How To Drive Traffic from Reddit for Affiliate Marketing

     Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world that allow people share their ideas, hot news, and many other things, it gets about 542 million visitors per month, however, it also famous with the low-quality traffic that means the section duration is very short.

Reddit's user love shock and weird content, that topics are always on the homepage and attract the most visitors, and they are often more entertaining than educational.

So few people go to Reddit to find solutions, or advice for their problems and therefore the chance of you converting the traffic from Reddit into a client is quite low.

However, Reddit still has the subreddit that tells you who is in your market, it's great for your affiliate marketing business, although it may not offer as high conversion rates as forums or specialized websites, if you marketing right way, you can still get a lot of benefits from this traffic source.

Get Started

Reddit is a strict forum about rules, That is also why their website grows as big as today,

So before attracting traffic, you need to read about their rules and follow, otherwise, your posts or comments will be deleted or worse you'll be getting banned.

When you know the rules, that is the time to approach the site and get traffic to your site as an affiliate:

Step 1: Find your Subreddit

Go to the subreddit in your niche, Each subreddit is identified by the URL structure https://reddit.com/r/subreddit.

Replace subreddit with your keyword or phrase, if not you can use the search feature on Reddit to find your niche, in this example, I search for the phrase “affiliate marketing” and there's a lot of communities for affiliate

You can subscribe to follow what’re they discussion

Go to each community you can see the discussion as well as the question of each member.

The top topics will be voted by another member in the community that displays by the karma score, that means these problem or topic’s also the matter of many people.

Of course, you can share what you thought via comment and put your link here, but like other forums, your comment must be constructive and not be personally promoted.

Trust me, that tactic is no longer useful and it can make you get banned.

Step 2: Participate

The better way is to build up the reputation before you link to your site, to do this you need to contribute to it, joint to the discussion, provide quality answer or useful article to get the karma score. In this stage, you shouldn’t promote yourself.

Because people don’t know who you are, I recommend you to provide the value your subreddit in at least one month. 

This is an example of providing value through the comment from the question: Is building a product catalog with a retailers inventory before applying for the retailer's Affiliate program common?

Or you can create a helpful article or topic in your niche 

By this way, you’ll build the awareness about your brand as an esteemed member instead of just one who is trying to promote

Step 3: Submit your Link

After you provide massive value and build up the reputation, the next step is to promote yourself,

Note that when you become a valued member that doesn’t mean you can promote anything you want. 

Reddit does not lack those who provide quality content like you, they can be more comfortable with you, but if you abuse and violate their policies you will still be banned like others. 

So be smart and provide the value through your answer or create a post and then put your link on it (properly).

Here's the example of the person who promotes successfully their site on Reddit:

You can see this post get a lot of karma score (296), It says that the article provides so much value

If you want your content to become to the top topic as well as get a lot of karma scores, your subject line must be irresistible.

If you don’t know how to create an awesome headline, read the article here: 11 Ways to Create Irresistible Headlines That Readers Love

The other thing that ‘ll help your content get a lot of karma score that is digging around your subreddit and noted what’re your audiences discussing, what’s the most popular problems, then create content around it.

Step 4: Retain Traffic for Affiliate Marketing

When you build some link on Reddit and start to get the amount of traffic from them. Here's the time to retain that traffic for your affiliate marketing.

One of the most effective tactics to capture the audiences email that is Content Upgrades. 

This tactic work based on the psychological phenomenon called “Consistency” that introduced by Robert Cialdini in the book Pre-suasion [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

As he said in the book” People try to act in ways that are consistent with what they have already said or done”.

So if they come for your content, It is very likely that they will continue to sign up for something that supports or continues with your original post.

Here is an example from Tim Soulo:

· In this article: What An Email Response From Rand Fishkin Taught Me About Influencer Outreach

He has shared a screenshot of his outreach email to Rand Fishkin and mentioned that he has used a cocky email subject to get Rand Fishkin’s attention.

But he didn’t share that subject in his article.

He told his readers that he can only share it with them if they give him their email address.

Like this:

If you click on that yellow box, a popup box will appear and ask for your email address:

After you submit your email, you will get a pdf that contains the email subject with extra tips on writing catchy email subjects.

You can use Sumo me to create your content upgrade or if you use WordPress platform, Content Upgrades PRO is also a great plugin to help you do this. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through Content Upgrades PRO link.]

Just create a new upgrade by just filling in some fields




Then that plugin will show you how your pop up’ll look like:




That plugin will add the collected emails to your MailChimp account

Finally, get the shortcode from the plugin and paste it on anywhere you want to display the content upgrade.



Remember as I said above Reddit traffic popular with the low session duration, so you need to capture them as fast as possible. To do that make sure you put your content upgrade near the top.

Step 5: Expand your Brand or Site by AMA

When people start to know about you and see you as one trusted source, then you need host an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.

That look like this

Here are some questions asked by the audiences

Of course, you can continue providing the quality answer or create a post to drive traffic but Ask Me Anything is a great strategy to build your personal brand.

The user on Reddit loves AMA because it helps them save a lot of time to find the trust sources to get the answer.

You should also host an ama on your subreddit because it’ll help you qualify the audiences.

Conclusion

Above is the strategy I’m using to drive traffic from Reddit and it really effective. Spam link in forum, website or broad was no longer useful but It also harms your site. 

So to become a success with Reddit or any website, you need to spend the time and work to provide value for your audience. That will help you build the trust, relationship, and reputation.

How about your idea? What ‘s your best way to get traffic from Reddit, please comment it bellow