OP 07 September, 2021 - 10:05 AM
I've been marketing on Reddit since 2016. I used to run a front page of Reddit overall service on BHW and it can be an extremely profitable platform IF you know what you're doing.
Today, I'm going to share one of my earlier marketing projects, which you can twist and tweak endlessly depending on what exactly you want to promote. I've moved on to other Reddit projects, but due to the nature of Reddit, this can't get saturated.
Q & As - Simple, yet extremely profitable
This method requires that you have a few things:
2 Reddit accounts - preferably active, older than a couple of months and with at least a couple hundred comment karma
Your own website - for this method, shared hosting at $5/month will probably be fine, along with a .com/.net TLD with WHOIS protection
An affiliate network account - I'll explain why below
Step 1: Pick the product you want to promote
For this, I'll use a real life example I've promoted in the past - car insurance. Head over to your affiliate network of choice and pick a car insurance (or whatever you want) offer which pays on a CPA basis. Redditors typically aren't going to pay for SFW non-tangible products. When I ran this particular project years ago, I had an offer which paid around $12/lead based on a 3 page submission. It doesn't cost the Redditor anything to get a car insurance quote. This is where you can start twisting the method to suit yourself. You don't have to go with car insurance, there are probably 100 other campaigns you can promote at any particular point in time on a network like CJ. There may be fewer on other networks, but new offers come up constantly even on small networks.
Step 2: Build out your site
Your best bet is to start from scratch with a domain name that is at least tangentially related to the offer (or vertical) you'd like to promote. Something like AutoCoverageGuide.com (example) if you were going to do something with car insurance. Get the $5/month host, pay the ~$20 for the domain name and privacy protection and pop up a Wordpress template. You'll be making one post on the site, something with a slug like http://autocoverageguide.com/securing-th...ance-rates. You don't want to link straight to your home page because 1. There's no need to have much on the home page and 2. In this case, it will actually look less like marketing if you link to an internal page.
After you're ready to make the post on your site, go through the offer you've chosen yourself. Take screenshots every step of the way, I'm talking the landing page, second/third pages, the final "see my quote" page, and if you can, the last page where you receive a quote. You'll make a small blurb write-up between each screenshot explaining what the user is seeing and how to continue onto the next one. This is all going in one Wordpress post. Then, create a redirect in your cPanel (or whatever backend you use) to funnel people to the offer, something like http://autocoverageguide.com/insurance-quotes should redirect to the tracking link for the CPA offer. Add a couple of the redirect links throughout the post, one especially at the beginning and end. Another trick I've used is to make all of the screenshots redirect to the offer as well if they are clicked.
Step 3: Time to post on Reddit
You have your site, your offer is ready, now you need to start driving some traffic to it. This is where the Q & A method comes into play. Think of a question to ask Redditors where a link to your website could be given as a good answer. I typically used r/AskReddit for this because it's the largest subreddit and brought in tons of traffic, but there are plenty of smaller (though still hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers) subreddits where it can work.
In this example I might create a post in AskReddit with account #1 which reads:
What's something you pay for but you hardly ever use?
It's a general-type question that can elicit a lot of comments, it can also elicit a lot of upvotes and a lot of traffic. Your next move is going to be to post a comment containing your link. Don't post it 1 minute after posting the question as it would look way too much like marketing. Use account #2 and post something like:
Car insurance.
Every 6 months it's time to pay up again, [and I do shop around for it](http://autocoverageguide.com/securing-th...ance-rates), but I haven't had to file a claim in years. Same goes for most other types of insurance. I hardly ever use it, but I'm happy it's there when I need it.
It's a short and sweet comment. Feel free to add on a couple sentence long personal anecdote if you want, just keep it under a paragraph. The formatting with the brackets and parenthesis is how you'd anchor a link into a Reddit comment. That will show up as blue and clickable to everyone reading it.
Step 4: Pushing the post (optional)
While just performing the three steps above can result in decent traffic, it's almost always worth your while to do some extra pushing. There are plenty of upvote providers and subreddit front page providers in the Marketplace section here who can help with upvotes. That being said, upvotes aren't everything, which you might learn the hard way if you try to brute force your way to the top of a large sub.
Step 5: Repeat
The beautiful thing about this method is that you can repeat it several times, either on different subreddits, or by asking different questions and creating new comments. Speaking from personal experience, there is a decent chance at some point your accounts/domain is going to be banned or filtered, especially if you get a lot of highly upvoted posts. If you're at that point, it's not a huge deal. You probably paid around $25 for the domain/host, maybe an extra $20 for the two accounts if you didn't create them yourself. That's under $50 for the kind of traffic that most likely made you 4-5 figures if you get popular enough to where your domain is being filtered. There's nothing stopping you from copying the content immediately onto another domain name, getting a couple of new accounts and starting the process over again
Today, I'm going to share one of my earlier marketing projects, which you can twist and tweak endlessly depending on what exactly you want to promote. I've moved on to other Reddit projects, but due to the nature of Reddit, this can't get saturated.
Q & As - Simple, yet extremely profitable
This method requires that you have a few things:
2 Reddit accounts - preferably active, older than a couple of months and with at least a couple hundred comment karma
Your own website - for this method, shared hosting at $5/month will probably be fine, along with a .com/.net TLD with WHOIS protection
An affiliate network account - I'll explain why below
Step 1: Pick the product you want to promote
For this, I'll use a real life example I've promoted in the past - car insurance. Head over to your affiliate network of choice and pick a car insurance (or whatever you want) offer which pays on a CPA basis. Redditors typically aren't going to pay for SFW non-tangible products. When I ran this particular project years ago, I had an offer which paid around $12/lead based on a 3 page submission. It doesn't cost the Redditor anything to get a car insurance quote. This is where you can start twisting the method to suit yourself. You don't have to go with car insurance, there are probably 100 other campaigns you can promote at any particular point in time on a network like CJ. There may be fewer on other networks, but new offers come up constantly even on small networks.
Step 2: Build out your site
Your best bet is to start from scratch with a domain name that is at least tangentially related to the offer (or vertical) you'd like to promote. Something like AutoCoverageGuide.com (example) if you were going to do something with car insurance. Get the $5/month host, pay the ~$20 for the domain name and privacy protection and pop up a Wordpress template. You'll be making one post on the site, something with a slug like http://autocoverageguide.com/securing-th...ance-rates. You don't want to link straight to your home page because 1. There's no need to have much on the home page and 2. In this case, it will actually look less like marketing if you link to an internal page.
After you're ready to make the post on your site, go through the offer you've chosen yourself. Take screenshots every step of the way, I'm talking the landing page, second/third pages, the final "see my quote" page, and if you can, the last page where you receive a quote. You'll make a small blurb write-up between each screenshot explaining what the user is seeing and how to continue onto the next one. This is all going in one Wordpress post. Then, create a redirect in your cPanel (or whatever backend you use) to funnel people to the offer, something like http://autocoverageguide.com/insurance-quotes should redirect to the tracking link for the CPA offer. Add a couple of the redirect links throughout the post, one especially at the beginning and end. Another trick I've used is to make all of the screenshots redirect to the offer as well if they are clicked.
Step 3: Time to post on Reddit
You have your site, your offer is ready, now you need to start driving some traffic to it. This is where the Q & A method comes into play. Think of a question to ask Redditors where a link to your website could be given as a good answer. I typically used r/AskReddit for this because it's the largest subreddit and brought in tons of traffic, but there are plenty of smaller (though still hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers) subreddits where it can work.
In this example I might create a post in AskReddit with account #1 which reads:
What's something you pay for but you hardly ever use?
It's a general-type question that can elicit a lot of comments, it can also elicit a lot of upvotes and a lot of traffic. Your next move is going to be to post a comment containing your link. Don't post it 1 minute after posting the question as it would look way too much like marketing. Use account #2 and post something like:
Car insurance.
Every 6 months it's time to pay up again, [and I do shop around for it](http://autocoverageguide.com/securing-th...ance-rates), but I haven't had to file a claim in years. Same goes for most other types of insurance. I hardly ever use it, but I'm happy it's there when I need it.
It's a short and sweet comment. Feel free to add on a couple sentence long personal anecdote if you want, just keep it under a paragraph. The formatting with the brackets and parenthesis is how you'd anchor a link into a Reddit comment. That will show up as blue and clickable to everyone reading it.
Step 4: Pushing the post (optional)
While just performing the three steps above can result in decent traffic, it's almost always worth your while to do some extra pushing. There are plenty of upvote providers and subreddit front page providers in the Marketplace section here who can help with upvotes. That being said, upvotes aren't everything, which you might learn the hard way if you try to brute force your way to the top of a large sub.
Step 5: Repeat
The beautiful thing about this method is that you can repeat it several times, either on different subreddits, or by asking different questions and creating new comments. Speaking from personal experience, there is a decent chance at some point your accounts/domain is going to be banned or filtered, especially if you get a lot of highly upvoted posts. If you're at that point, it's not a huge deal. You probably paid around $25 for the domain/host, maybe an extra $20 for the two accounts if you didn't create them yourself. That's under $50 for the kind of traffic that most likely made you 4-5 figures if you get popular enough to where your domain is being filtered. There's nothing stopping you from copying the content immediately onto another domain name, getting a couple of new accounts and starting the process over again