasting time is to AVOID doing something completely wrong on Reddit. There are a bunch of ways to screw up but one thing to avoid is to post a link to your own blog post. Let’s say for example, I go on Reddit and post a link to this blog post…that will look kind of weird right? Ideally, you want other people to be posting your amazing content. You don’t really want to be tooting your own horn. It’s much more powerful coming from a third party, unrelated source. Inside of the Evil Reddit Magician, we go over how exactly to avoid this mistake but still be in control of your posts!

Now, it’s OK to link to your own stuff, but you need to be adding MORE value than just the content you are linking to. So…a bit more effort needs to go into it if you do want to post your own stuff.

5 Steps To Reddit Posting Success

1) Pay Attention To Subreddit Rules

Not all subreddits are created equally. You need to pay attention to the rules of each subreddit to experience success. For example, you can’t post in certain subreddits without having a certain amount of comment Kharma.

Another example is that some subreddits only allow text while others allow text and images.

2) Never Post A Thread and Walk Away

When you make a post on Reddit, people are going to interact with you, respond and ask questions. The last thing you want to do is ignore anyone! The whole point of Reddit is interaction. Be sure to stick around for about 90 minutes when you make a post. It’s also helpful to have the Reddit App on your phone. Keep in mind that you can do other things in the background while you are hanging out and answering comments.

The main reason for this is because you want to shoot up to the top of your subreddit.

3) Handle Haters Peacefully

Trust me…there will be haters. What you don’t want to do is get defensive and hate back. You just want to respond calmly like their comments aren’t getting you riled in any way.

The most important thing to do is be honest…that will take you very far and it will force other Redditors to take your side and not the hater’s side.

4) Don’t Say Everything In Your First Post

Your first post should have the Who What When Where and Why. You want to intentionally leave things open ended so you will stir up a great conversation. The more comments you get, the more attention your thread is going to get. This is why you want to hang around a bit when you first post a thread because your responses will create more questions.

5) Load Your Guns Before You Post

You don’t have to have a huge following for this to work, but it is important to post a link to your new Reddit post on other social media sites where you have some type of presence so that you can get it started with people who already know you and “have your back”.

Introduction To Reddit Ads

Reddit is a great place to pay for advertising. The reason is because it is highly targeted! You are basically marketing directly to the subreddit of your niche.

PocketDerm, a skin care product, had extraordinary results with link ads (see below) which linked to a landing page. They also had what’s known as a text ad that answered common skincare questions within the ad copy. To encourage people to try the service, each Reddit ad offered a free month of PocketDerm to new patients.

Companies like Sumo Jerky sell a subscription physical product. They are advertising to subreddits like: /r/food, /r/keto, /r/paleo, /r/ fitness, and /r/snackexchange. Ryan personalized his ads by introducing himself in the headline title, adding a selfie as his thumbnail image, and offering a custom Reddit promo code.

Subscription type services are very powerful because you can offer up a free trial to very targeted potential customers AND you can interact with people who have questions about your offers! There’s a ton of potential!

Targeting Your Reddit Ad

Ads on Reddit are constructed a bit different. Your ad is actually your Reddit post.  You can either target a group or a subreddit.

So, inside of Reddit, there are predetermined groups.

Some groups include:

Trend Spotters
Gamers
Technology Buffs
Sports and Fitness
News Junkies
Lifestyles
Adult Content

You can also geo-target to a very specific subset of people. This is huge for services where geographic location is important.

The Reddit style of ads are different too and unlike Facebook. They call their ad space “Inventory” and the inventory actually gets sold out quickly, especially in popular subreddits like the Entrepreneur category. There are sneaky ways to get around this which we cover in the ads section of Evil Reddit Magician.

Don’t worry, not every section of Reddit sells out their inventory. It’s a good thing to try advertising in different, but related subreddits to test out your traffic and see what kinds of people are responding to your ads. There might be another subreddit just as good and you can get traffic and buy ads all day long with no issues. It’s all a matter of testing, just like anything.

You can only choose one subreddit per campaign. This is actually a better setup so you can monitor how each subreddit is doing.

Hot Reddit Ad Tip

This is a great tip that we just had to include here.

Before you put up your Reddit ad, go into your subreddit and start to look at the types of posts that are doing really well. This way you will see the topics within that niche that people are really responding to.

Here I went to the subreddit: paleorecipes

And it looks like this Roundup post (or curated post) is doing pretty well. So perhaps an ad would be for the best Paleo Recipes for 2015 so far, or something along those lines.

Looking at trending Reddit posts will give you tons of clues with the direction you should be heading in with your ads.

Reddit Success Conclusion

Reddit is a tight community. Redditors are proud to be Redditors and they support other fellow Redditors.

Redditors love real, honest people. They are not going to support some schmuck who just goes in there and self-promotes like it’s another warrior forum. This is how marketers utterly fail at Reddit and they say that it just doesn’t work to get traffic. Little do they know that they need to follow the basic rules to posting in this community of buyers and action takers. If you violate these basic rules, consider Reddit as a dead traffic source.

Be sure to remember that posting to Reddit is about being real. Don’t hold back. Share everything. Be funny. Be humble. That is how you will survive on this platform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes he is a little bit scary (but cute). Yes he is everywhere on Reddit (and always staring at you). But he can be your best friend or worst enemy…you decide!

Click here for the only training you need to succeed on Reddit and how to properly use it to get heaps of targeted traffic for years to come.