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Using reddit to drive traffic is not easy work as any other social bookmarking site. But still you can get large hits using reddit to drive traffic. Like Pinterest and Tumblr, Reddit isn’t a perfect fit for all web marketer yet, if you can figure out how to use it as a tool in your SEO toolbox you can drive massive traffic to your site. To get reddit traffic you need to learn "how to get tons of high quality reddit traffic to your blog or website. But be warned…unlike Pinterest or Tumblr, take the wrong marketing steps on reddit and you could get eaten alive. Reddit is somewhat remarkable in driving traffic. 

What is Reddit?

Reddit titles itself “the front page of the internet”. You know what, the title is accurate to their pursuit. It is consecutively a social network, news portal, bookmarking directory and powered-up community.
Users will submit content into the organized areas of interest called “subreddit”. Where the other users will interact by voting, commenting and sharing. This is how it works.

Digging into the history, it was founded in June 2005 by two roommates, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The subreddit topics include news, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, and photosharing, among many others. As of 2015, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking 14th most visited web-site in US and 36th in the world.

How to Use Reddit to Drive Huge Traffic to Your Blog

Reddit is one of the best social bookmarking sites and very popular. By using it effectively you can get thousands of visitors in your blog. It also helps you increase your online earnings. One if you know using reddit to drive traffic to your blog, you will love it, because all traffic are organic and can be your customer too.

I thought that Reddit was not useful for me. But, after I got huge hits from reddit, I decide to use it more often and sharing this article as a guide to using reddit to drive traffic . In this article I will tell you about How to Use Reddit to Drive Huge Traffic to Your Blog and my mistakes.

Let’s move on to how this actually works on the site.

How to Submit on Reddit

Submitting to reddit is a piece of cake. Your first step is to create your reddit account handle. There are two options to think about:

• Setting up an anonymous account – While this allows you to do or say anything you want…it won’t help you out if one of your posts lands on the front page of reddit. I can’t think of any reason, except for testing out reddit, that you would create a dummy account.
• Creating a legit account handle – I would recommend you use something that reflects you…maybe it’s your name or what you do for a living. This is your best bet if you want to build credibility if one of your posts makes the front page.

Once you’ve establish a reddit handle, now’s your chance to submit a link.

The inner workings of Reddit

The first time you visit Reddit, you’ll probably have no clue what’s going on.
It looks complicated, and many say it’s ugly as well, but its functionality is great.
I’m going to break down some of the most important concepts that you’ll need to know to successfully market your business on Reddit. 

Use of Reddit Karma

Everything on Reddit is driven by “karma,” which is the individual positive and negative point (called upvotes and down-votes) given and received by each member of the site.
Every link or discussion posted on the site can be voted on by everyone. Everyone’s vote counts for the same amount, so it’s essentially a democratic process. An up-vote means that you believe it’s a good post, while a down-vote means the opposite.

Submissions with the highest score (up-votes minus down-votes) will rise to the top. However, there’s one more factor that controls the flow of submissions: timing.
Newer posts don’t need as high of a score as older posts to rise up in the rankings. This keeps the content from growing stale.

Share contents from other websites

I know you are surprised. You are expecting some interesting or valuable tips in second point of my article like sharing your own contents and getting traffic. But, no, it’s the one of the most important or valuable steps. Without it your all work is going to be spoiled. It is one of the reasons for which I failed. After creating your account, for first few days forget about your own blog when you use Reddit.

Submit interesting topics from other websites and try to get more and more up-votes and build Karma. Otherwise your account can get banned. You will not get up-votes or karma either. Submit your own links when your Karma is around 150. After you have started submitting your links, I suggest you not to submit links only from your own blog. Reddit rules say to submit post from other sites.

Reddit for SEO

I wanted to get this out of the way because I know you’re wondering about it. Reddit can be useful for link building, but building links shouldn’t be your primary goal.
Another good thing about the site is that it’s set up to prevent spammers, which is good for marketers like me and you, who actually try to create valuable content. 
To prevent people from just mass-posting links across the site, not all links on Reddit are made dofollow.

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.

Get more up-votes and make front page of Reddit

To get huge traffic you need more up-votes. It helps to get your link on the front page of Reddit which is the number one goal of Reddit. For that you need to get first 10 up-votes for your link as quick as possible and it will rise to the top in that sub-reddit. Reddit will favor you more if you manage 100 up-votes in 1 hour. But, if it takes 10 hours, it won’t be effective. Reddit ranks newer stories higher than older stories. So, try to submit newer stories. If your link gets the highest number of up-votes in that sub-reddit, it will rise to the front page. Another thing is the first 10 up-votes have the same power as the next 100 up-votes which have the same power as the next 1,000. But, all these equation will not work if you get significant amount down-votes which will also affect the rank of your link. For example, getting 120 up-votes and 10 down-votes is better than getting 1000 up-votes and 900 down-votes.

Give an interesting title to your link

Reddit don’t allow you to put link summary like other social bookmarking sites. You can only give a title to your link. So, try to give a clear idea about your post. Also make the title attractive or surprising. For an example, you are sharing a link about facebook’s new feature hashtag. Your title should not be “Facebook’s new feature hashtag”. But, it can be “Facebook turns heat on twitter with hashtag”

Submit your link to a suitable sub-reddit

Before choosing a sub-reddit, you have to think about 2 matters. One is name of the sub-reddit and number of subscribers of the sub-reddit. Try to be more specific when you choose a sub-reddit. Find sub-reddit that is the best fit for your post. Suppose you want to submit a link about “Benefits of using Google chrome”.  You should choose chrome subreddit for it, not technology/internet. Then see number of subscribers of that sub-reddit. Traffic depends on the number. If you can’t choose a perfect sub-reddit, it won’t be effective.

Time for submitting your link to Reddit

If you submit your link when people are not active, you can not expect many up-votes. Study says that, the best time for submitting your link on most social networks is before 5pm EST. Same timing is helpful for Reddit.

Never do these things on reddit:

• Submit too many posts from a single URL to a single subreddit– Moderators will immediately jump on any behavior that looks like you are trying to game Reddit…and submitting this one will definitely smell fishy to them.
• Don’t use auto–submit forms – There used to be a WordPress plugin called Sharing Is Sexy. It would automatically share stuff on reddit. Reddit users will spot this kind of activity and root it out. If you can’t submit it manually, don’t submit it all.
• Posting spam – If all you do is submit content that promotes you, your brand and your products…you will fail in reddit.
• Buy upvotes – This is another no-no…even though it is not as easy to spot for reddit users. There are clues and even clear admissions that this is happening.

Do any of these just once and you might get away with it…do it more than that and you and your domain could get kicked off.

How to Find relevant subreddits

How many times have you read that you need to find your target audience in order to find potential subscribers? 
Probably a lot because it’s a fundamental part of any marketing strategy. 
The great thing about Reddit is that your audience automatically segregates itself. Vegans go to /r/vegan; general healthy eaters go to /r/nutrition; and frugal eaters go to /r/EatCheapandHealthy. 
Isn’t that useful? It’s like going fishing for salmon and all the fish separate themselves into groups so that you can only target the ones you actually want.

So, the first step is to find subreddits relevant to your blog (they contain your target audience). Note that sometimes you’ll have many more than just one relevant subreddit that you can target.

Ideally, this would be the only step necessary. Unfortunately, Reddit is known for having a terrible internal search engine. While it sometimes pulls up what you’re looking for, it often leaves out quality results. 
We’ll start with this method and then fill in the blanks. 
Use the subreddit search function by typing in a few keywords that describe your website (one at a time)

Expand your list with the Reddit sidebar 

Some subreddits will contain your target audience, but it isn’t obvious at first. You may dismiss them when searching, or they might never come up. 
Luckily, Redditors create their own sort of subreddit directories. When you go to most subreddits, you can scroll down the sidebar (on the right) and see a list of recommended subreddits. These will be highly related to the subreddit you are on.

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. using reddit to drive traffic

What Should You Submit to Reddit

There’s really only one good way to share content that will go viral on reddit…and that is to think just like you were creating link bait:

• Infographics – Because of the nature of the community, I’d avoid infographics on narrow topics like SEO or web marketing and try to share content that is funny, political or just really interesting. A good subreddit for an infographic might be /r/TIL.
• Drawings – Again, anything humorous or interesting, dropping it in the /r/comics would be the most appropriate subreddit.
• Videos – When videos like “Everything you know about skipping is wrong” and “The chance of this happening is 0.0000001%” can land at the top of a subreddit, you’ll see that just plain funny stuff really works in /r/videos.
• Questions – Asking the right questions can drive a ton of comments. And it really just depends on what works. Research /r/askreddit for example, and pay attention to what is popular. This is a great way to build karma if you can strike a chord.

If you are genuinely trying to contribute to the Reddit community, then anything you share will get you traffic.

Using reddit to drive traffic has strict rules, you can drive huge traffic to your blog by using it appropriately. Even it can make you happier than other social networking sites.

Have you had any success driving traffic to your site with reddit? Please let me know by commenting below.
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