Today I want to talk about a huge source of traffic that a lot of internet marketers are ignoring – reddit.

The potential for reddit marketing is absolutely huge but most people don’t have a clue how to go about it… so today I’m going to lay it all out for you.

So how does reddit work?

Reddit  is an incredibly popular social sharing website where people can submit links about all sorts of topics and then the rest of the community can vote up or down those links. The site currently has an Alexa traffic rank of #54 and receives billions of page views each month.

The site is divided into heaps of different categories called ‘sub-reddits’. So if you want to find or post a technology link you would head over to /r/Technology. Or if you want to post about politics then you can do so at /r/Politics. Or perhaps you’ve got a music related link? Then you’d head over to /r/Music. There’s a sub-reddit for almost everything.

Links that get submitted to reddit that are well received by the community can easily get thousands of visitors from one submission. If you’ve been in the internet marketing game for a while then you might remember when people used to talk about the ‘Digg effect’. This was when Digg.com (a site that operates very similarly to reddit) was a lot more popular and submitting a link to it could cause you to get an insane amount of traffic which was known as the ‘digg effect’.

These days though Digg has died down and the ‘reddit effect’ as replaced it:

How to get to the front page of reddit…

Obviously you can’t just submit any old junk and expect to get a tonne of visitors. You need to be a bit strategic about what you submit and where you submit it.

The good news though is that you don’t need to get to the front page of reddit to get a tonne of traffic. Reddit has so much traffic that even a submission that does ‘pretty well’ will bring you an incredible amount of traffic.

A good way to get a sense of what sort of content works well on reddit is to simply spend a bit of time browsing through their various submissions (warning: it can be pretty addictive).

By visiting the front page of reddit we can see the most popular recent submissions:

Look through all of the most popular submissions and check out the comments for each submission and you’ll quickly start to get a sense of what the reddit culture is like. Understanding the culture of reddit will help you greatly to make successful submissions.

So what sort of culture does reddit have?

The reddit community tends to be quite liberal and internet savvy and they like to be entertained rather then sold to. They like to learn and love stuff that’s interesting or humorous and love subjects like technology, gaming, science and politics (oh yeah and cats).

This short video does a pretty good job at summing up the reddit culture:

Create your content with reddit in mind…

The more time you spend sifting through the popular submissions on reddit and the more that you submit the better you’ll get at working out what type of submissions will work well on reddit.

Below though I’ll give you a few pointers as to how you should create and submit your content so that it does well.

Your title is extremely important…

The title of your submission is going to be the first thing people will see and it can literally make or break your submission. Before you can get people to vote up your submissions you have to first get them to check it out and it’s with a good title that you can do this.

Try to create a title that is as interesting and enticing as you can possibly make it. Good titles include ones that ignite curiosity, stir up controversy or only give away half of the story (making them click your link to get the full scoop!).

Again just experimenting with different titles and checking out the titles of other popular submissions will help you to nail the art of writing a great submission title.

Be subtle…

Don’t just go in all guns blazing posting links to every single page that you have. Instead fly under the radar. Don’t be obvious about the fact that you are promoting your own website and don’t only post links to your own websites.

Mix it up by submitting interesting content from other sites and even commenting on some other submissions. Redditors can easily see your past comment and submissions and if they think that you’re only there to market your stuff they are just going to downvote all of your submissions into oblivion.

Add a reddit button to your site…

Another good way to encourage users to upvote your content is to make it as easy as possible for them by adding a reddit button your pages. You can find a whole bunch of reddit buttons here that you can embed into your site.

Pro-tip: borrow content from other sites…

Getting your content to go viral on reddit doesn’t mean that you have to spend an insane amount of time writing amazing content or creating an incredible video. An easy way to add good viral content to your site that will work well is to simply recycle good content from other parts of the web.

This could be as simple as embedding a popular YouTube video that’s related to your niche onto your site and then submitting it to a niche related sub-reddit. Another example is to add good infographics to your site that are related to your niche and then post them to reddit.

Or you could find hot news stories related to your niche that are trending, re-write them and then add them to your website. If you’re the first to post a story or viral video then you can get an insane amount of traffic by doing this.

Reddit is also great for backlinks!

Aside from being great for free traffic reddit is also awesome from an SEO point of view as you’ll score a tonne of quality backlinks from a good submission. Not only do you get a backlink from the actual submission itself but you also score another backlink for every person that comments on your submission as the link gets re-posted to their user profile.

So if 50 people comment on your submission… you’ll get a backlink on the profiles of all of the commenters giving you a cool 50 backlinks.

Often people will even find your submission on reddit and then re-post it to other sites bringing even more backlinks and traffic to your site. I’ve had some of my submissions reposted to extremely high authority websites before and acquired some killer backlinks by doing this.

What’re you waiting for? Get on it!

The potential for social marketing on reddit is absolutely huge and if your website is about a niche that’s even slightly interesting then it’s something that you should really be jumping on.

Tonnes of traffic, tonnes of high quality authority backlinks, totally free… what’s not to love?