Getting Bitcoin Traffic Out of Reddit
There aren't many places around the web today for Bitcoin users to hang out. One of the most powerful techniques to get free users is to familiarize yourself with these "hangouts" and build a reputation for yourself. Reddit is one of the main traffic points for Bitcoin users.
r/Bitcoin- an unexplored gold mine
Reddit, for those of you who are still unaware of it, is a social news platform. Simply put, it's a voting platform for content from all around the web with the option of adding your own content as well. Content that is up voted a lot gets pushed to the top and stays there, and content that isn't as good disappears within minutes.
The outcome - an amazing, almost unbiased news source for the people and by the people. Reddit is currently the #25 website on the internet according to Alexa and is growing in popularity around the world20.
So why should you use Reddit?
Well, good question. The three main reasons that you should use Reddit are:
- It will get you links from a premium quality domain and that's good for SEO.
- It will get you to the first page on Google in a matter of hours if you're in a low-competition niche like Bitcoin.
- It can get you MASSIVE amounts of traffic if you use it correctly.
Just to emphasis the amount of traffic you can get from Reddit, here's a screenshot from my website's analytics after I posted one of my posts on Reddit.
I nearly doubled my daily traffic. Colleges of mine have reported that when they got to the #1 spot on a specific subreddit (we'll get to that later) they've gotten up to almost 30,000 unique visitors per day!
SubReddits
Reddit is built out of different subsections, or subreddits. For each topic there is one or several subreddits. If I take for example the subreddit I use mostly, which is r/bitcoin (this is how subreddits are formatted), then there are also r/bitcoinbeginners, r/bitcoinUK etc... Meaning a topic can have similar subreddits and it's your mission to understand which subreddit is most suitable for your content.
When choosing a subreddit, make sure to find out how many subscribers it has. For example, a few hundred subscribers is considered a relatively small subreddit . Several thousand is considered medium, and tens of thousands is a large subreddit. r/Bitcoin is considered pretty big and is currently #198 out of all subreddits available21.
Reddit Users
Reddit users are usually people looking to stay informed on a specific subject. Consider your subreddit as a forum of experts on that matter. This means that if you throw at them a $5 SEO article you bought on Upwork, it will disappear in no time. Moreover, from my experience, Reddit users value facts over opinions. This means that a post about the "Top 5 bitcoin ticker widgets" would probably work better than a post about "Why Bitcoin will fail". Still this is not to say that you shouldn't submit opinionative posts, but I'll explain more about that in a minute.
Each user has "Link Karma" which is based on the votes for links he has submitted and "Comment Karma" based on comments he has replied. Note that this does not mean that you can create hundreds of users and up vote your own posts. Reddit uses a sophisticated ranking system, which identifies "low values votes" and matches them with the opposite vote. This means that if you try to trick your way to the top you will only lose ranking faster. Again, quality matters here.
Posts vs. Links
Once you start using Reddit you will notice that it is much easier to get up votes for posts than for links. This is for several reasons:
- A post is a content that keeps the user within Reddit. This makes it easier to click the up vote button without the need to click back to Reddit.
- All links in posts are "NoFollow" links, which makes posts much less attractive to SEO spammers.
- A post is content written by the user itself and not by a third party website like a link.
- This might be the reason for people going easy on posts much more than on links.
Reddit Rules
Each subreddit has different rules. For example, the subreddit r/entrepreneur won't let you post a link unless you have over 90 Link Karma points. The subreddit r/Java won't let you post a link if you already posted it in a related group (e.g. Scala) so make sure to get familiar with each of the subreddit's rules. In general you can't submit a link that someone has already submitted within the same subreddit (but you might be able to submit it in a different one).
Reddit Gold
Since Reddit is "for the people and by the people" it allows you to buy a gold membership which is called Reddit gold - this helps support the Reddit community. This doesn't give you much in terms of marketing but it does help to validate your profile. So if people may suspect you are only on Reddit to promote your own links (which may be true), it puts them at ease that you are at least giving back to the community. I personally am subscribed to this service, because I believe that in the long run it would give me better exposure to my links.
Let’s get down to business
Now that we've gone over the basics of how Reddit works, let's talk about some tips, tricks and best practices you can use when using Reddit as your Bitcoin marketing channel. I will talk mainly about submitting links for two reasons:
- Submitting a link is probably the best way to drive traffic to a specific URL.
- Links submitted to Reddit, surprisingly enough are "DoFollow" links which help your SEO efforts.
Rule #1 - Use the entire link real estate you are given.
When you submit a link to Reddit you are required to enter the following:
- Title for the URL
- The URL itself
- A subreddit to post the URL
Make sure to make the most out of all of these.
Title - This is probably the most important part. This is why you should never use the "suggest title" option. The title should be catchy, make people want to click it and still be related to the actual content. Remember! Your audience won't tolerate cheap marketing tricks. Think interesting and elegant. Use numbers to differentiate yourself from other titles.
The URL itself - not much to say about this, just enter the URL as is.
Your selected subreddit - Most of the times you won't be limited to posting your URL in only one subreddit. Having said that, I wouldn't post any link in more than two main subreddits of your relevant audience. Reddit will also stop you from reposting your links over and over at some point. The key thing to remember is "Don't abuse the system". Think about giving actual value. If you think this link will be relevant to two or even three different subreddits, then post it there as well.
But let's take Bitcoin again for example. I know that the majority of my audience is subscribed to r/bitcoin and the newbies are probably also subscribed to r/bitcoinbeginners. So I might post a general post about the future of Bitcoin on both subreddits, but if I was posting about entry level stuff I would only post it on r/bitcoinbeginners.
The photo - I know, I know, I've never mentioned a photo before. But just like a post on Facebook, when you post a link to Reddit and it has an image on that URL it will normally take the first image on the page and put it as a thumbnail. This is a huge advantage for your CTR if you use this correctly.
What I usually do is create a specific Meme for each of my posts and make sure to put that Meme as the first image on the page. This creates a thumbnail of that Meme, which people usually identify but can't read (because of its size), hence making them click the link.
Also, if you post a link to YouTube on Reddit, users will be able to watch the video from within Reddit which will probably help it get more up votes.
Rule #2 - Always test your content for the best suitable audience
We've talked before about the fact that most of the time you will be able to post your link at different subreddits. Use this to test out which links work best with which audiences. Keep track of the number of up votes/down votes you've gotten for your past links (I just use a simple Excel sheet) and the next time you have multiple options to where to submit a link choose wisely.
Rule #3 - Not all URLs are created equal
Whenever you post a link to Reddit the URL will appear to the right of it. This has several impacts:
If your URL is "spammy in nature" less people will click on it. For example, when I started out, my domain name was BitcoinWithPaypal.com - since I wanted to teach people about buying Bitcoins with PayPal and needed to get better SEO results. Having said that, that domain name isn't the most reliable one you can choose for a subreddit of Bitcoin savvy people. It isn't elegant and it has affiliate marketing written all over it. This gave me a really hard time to get people clicking on my links. Some people even commented about the domain without actually clicking on the link itself.
Reddit has a sophisticated way of filtering out abused URLs. My guess is that it tracks your history in a certain subreddit for that URL and if it's a poor one, it won't show you as much. Again, this teaches us not to abuse the system and only to post stuff that adds value to the community. So keep in mind that you will probably get the most traffic in the beginning when Reddit still doesn't recognize your domain and as time progresses it will get harder (but possible) to get the same amount of traffic.
Rule #4 - There’s no such thing as a bad troll
Sometimes when you post a link to Reddit you will get some trolls or people commenting bad things about your link. Don't worry; this is actually good, since Reddit takes into account the amount of comments when it calculates how to rank the post in the subreddit. The important thing is to keep your audience engaged. So make sure to reply to comments that you get.
Sponsored Reddits
Reddit allows users to post sponsored links on the top of a subreddit. This is an amazing tool for driving additional traffic at low cost (estimated $0.04 per click). I won't go over this tool in detail in this section but here are the main things to keep in mind when using it.
Just because you're paying to be at the top doesn't mean you can put whatever you like there - the more people click and up vote your link the more Reddit will prefer showing your sponsored post over others.
Use this method for time-sensitive posts where you want to make sure that you're at the top of the subreddit without the need to count on user up votes. This method does not substitute the organic submission of links, it complements it for specific purposes. But more on that in a different post.
Reddit is an unexplored gold mine
To conclude, Reddit is the Craigslist of content marketing. It has an ugly layout (not mobile optimized even the slightest bit), a mediocre user interface, and tons of traffic. If you get your head around how to use it right you will be way ahead of the content marketing game in your niche. But don't make the mistake of disrespecting the Reddit society just because it has an outdated front end. Make sure to add value to the community and they will give you value back. Reddit is probably the biggest source of traffic of Bitcoin users.
Tools for exploring Reddit
Reddit list
Gives you a list of all of the different subreddits out there and ranks them according to size. You can also search for keywords like "bitcoin" and see many other relevant subreddits.
Reddit Metrics
Shows you detailed stats about each subreddit. User growth rate, milestones, etc. Not as useful as Reddit List but pretty cool to explore. One example for using this site is to create an infographic about r/Bitcoin as shown here.
Reddit filters
If you want to search through the top stories in a subreddit to get ideas about what works well you can just use the built in Reddit filters. Just go to your subreddit, select "top" or "controversial" and then just choose to show "all time". Now you can see what types of stories work well on your specific subreddit.
RedditLater
A tool for scheduling link submissions to Reddit at a later time. Also gives a great analysis of what are
the best times to post at.
Homework: Hack Your Way Through Reddit
- Open up a Reddit account.
- Start searching for relevant subreddits through Reddit lists and Reddit metrics.
- Find the top stories in the past month for r/Bitcoin. Think if you can write similar stories that will perform well.
- Use RedditLater to analyze what is the best time of day to post into your chosen subreddits.
- Post at least one link to r/Bitcoin and track how much traffic it brings in; don't forget to rules about using all of your real estate.
