Using Subreddits to Boost Traffic To Your Websites

Most of us know that social bookmarking sites are a cheap and easy way to garner links for a personal or client SEO project.

However, with ease and cheapness comes a saturation point. A lot of SEOs simply purchased social bookmarking packages to promote their websites through these channels.

As expected, Google seems to have devalued these links as of late and is in fact penalizing many people for using them excessively.

Building a brand is the smartest thing you can do to develop long term success online.

What is an enterprising SEO to do?  Get a little more creative!  Today I will be discussing a great way to build a community, validate a niche or authority site idea, and build consistent and engaged traffic to your website.

Using these strategies, I have a guaranteed 500-1k views to my new posts on a fledgling website I’m building in a niche I’m passionate about.

Reddit has become an extremely popular social bookmarking site ever since Digg 4.0 came out.  Many Diggers, including myself, jumped ship and checked out Reddit for the very first time.  I have to admit, it looked really weird to me for the first month or so, but after that I was hooked.

The beauty of Reddit is that it allows you to create your own subreddit on any topic you care about.  You get to completely customize the appearance and styling of this subreddit as well.

Benefits of Running a Successful Subreddit

There  are a few awesome benefits to creating a subreddit.  As SEOs, we are constantly looking for new niche is and opportunities to build websites and create communities.  The beauty of running a subreddit in a particular niche is that it is much easier to build your community.  Reddit has millions of users, all of whom have diverse interests.  So unless your niche is something like “Juggling in the dark on lawnmowers,” I think it’s safe to say that there are other people out there that share your interests.

Running a sub Reddit is like testing for viability in a niche.  If you can grow it into a decent user base that likes to participate, share, and comments, you know that you got a niche with some traction.  You’ll be able to get inside the community’s head and understand what they like, what they love, and what they hate.  They will automatically generate content for you that can give you ideas for new blog posts or articles.  You can tailor your content to common questions that keep coming up.

Additionally, running a successful subreddit has some direct benefits for your websites.  As moderator, you have complete control over the sidebar and the content of the subreddit.  I would suggest placing your website as a source for additional niche content.  Make sure that you made a commitment to creating valuable and interesting content, so your site doesn’t come off as spamming.  Additionally, you should submit posts to the subreddit, which should garner good amount of attention if you been paying attention to what your community likes.

Getting The Word Out

Now that you’ve got your subreddit set up, it’s time to garner some users.  Reddit is such an interactive and vibrant community that they’ve actually created a subreddit simply for announcing new subreddits.  SUBREDDIT INCEPTION!  You can find it at /r/NewReddits and you should drop a link to your subreddit there as soon as possible.

The next step is to identify all other subreddits that are like yours.  Almost all of the large topics of interest have been taken already and are quite large.  You can petition the moderators of subreddits larger than yours for a link in the sidebar.  Most of them are happy to help, because they genuinely care about their niche and want to serve their subscribers with as much related content as possible.  It’s a good idea to create a list of related subreddits on your own sidebar before you petition any moderators.  It’s a sign of good faith to have already linked to them.

You can also set up a filter for any keyword or phrase using Metareddit.  This is a super helpful tool and you should consider donating to the creator if you find it useful.  Use the monitor tool to let Metareddit know that you wanted to start looking for certain keywords or phrases.  You can then subscribe to this feed via RSS and you now have a real-time feed of any comment containing something related to your niche.  Then you can just hop into the conversation, provide some invaluable insight and say something like, “By the way, I run /r/yoursubreddit if you want to check it out!”  You’d be surprised how many people this converts!

Keeping Active

If you don’t keep posting content to the subreddit in the early stages, it’s going to die on the vine.  You need to nurture it until it’s large enough to sustain itself.  After that you can take a backseat and just delete the spam and pop in with some great content every now and then.

I hope you got some value out of this post and I’d love to hear about your experiences using subreddits (or Reddit in general) to generate traffic to your websites!

Kevin Espiritu

Founder / CEO of Epic Gardening. Gardener, business-builder, curious.