Driving traffic through Reddit
Adding gold to gold.
Yooo, Mac is back.
Here’s what’s in store:
🎬️ Behind the scenes
💡 1 Insight
⛰️ 1 Challenge
🧠 1 piece of inspiration
🙈 In case you missed it
💁 How I can help
🎬️ Behind the scenes
➼ I revisited my broader work goals yesterday, boiling them down to their essence:
What: Create a portfolio of digital revenue streams
How: Partner with people I enjoy, who have complementary strengths, so I can focus on what I enjoy, and where I want to grow
➼ Impostor syndrome drives growth and is guaranteed to be there as long as we have more to learn.
I joined a new mastermind this last week with 3 other founders, each running businesses in the $30k-$60k MRR range.
While I’ve been in that range before, I’m not there right now, so I feel like an impostor. But I love it because that means growth is coming.
➼ My wife and I have been watching Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass on writing, which is crazy inspirational.
➼ The recent issue of Growth in Reverse (I read every single issue in depth) on Luca Rossi was 🔥.
I’m re-reading both Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets at the same time, as I continue dialing in my value ladder and newsletter welcome sequence. Both are so good - right up there with Hormozi.
➼ If you’re looking to grow your audience on LinkedIn, Aware is currently running a Black Friday deal of 50% off annual plans - the cheapest it’ll ever be!
💡 Insight
My favorite marketing method is the one that is working best at the time.
Right now, at the top of the (non-paid) marketing list is Reddit.
Why I like marketing on Reddit
There are certainly marketing approaches more scalable than posting and engaging on Reddit.
However, I love marketing on Reddit because:
There’s at least one subreddit, if not many, for each niche
It’s easy to find discussions you can add value to, making it an easy way to get in front of your audience
Links and comments you leave persist. A good post and comment will have a decent lifespan. Even once it falls off the first page of a subreddit, it’ll be found for years as people search on that topic.
When you find your system, it doesn’t take long
It’s free
Unfortunately, the links are ‘nofollow’, which means they won’t help provide SEO juice to the site you’re linking to. But that’s okay, it’s still well worth the time.
Posting on Reddit
Publishing posts there can be quite effective, but you need to know the subreddit you’re dealing with:
Some don’t allow links
Some look down upon links if done in a clearly promotional way
Sometimes you’ll get away with links, but get a lot of haters in the comments
Here’s an example of a post of mine that drove a lot of newsletter subscribers:
Engaging on Reddit
An even easier, and less risky approach to driving traffic from Reddit is to leave valuable comments on existing posts, and periodically drop a relevant link to your product, newsletter, or blog.
Why commenting is better than posting
Most subreddit moderators are much more lenient when it comes to links in comments than links in posts, and I’ve never had any push-back or snarky comments with this approach.
How to find posts you can add value to
A simple way to find posts in your target audience is:
Create a list of relevant subreddits for your niche(s). The easiest way to do this is to go here, type in keywords related to your niche(s), and create a list for each.
Each day or so, go into each of those subreddits and scan or search for topics you can add value to.
How to leave an effective comment
Look, you and I both know we’re here to drive traffic to whatever it is we’re promoting.
But we aren’t here to go spamming links. I promise that won’t do anything positive for you.
When you find a post you can add value to, the key is the be genuinely helpful and thoughtful.
Every 3-5 comments you leave, find a way to add a link or reference to your products, newsletter, or even just a blog post of yours to generate awareness. And sprinkle links to products and sites that aren’t yours on occasion too. Done this way, your links won’t be looked down upon.
Here are a couple of examples:
A Reddit comment linking directly to a product
A Reddit comment linking to a blog post
Bonus tip: Ride a popular comment
Here’s a bonus tip that can work great:
If you find a hot comment on a post - that is, a comment that due to the number of upvotes has risen well above the rest, and is therefore the first comment listed below the post - you can piggyback off of it.
You do this by leaving the best comment under that comment.
If you manage this, you’re guaranteed to get a lot of eyeballs.
Monitoring subreddits and topics
I used to just keep links handy of all the subreddits I monitor, and go through them a few times a week.
That works, but now I use GummySearch, which helps discover and monitor subreddits in my niches significantly more easily and quickly.
I set up separate audiences for each that I want to monitor. Each audience in GummySearch is a group of subreddits.
I have separate audiences for each of my niches, sometimes multiple audiences for a given niche.
GummySearch lets me set up keyword searches within each of those that I can save and easily reference at any point to see the new posts that match those keywords.
I then get an email when there are new posts found, and I can hop into the conversation without missing a beat. It didn’t take long to get this set up and once I did, my process became silky smooth.
I aim to spend 5-15 minutes a day checking GummySearch to see what value I can add to my niche communities there. And when I don’t I still get the email digest which often has at least one golden thread for me to jump into.
⛰️ Challenge of the week
If you aren’t already active on Reddit, find some subreddits relevant to your niche, then look for some posts you can add value to, and leave comments.
Remember: Don’t leave links in every comment, maybe one in five. And be genuine.
15 minutes a day with this will add up.
But for this next week can you commit to doing this twice for 15 minutes?
🧠 Inspiration
"Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you're smarter than you are."
— @ShaneAParrish
🙈 In case you missed it
Last week I discussed the power of creating new connections and surrounding yourself with other founders. Here’s that post if you missed it.
And if you need a good community to join to make such connections, Small Bets continues to be the best bang for your buck, with lifetime access to classes, and a very active Discord community. They keep adding amazing new classes that are all included in the membership. Join now if you haven’t and I’ll see ya in there.
Some of the upcoming classes in the Small Bets community
On that note:
Would you be interested in a SaaS Bootstrapper community?
A place to engage with others, share and get feedback.
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💁 When you’re ready, here’s how I can help
1:1 Coaching via chat: For just $49/mo you can connect with me privately in Discord and get help from me along the way, whether it’s about brainstorming ideas, figuring out if you’re on the right track, determining your next steps, going to market, or scaling.
1:1 Clarity call: Wherever you are on your bootstrapping journey, chances are I've been there. I know the struggles and challenges and am here to help through a 1:1 clarity call.
Aware: Aware started an early Black Friday deal for 50% off annual plans. If you’re looking to step up your audience-building game on LinkedIn, this is a great time to make this investment in your audience growth.
Last but not least, get free product promotion: Refer this newsletter to 3 people, and I’ll mention your product in an upcoming newsletter to my thousands of readers.
P.S. How did you like today's newsletter?
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Have a great weekend!
Mac
P.P.S. I dare you to reply and introduce yourself if you haven’t already.