A popular reddit post can bring thousands of views to your website, but most attempts by marketers to promote content on reddit end in failure. And by failure we mean they receive no attention, are downvoted or removed as spam, and sometimes the user is banned from reddit.
The reason these attemps fail is because most marketers do not know how to authentically contribute value to the reddit community. Lazy promoters want to post a link in 5 seconds and watch the traffic roll in, but good marketing is never that easy. This article offers basic tips and examples on how to create quality content for reddit that is accepted and upvoted by redditors.
The Basics of reddit Content Marketing
Become a redditor. If you don’t have experience with reddit then you need to start with the basics. Read our Beginner’s Guide to reddit (for Marketers) to help get you going. Once you know the ins and outs of the platform you can start thinking about strategically engaging the community.
Get to know your subreddits. Find the subreddits that are related to what you do and what you know. Subscribe to these communities and monitor them regularly. Spend time getting to know how people communicate in the subreddit and what they care about. The better you know a subreddit the more equipped you will be to contribute valuable content. If you need help finding subreddits, read this guide.
Create unique content specifically for a subreddit. Creating valuable content is largely dependent on what subreddit you are targeting. Your goal should be to create content that is targeted as much as possible to the subreddit audience you are submitting to. You should feel extremely confident that your submission is unique to the subreddit and will grab attention.
All image submissions must be uploaded to imgur.com. This is a rule because imgur has the resources to handle the large volume of traffic that reddit can trigger. The good news is that you can upload an image to imgur.com without creating an account. However, if you want to control your content on imgur, you need to create an account (e.g. you might want to delete an image in the future).
Share your blog post as a text post. Redditors simply prefer to read blog posts as a text post within the reddit platform. This is because marketers consistently abuse reddit as a place to promote links to blog posts. If you are sharing a blog post submit the full blog post as a text post, include a reason why you are sharing the post, and include a link to the original source of the blog post after the full text.
Post at the right time. Posting at night or on the weekends may cause your post to go unnoticed before it can ever gain traction. Reddit posts naturally fall over time, so you want to post when the most people are viewing the subreddit. Generally, this is Monday thru Thursday from 9am to 4pm.
Use redditlater.com to find the best day/time to post to any subreddit
Reply to all comments. It is very important that you engage everyone who comments on your submission. This will encourage others to comment and will show that you care about the community. The comments section also gives you an opportunity to answer questions from redditors and potentially recommend your product or services.
3 Great Examples of Reddit Content Marketing
Here are a few examples of successful reddit content submissions that you can replicate to generate awareness and traffic.
Ramin Nazer shares “After You Die” | Posted to /r/Psychonaut
Ramin is a comedian and artist. He created a book called After You Die which illustrates numerous life after death scenarios. He promoted his book by sharing a photo preview of the book with the highly relevant /r/Psychonaut subreddit. This submission worked because the content was on topic, it was posted at imgur (not his website), and most importantly the content is high quality.
ULTIMATE MEGA SAN ANTONIO FOOD & RESTAURANT GUIDE | Posted to /r/SanAntonio
Guides and lists are great ways to contribute to a subreddit. Using a text post, this guide included 42 categories of hundreds of San Antonio restaurants. The post received 96% upvotes and was stickied by the moderators for several days.
Gamamia shares 10 Free Android Games | Posted to /r/AndroidGaming
Another list, this time submitted by one of the creators of Gamamia (a product-hunt website for indie gaming). This content submission was a photo-based list posted to imgur that received over 6,000 views. It included a link to Gamamia at the end to drive traffic. This submission was successful because it provided a useful list of free games to a targeted audience.
TL;DR
There are no shortcuts or tricks to having your content upvoted on reddit. You need to first learn how reddit works and familiarize yourself with your target subreddits. Then you will be equipped to create quality content that resonates with users in a specific community. By focusing on contributing in an authentic way, you will be able to generate meaningful results through content marketing on reddit.
