Reddit to generate traffic
I have IAnybody who tries to make money from publishing on the internet, quickly realizes that the difference between earning some pocket money, and making a good living off adsense and affiliate programs is down to the amount of traffic your sites receive. As far as I can tell there are two major ways of attracting traffic, ranking well with Google (and other search engines) and social bookmarking and networking site. Of the two I had never had much luck with the second and have concentrated my efforts on getting traffic from Google, until a couple of days ago I joined reddit, it really showed me what can be achieved from social bookmarking sites.
I have not been trying to make money from the internet for very long, less than 3 months so far. I am keeping track of my results in my making money online blog. As I had never been incredibly active on social sites before, I am not somebody who has masses of friends on facebook, or followers on twitter, also I don’t think my friends would be very impressed if I spammed the pages with links to my online writings. I think most of them think of this as a period of denial of being made redundant, and are waiting for me to come to my senses and start looking for a proper job. Whenever I’ve posted something on FB or twitter, I get a few clicks and then it dies out. Hardly worth the effort.
I had also tried other sites (including redgage), also attracted by the possiblity of getting dofollow links. I have tried StumbleUpon, diggit, tumblr and Pinterest among others. Again either no traffic or a few clicks from any of these sites. I can’t really figure out how StumbleUpon works, for example, I suspect the secret is to follow people and get followers, and to thumb up pages. What is so frustrating is that there are pages with thousands of approvals, that really don’t seem to be that amazing, I have flashbacks to high school and wondering what it was that made the popular crowd so popular. I really like tumblr and Pinterest, they are both really cool platforms and I enjoy using them for their own sake. They both have the great advantage that posts with links, can be reposted or repinned by other users, allowing the link to spread to other pages. Even if you don’t have a chance of going viral, with time your link can still be found on tens of pages, which has to be good, especially with tumblr which gives dofollow links.
The contrast with reddit was amazing. After adding a link, I got 300 visitors to my pages, although I believe the traffic dies down after a couple of days. A really important thing to remember is to submit a link to a subreddit (a category) rather than the main site, where it will just get lost). To find a subreddit, search for a keyword relevant to your link, and check out where the results that seem relevant to you are posted, and submit to the same subreddit. I was observing my site in realtime with google diagnostics, and a couple of minutes after submission, the visitors started pouring in. I could not believe the speed and scale of the reaction, it was great.
An important aspect of using reddit is to avoid being branded as a spammer. The moderators of a subreddit will ban you and remove your links, if they think you are just using the site to promote your own material. This is not terribly fatal, you can just sign up again with a different username. Still it is not pleasant. To avoid being banned, don’t just submit links from your own sites, comment on other people’s submissions, link to good youtube movies, submit interesting pictures etc. This is obvioulsy a lot more work than just submitting your links, but I think it is worth it. Redd
