5 lessons from playing with Reddit - (3500 visitors and 30 email subs in October)

Hi guys!
Today I wanted to share a little case study about working with Reddit as a marketing source.

Actually, it is my first month that I did it, so it's like a mini-milestone + a good way to exchange ideas with others to me. The numbers are small, but I'm sure it might grow into something bigger.

I decided to wrap it as lessons to make it easier to consume.

Before that, let me share the context:

• I started a blog in September to test some of my marketing skills + improve my writing a bit (productivity niche)
• I decided to collect the audience around it somehow, and email seems to be the best way
• The only problem I had was traffic. I didn't know how to promote it properly, so I decided to experiment with Reddit (hence I was using it just for fun)
• The main idea is to find posts and leave comments with recommendations there, promoting your product in a non-direct way
• Reddit is heavy on banning promotional stuff, so if you do it in direct way you'll get banned quickly

Month later, I can share a few points I learned from it.

1. It can be a regular marketing channel for your startup
   Posting stuff and praying to avoid getting banned is not the only way you can leverage the platform. Although "commenting" may sound as something non-scalable - I'm doing my best to prove the opposite.

If you do it good - you can collect pretty impressive targeted organic motivated traffic (my record high is ~800 visits in a day). At the same time, my average was 114/day in Oct, with 200/day in the last 2 weeks.

It all depends on your niche, of course, but I saw other guys doing this with a descent success.

2. Scaling is hard, but possible!
   The hardest thing about working with Reddit is making sure you help people. To do so, you need to find relevant topics, provide relevant information and match it somehow with the way you angle your product or service.

It was tough in the beginning, I obviously got some warnings from moderators. But with time I found a system that seems to work. Besides that, I use a tracker (it's a spreadsheet) where I track all the stuff, like number of links that I leave, links/day, visitors per link, etc etc. It helps me get the idea where I'm moving on weekly/monthly basis.

When I keep doing it for a few weeks, I start noticing patterns. For example, the average number subs/day gets higher on a week by week basis - now it's around 1.8-2. A guy who does similar stuff (who I reached in dm) said he has 5-8 email subs/day on average, but his niche is a bit more narrow and focused.
I expect to push this number for my blog in November too).

3. Experiments help
   I started experiments with Email subscriptions, in first place. Because I'm new to the niche - I didn't know what "lead magnet" to use. I added multiple different forms via ConvertKit into my WP site using the Ad Rotation plugins. It's like a cheap A/B testing lead form now. This helped me get rid of the worst performing magnets and leave the good ones (current ones have around 0.6% subscription rate, I removed the ones with 0.3-0.4%).

I also started experiment with "sourcing" the posts I want to engage with. I use a small python script to scrape all the relevant subs for the keywords I'm looking for, including the title, how recent this post was, the upvotes it has. I still don't know for sure how the recency of the post correlates with the traffic I get - so that's another intereting thing to check.

Another example of experiments is marking every comment that I leave. I do it with utms, but 55% of them get broken. Still, I can see the distribution of the rest 45% of visitors among other comments and have my "swipe file" of cases where it worked well.

You can also experiment with other subs, angles of information, etc. I'm on my way there, I'm sure tons of improvements can be done there.

4. Tremendous amount of niches work
   As part of the research that I did was having another python script to scrape reddit and see how others do marketing here. I noticed a few other people who do something similar and reached them to chat, exchange ideas, see how it works for them.

The main thing that I noticed is that all of them are from different niches, but they are in the same subs. It means that the field is pretty wide for various products/services you can do. This led me to think that I'm going to consider entering other niches too and growing multiple projects simultaneously using this approach. Anyway it all takes time & consistency to grow.

There are some tools out there, showing you the "related subreddits" stuff. Using them, you can easily research more subs to join + find people who do such "recommendational marketing" and how elegantly they do it (otherwise they'd get banned fast).

5. Next steps
   First of all, I plan gradually increasing the mailing list that I have, testing more stuff and ways that can work. Currently I do all work myself, which is a natural barrier - so outsourcing it properly is another thing I think of.

Besides, I'm looking into more way to monetize this sooner, so I was thinking to reach out to startups in my niche/similar niches in order to see if they'll be interested in this.

Another idea I was having is to expand this approach from just Reddit to Twitter - but for sure I'm far from making Reddit work well for me too.

Hope it was helpful, I just wanted to share this, since I noticed that most of the posts about Reddit here rely on posting something to subs. Yes, it is a great strategy - but it's just some fraction, some obvious tactic. Giving recommendations and genuinely helping people is the less obvious one, which I enjoy playing with.