How to Use Reddit to Drive Huge Traffic to Your Website

Reddit to Drive Traffic to Your Website

We already no that, Reddit is one of the best & popular social bookmarking site. By using it effectively you can  Drive Huge Traffic to Your Website too.

Related: Want to Increase Website Traffic

In order to be successfully drive traffic to your website with Reddit, you can’t be a Reddit marketer. You have to be a Redditor & have to share their passions too, yes i MEAN it. But more importantly, you have to share their hatred for self-promotion. Only share something with the community if you think it’s worthy & awesome; someone might be interest to the topic.

There are few steps you need to follow to be successfully drive traffic to your website via Reddit & Reddit Reputation. Skipping even one of them can ruin your reputation on Reddit, or risk get you banned.

It is easy to get banned from Reddit. Posting too many links or breaking the rules in a subreddit will almost guarantee you get banned from that subreddit or from the site entirely. This is how Reddit fights the constant onslaught of spammers and over-zealous marketers.

Read the rules of sub-reddits and avoid spamming

Many users submit their links without knowing about the rules of sub-reddit. Reddit is highly concern about spamming. It has a spam filter which automatically filters out spam. But, don’t worry. You can prevent it. Before submitting, read the rules of sub-reddits where you want to submit your link because different sub-reddits have different rules.

Also be sure that your link was submitted before by you or someone else or not. After submitting, to check whether your link is alive or not, click the “New” tab of that sub-reddit where you have submitted your link. If it is not there, it means, your link is caught by spam filters.

Keep It Relevant

If you want to get large amounts of traffic from Reddit, you have to keep your posts highly relevant to the users. This means that the more that you can tailor your posts to the subreddit that you’re posting in, the better. Avoid posting content that addresses too broad of an audience.

This requires you to do a little bit of research into your subreddit and see what kinds of posts are already popular. Get a feel for your audience there. Then you will be more equipped to create a popular post of your own. If the end goal of your site is to sell a product or get subscribers, you will need to do some customer development first.

This will ensure that you’re in touch with what your audience wants, while saving you a ton of time in the long run.

Only Post Great Content

Only post your best content on Reddit! Short and generic content will not perform well. It will also get down-voted and you’ll lose any valuable reputation points (karma) that you have.

Only post content that is in-depth, unique, well-written, helpful and actionable. Wherever you post your article, Reddit users are going to click on it to check it out. What they think of it (either upvote or down vote) will dictate your results.

Follow other Reddit users

It won’t give you up-votes or traffic, but it is very helpful. What you have to do is watch what other users are doing. Specially follow users whose links are on front page. Try to understand why they have got so many up-votes or what types of posts get more up-votes.

Find out what’s the difference between your title and their titles. See how they comments on a post. This will give you more knowledge and you can understand what to do next.

No Double Dipping

Don’t start getting greedy on me now! When you log in to your analytics account and see that spike in traffic and realize: “Oh yeah, I posted on Reddit – and it only took me 5 seconds!”

Making a link submission as your first action as a redditor is a huge red flag. Even if you are posting a genuine, relative link, it still looks suspicious to moderators and Reddit’s source code. If this link gets remove or marked as spam, your account might be done for. We recommend always posting comments and voting on other submissions before you start posting links.

Usually the next natural thought is “I should be doing this all the time!” But that’s where you can get yourself in trouble. Stay out of “hot” areas. This means that if you just posted a link in a subreddit, let it rest for a while! I usually wait 2 weeks to a month before I post another link of my own in the same subreddit.

Have fun

This is possibly the most important point on the list that impatient marketers overlook. This is why ‘the other guys’ are terrible at getting traffic from Reddit. You need to be a normal Reddit user. Remember, you can’t be a marketer, you have to be a redditor.

Reddit does not tolerate users that upvote their own posts. This is because spammers are constantly trying to implement upvote schemes that get their content to the top of a big subreddit.

Interact with the rest of the site. Build up a post history that shows that you’re a normal user. Build up your karma points by posting helpful or funny comments on other posts.

Address the Concerns of the Community Before They Have Them

If you post links to your site on Reddit, there will be a lot of users that will to try to find an excuse to down vote your posts, report you to moderators, bad mouth you etc.

What you have to do is beat them to the punch and address all of their concerns before they can get a word in.

Reddit has take a strong anti-harassment stance this past year (2015). If you are harassing a user or someone harassing you, you will likely be reported to the admins and they will take action.

Don’t Ever Let Your First or Second post be a promotion

This should go without saying, but if you’re new to a subreddit, be sure to post a few other things in that there first before you decide to promote anything of your own. I made this point short, since the last one was so long.

You can be banned from any subreddit by a moderator of that subreddit. A subreddit ban can be time-limited or indefinite. When you are banned from a subreddit, you will receive a private message that says how long the ban will be in effect and optionally the reason you were banned. After you are banned from a subreddit, you will not be able to submit any posts or comments to that subreddit.

Don’t Over-Promote Your Post or Website

You may think that if you don’t promote your website repeatedly in the same Subreddit that you’ll be fine. But this is yet another big Reddit no-no. Reddit moderators and users can see your site-wide activity. Not to mention that they have automatic spam filters. Don’t abuse the system, and you’ll be safe.

You can also be banned from submitting posts or comments to a subreddit by the “AutoModerator” bot. AutoModerator is a Reddit bot that moderators use to perform tasks on their behalf. One ability that AutoModerator has is to remove any posts or comments from a specific user. So if you have been banned by AutoModerator, you will still be able to submit posts and comments, but they will instantly be removed from the subreddit.

If you post links to the same domain name too often you run a huge risk. Reddit's automatic spam filters will blacklist your domain, so that if anyone posts it, it won’t show up. They can also “ghost” your account which is a special kind of punishment for spammers. Getting ghosted means that none of your posts ever show up to anyone but you. So you can post as much as you want, but they will never show up to anyone else.

Share Your New Posts With Your Friends

Even if you do not belong to a Reddit team, you should still have a group of people or a network that you can share your content with. This step entails you sending your new Reddit posts to your friends or Twitter followers that are also Reddit users. If they like what you posted, they’ll give you an up-vote, which will attract other Reddit users, and get the ball rolling for your post to get it popular.

Comment and Reply to Everyone

Activity on your Reddit post breeds more activity. This means that when someone comments on your post, reply to their comment to double the comment count. When posts have lots of comments, it gets more redditors to click on your post, and join the conversation. You can even be the first one to comment on a link that you post.

Be Humble

Most people take criticism on their post as a bad thing. But you can use it as one of your biggest advantages.

Not only will this help you with "Address the Concerns of the Community Before They Have Them", it will also help you to get better at using Reddit to drive traffic and customers to your website. When you reply to comments, be sure to learn as much from your commentators as you can.

Personal Thought: Spend At least 10 minutes a week, and get a feel for the community.

Best Ways to Promote Your Online Courses

Actually there is no specialize way to promote online courses, You’ve got to address the same challenges you do when promote a service or product online: build attention, interest, desire, and action in your prospective customers.

You do need to take into account the unique structure, timeline, and value proposition of your online course, and create online marketing campaigns that support it.

Here are ways that can help you market your online course effectively and grow your Audience (I believe so).

Make a blog 

Maintaining an active blog in order to support your online course activity as an educator is the best thing to do. Update your blog few times a week with engaging, useful and informative content about your online course.

Regular blogging also make your blog authority source in your niche. Becoming an authoritative source for information that meets users expectations more than search engine needs will become exceptionally important.

Social Media 

Οbviously using social media in order to communicate and connect with potential learner is important. What you should never forget is to always provide useful information and actual and useful knowledge. Also, keep this activity within reasonable limits. For example, post blog articles on Facebook not more often than 2, 3 times a week. Making “noise” in the social media will have a negative effect on your image.

Provide Authentic Information

Make testimonials and small stories for specific people who enjoyed your online courses recently. Publish these positive examples on your blog and social media pages.

Make Short, Free Courses and Share Them 

Giving things for free builds more engagement with existing and potential customers. It is an excellent way to grow your online community and to generate more new leads.

Newsletter 

Keep engaging your past, current and future potential learners with informative newsletters. Let them know about the latest on the industry, tell them about your content, interview industry opinion leaders etc.

Run a Forum 

As an educator you are an opinion leader yourself, most probably. Use this expertise and engage learners with a forum. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to properly administrate a forum but once you are up to it results will be fascinating. You can also use it in order to start discussions, get feedback and come up with new ideas just by listening to people.

eBook 

eBooks are used to provide information, engage online customers and provide the writer with an authoritarian role. You can make and share new eBook every couple of months. They should be anything between 10-20 pages and they must share clear and useful information related to your online course.

For example, if you are educating people on Website Design, you can make a 20 page eBook on how to design a basic website. You can then upload it on your website or blog and allow people to download it for free only by giving you their name and email. This way an eBook can also become a useful lead generator.

Of course, this list isn’t a road map to guaranteed success to Promote Your Online Courses. There are number of ways you can do in order to promote your online course and sell your courses. You can start by using these ways I just mentioned above and make them part of your core strategy, before using more advanced processes.

Crucial Things Social Media Marketers Need to Remember

Social media is everything. An obsessive habit, a communication portal for businesses and customers, a gateway to increasing links and online purchases, a consistent lead producer, and so much more. Social media marketers are well aware of this and the heavy burdens that come with managing company social profiles.

Not only is a brand exposed to the possibility of bashing, but several crises now exist due to social media and the demand for presence. Through all the chaos of managing a company’s brand online, there are many rewards: engagement with new fans, the first sale from Facebook, content shared virally on Twitter, etc.

Image Source: Dazeinfo.com

Business 2 Community organized an impressive list of online marketing statistics last December. Of the many, these social stats sum up the struggle, benefits, and why social media is such a vital part of online marketing.

• “Interesting content” is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media. (NewsCred)
• 47% of Americans say Facebook is their #1 influencer of purchases. (Jeff Bullas)
• 63% of millennials say they stay updated on brands using social networks and 51% say social opinions influence their purchase decisions; and 46% rely on social when making online purchases. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)
• 34% of marketers use Twitter to successfully generate leads. (Jeff Bullas)

You can keep afloat through the social media updates, crises, and changes with these tips:

Optimize Social Profiles

As much as this should be a given, it’s so easily forgotten. Each social network offers different opportunities to optimize a company profile. Twitter allows hashtags in the description and tracks keywords to filter specific search results for accounts, photos, videos, and more. Facebook gives you plenty of opportunity to properly insert business information with specific hours, categories, address, short/long descriptions, etc. Don’t miss out on opportunities to connect locally and with potential new clients by forgetting to optimize your company’s social pages.

Optimizing Tips

• Verify your Pinterest profile by verifying your website. There are two different ways to verify, with an HTML tag or a meta on the website. Once verified, a bright red check mark appears next to the website, giving users a more comforting feel that this is indeed the real Kim Kardashian Pinterest page.
• Optimize Twitter images. Twitter automatically reduces images to 440 x 220 pixels. If the large image you were planning to attach with a tweet won’t be attractive that small, choose a different image that will appeal to Tweeters and the pixel requirements.

Pay Attention to Analytics

Almost every social network is now providing it’s own analytics for businesses. This leaves very little reasoning to why you’re still posting at 12:15pm everyday when Facebook has data to prove your fans are engaging best at 6:30pm. Scheduling tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Followerwonk also provide great analytics that further help analyze what fans are engaging best with.

Analytics Tips

• Perform weekly social media reports that analyze each social network’s progress. The report should track how many fans/followers, increase/decrease of engagement, published posts, link clicks, etc.
• Analyze goals with results. If the goal of a company Facebook page was initially to address concerns with products and act as a customer service funnel, then analyze how often the page is receiving such engagement. Is it the type of engagement you expected? Are you responding accordingly and in a timely manner?

Time is Always of the Essence

On Monday I spent about 10 minutes writing a complaint on a company’s Facebook page regarding an experience I just had. As someone who manages several company social pages, I know the quickest way to get a response from a company is when a complaint is right smack on a client’s Facebook page, just waiting for comments from others to add on.

It’s been four days now and still no response. This is a very big, corporate company with locations internationally and a large social team who’s been posting new posts since my complaint was posted. As a user, and former customer, I’m now even more upset. Imagine how your clients and customers feel when you don’t message them back on Twitter in a timely matter.

Urgency Tips:

• Respond to engagement within 24 hours. If the engagement is negative, respond as soon as possible to help resolve the situation.
• Create notifications to notify you each time engagement is received. Connect the notifications to the email address you check most, and push notifications through your cell, as well.

Reach Your Demographic

There’s nothing worse for a user than wanting to like and engage with your brand, but being turned off by your irrelevant posts. If your audience is primarily made up of millennials, use fun, high contrast imagery that they’re attracted to. Whereas if you’re trying to sell life insurance policies to 50+ year old couples you’ll want to use stock images of people in their 40s.

Conduct research, and then do more research, about what your demographic likes and what your competition is doing. Checking with your competitors who have similar demographics will inspire you with new ideas and avoid the trial and error of what works and what doesn’t.

Demographic Tips:

• Understand what your demographic likes. Clearly you’ve done enough research to define your demographic that you should know what kind of things your demographic enjoys. Incorporate your company with those types of interests to appeal to them with similar types of posts, images, and content.
• Pinterest isn’t the perfect social network for every company. Just as LinkedIn is great for scouting potential employees and leads, Pinterest is perfect for eCommerce, fashion, and restaurants. Have a brand presence on all social networks, but concentrate your main efforts on the networks your audience will engage with most.

Humanize the Tone and Message

This isn’t 2025; we’re not all robots. Let’s communicate to our customers on social like we do in person, using real dialogue. Phrases like, “Call Today!” and “Get Yours Now!” are typical calls to action that bombard customers with an unrelatable sales feel. Sales-speak can be great when spoken correctly, but isn’t always appropriate for social media. Converse with fans and produce thought-provoking engagement they want to interact with.

Image Source: Social Media Explorer

Humanizing Tips:

• Define the tone. Does your brand want to be playful, sarcastic, arrogant or persuasive? Choose a tone and stick with it when posting on social. Followers will respect the consistency of your tone, even if it doesn’t 100% match their own.
• Define the voice. A company’s voice is different than it’s tone. The voice is the more definitive style of the brand, whereas the tone is that extra spice you add to your already spicy burrito.

Handle Social Media Crises With a Stiff Drink

No one ever said managing social media pages would be easy. When a crisis hits, and they will, break open that bottle of whiskey that’s been collecting dust and get your typing fingers ready. You’ll have a lot of communicating to do.

Image Source: Pinterest

Crises Tips

• Know the difference between a standard consumer complaint and a social media crisis. When a group of fans who dislike your company create multiple social pages to badmouth and spread lies on Facebook,using your logo, that’s a crisis.
• Attack where the attack began. If the issue began on Twitter and quickly spread to Facebook and Tumblr, respond appropriately to the Tweeters, then the Facebookers, and Tumblrs. Your sincere apology needs to be seen where the comment was first made.
• Avoid an automated response. Copy and paste is not the answer to social media crisis. A real person needs to respond from the company and address concerns, either leaving their actual name as a signature or “Management”. Come up with a solution to the problem and respond uniquely to each comment.

Have a tip you can’t live without for social media management? Comment below and share your best strategies and ideas for surviving social media!

Strategy, Process & Life Cycle - Grassroots SEO!

Below you'll find the basic layout of your 6-12 month campaign, starting with what's in your SEO strategy. Let's start with milestones. You can put your milestones into a Google Spreadsheet in bold, font 24. Paste items in between milestones respectively, as you grow in your understanding of SEO best practices and techniques.

You can also use project management tools, such as TeamWorkLive.com or Basecamp, both of which allow you to calendar your milestones and create assignable task lists beneath them.

Milestone 1 - Your SEO Strategic Plan (1 Month)

You are going to get to hundreds of ideas and tools thrown at you for keyword research, spying on competitors, finding link opportunities and elements to consider when planning your SEO campaign. Problem is, most presenters don't actually say "okay, add these line items to your research to-do list, phase 1 of 5 in your holistic SEO strategy", they just say "here's some stuff you can do".

What's in Your SEO Plan?

Below is a list of reports and actionable lists to carry over to your project management system (or spreadsheet). The planning phase can take up to a month, but will save you a lot of time and frustration later in the campaign. Remember, this is boilerplate, so you can squeeze in new research and data-mining tasks you pick up from events. Isn't it nice to have a place to start putting the "stuff"?

1. Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) - This report will help you discover potential crawl and indexing issues. It has little to do with content, and is mostly focused on how search engine-friendly a website is. Criteria might include: checking for broken links and duplicate content, analyzing HTML and XML sitemaps, optimizing robots.txt and .htaccess files, to help crawlers get to the content you want indexed and away from the content you don't. The OAR might also include a review of Webmaster Tools, an audit from your seomoz.org campaign, and possibly data from similar online tools. Basically, your on-page "stuff" goes here.
2. Competitor Analysis Report (CAR) - This is your baseline report, your Day 1, your "aha" moment, where you get to discover some exciting things about your competition, and some occasionally depressing things about your current SEO performance. Having access to Hitwise is the most ideal starting point (if you can afford it). If not, tools such as Compete.com, SEMRush, KeywordCompetitor, and OpenSiteExplorer.org can give you really nice insight into where your competitors are earning links, what keywords they are getting traffic from (AdWords and natural search), and even tell you how much more money they spent on specific keywords last month versus the month prior (a keyword performance indicator). For local businesses, WhiteSpark's Local Citation Finder does a darn good job of finding competitor business citations and sorting them by seomoz.org's own Domain Authority for easy prioritizing.
3. Link Analysis Report (LAR) - This report is fun. Using tools like those in the seomoz.org arsenal, or possibly giving Ontolo a spin, you'll be seeking out and creating an organized inventory of link opportunities. Categorize your opportunities by classifications such as: Web Directory, Business Directory, Industry Blog, Regional Blog, Industry Portal, Industry Forum, Industry Experts, Niche Social Networks, and so forth. From here you have a few choices of how to store the information. I prefer Buzzstream, an Eric Ward-approved link tracking software, but Google Docs will do the job as well. If you do use a Google spreadsheet, break your classifications into their own tabs or link building becomes unmanageable.
4. Keyword Discovery Report (KDR) - You'll already have a boatload of data from the first three reports to help with this, possibly the most important, report. You can also explore a number of other tools to help tally up all the keyword opportunities. WordTracker and Google AdWords will provide some excellent ideas, but nothing will beat what you'll find in your own web analytics and Webmaster Tools (provided you are actually tracking conversions and/or sales). With competitor data, you can run pivot tables in Excel to learn about the frequency of keywords the major competitors appear to be receiving traffic from. Purge out the terms that are too broad or not searched enough to be bothered with, sort by relevancy and search volume and you've got yourself a list of keywords to optimize for.

Now that you have all this terrific data, what the heck do you do with it? Here's where actionable items or deliverables come into play.

1. Put your OAR items into a To-Do List within your project management system (under the milestone of On-Page SEO)
2. Put your CAR items into a Google spreadsheet so you can track and monitor changes over time
3. Put your LAR classifications into one or more To-Do List within your project management system (under the Off-Page SEO milestone), put the opportunities into a spreadsheet or Buzzstream
4. Put your KDR into a Google Docs spreadsheet, create a new tab called Content Tracking Spreadsheet with a column for just the top 100 or so keywords, and create columns to track Page Name, Title, Meta Description, Has Video?, Image Name, Image Attributes, Has 450+ words of Content? Matt Cutts Didn't Throw Up, Is Engaging? etc. In your PM system, your content writing tasks can be assigned (put the list under the On-Page SEO milestone)

Now that the technical stuff is done, you get to start the creative and social media campaign planning. Pull a group of super smart people into a room for a full day and come out with awesome link bait, widget, tools/giveaways, and other creative link building strategies to add under your respective milestones.

Milestone 2 - On-Page SEO (2 Months)

There are thousands of smart (and sometimes silly) things you can do to optimize your website. You already have a To-Do List assigned in your project management system to square away OAR findings, and a To-Do List for your content team based on the keyword themes you want to optimize for. This initial phase of your SEO shouldn't take more than 60-90 days and typically isn't rocket science.

You're going to get all sorts of new ideas from the seomoz.org blog, Search Engine Land, SEO Roundtable, and thousands of Tweets if you follow #seo in Twitter. Therefore, if you're using a project management system, your template will be growing and growing over time.

Local and Ecommerce websites will have a few special To-Do Lists for data feed optimization, location-based landing pages, and a few other things you might extract from David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors or elsewhere.

Milestone 3 - Off-Page SEO (3 Months for the Basic Tasks, 6 for Moderate)

Mike Essex wrote an excellent post awhile back on 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away. I also like to use my Meetup.com group to have everyone provide 1-3 creative link building ideas to everyone who requests ideas, along with some crowd-sourcing tools, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services. Choose the top ideas based on the business and industry and add them to an Advanced SEO To-Do List in your project management system. You will definitely need to create several project briefs for each idea so it makes sense to the tech and marketing teams.

I keep a Google spreadsheet going that has nearly 400 link building opportunities now (thank you Eric Ward).

You'll also have a list for Basic Link Building (industry destinations and directories), Moderate Link Building (outreach, and slightly more technical than submission-based linking). Advanced link building tasks are really more of an initiative and can be tracked outside of the the project management system as ongoing marketing innovation.

Milestone 4 - Social Media Optimization (1 Month for Setup)

This milestone gets a bit tricky and requires getting in bed with those crazy socialmedia people we all love. Perform an audit of all the current destinations our SMM teams are working with and insure they all contain relevant keywords, profile links, and (if location-based) business name, address, and phone number.

Next, seek out new social media opportunities, such as niche social destinations, popular social networks that have not been claimed yet (Google+ might be a good start). You might even buy lunch for the social team, and then try to give them training on how to blog with keyword-rich links every so often. If their eyes start going crazy as if you fed them after midnight, run away and try again another day. If not, train your social team, in distributing content, video, and micro-blogging to give you a serious lift in ranking. The trick is to make them think it was all their idea.

Milestone 5 - Video & Mobile (2 Months for Setup)

Technically, you can break video and mobile into two different milestones. But for the sake of the novel this post has become, let's bundle them together. For video, I recommend having a quick chat or consult with a pro, such as Mark Robertson of ReelSEO on campaign, channel and distribution ideas. Get ready to setup some video XML sitemaps and to start distributing video to relevant sharing networks. Also be prepared to start using video ads (PPC), which may help long term placement on key YouTube videos.

For mobile, you'll want to slip ONE task in for Milestone 2, insuring your mobile users have a custom experience that's mind-blowing and award winning. The rest will revolve around the creation of mobile apps for your products, mobile search optimization, and possibly even a few short code campaigns. We love Vegas, so I'm always excited to get my MB SMS offers from Mandalay Bay).

I've Completed My Milestones, Now What?

If you get through all the milestones (6-12 months on average - some might overlap, but they don't have to), your project management system should be empty of tasks. If so, you're no longer in Production Mode, you're now in Operations Mode and need only use your link and campaign tracking tools (here's a sample) for your day-to-day SEO initiative. However, you may elect to start over and repeat the entire process annually, depending on the results from the first round.

Now you have 5-6 vehicles of SEO in an organized form. You may decide to create a page for each milestone on your yellow notepad when you attend SEO conferences and events. If a presenter gives you some cool "stuff" to do, you should be able to easily classify the task into one of these buckets, so later you can update your project management template, as though you were putting another piece into a seemingly endless puzzle; which beats the heck out of creating scribble for your crumble ball with beautiful coffee rings on it.

Article First Posted on  - seomoz