Reddit is a great tool for driving traffic and interest to a game project, blog, or website. There is a thriving community there. You can also earn Karma for posts and comments, making Reddit a kind of a game. Don't get distracted by Karma though, remember this is about connecting redditors to useful information. Then every so often driving it to you. The title on this post is 'Tips for being useful on Reddit' because that is the best strategy to 'winning' on the site. Be useful to others.
Being helpful to the Reddit Community can drive traffic to your site, and give you practice in dealing with some of the roughest comments on the web. Feedback can be brutal, as well as snarky and you'll get a down vote before a helpful suggestion. But learning how to deal with the community and how to provide Redditors with information that is useful to them can bring you rewards. For example traffic spikes of 500 to 1000 hits for a single post with 50 up votes placed in a strategic subreddits like r/game, r/indiegame, /r gamedev. Some posts on reddit get as high as 2000 up votes. That's some serious traffic.
Too much Imgur.
Far too many people take screen shots of things and link to that image on Imgur. For example a screen shot of a tweet, instead of a link to a tweet. This is lazy redditing... But also oddly enough it takes more time set up then to link to the thing you took a picture of. For example if someone announces that Desktop Dungeons is about to go Beta, links to a screen shot of the tweet, they are missing out on driving traffic from Reddit to the twitter feed in question. That's a lot of people who could be retweeting this great news. Also smart Redditors get upset at dumb ones and leave nasty comments.
Bonus points if you notice who made that mistake.
Dealing with the emotional damage.
So you made a mistake. And people were nasty to you. They leave mean comments. How do you prevent a flame war? When you legitimately make a mistake, fess up. Explain why you were dumb and how you plan on correcting it in the future. Then actually change your behavior in the future.
Don't do what I did and link to screen shots of tweets, link to the tweets themselves. That way Redditors can follow the people who made the tweets and get the information in the tweet as well.
TL;DR
1.) Find you community on Reddit and learn what it needs to know, and how fast it finds out.
2.) Be helpful to everyone, even the trolls. Even the down voters.
3.) Ignore Karma, measure Hits.
4.) Link directly to things.
5.) Post your only your best blog posts to the appropriate subreddit.
I've been using reddit to drive traffic to my blog by submitting links to some of the posts that I consider good enough to be of interest to others.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually worked quite well in generating traffic and up votes, but it is also pretty evident that the reddit community will mostly just look at a page and then leave immediately, with my average pageviews from reddit being 1,07.
Do you have any experience with creating return visitors from reddit or getting the users to look at more than just the page you're linking to?
Tough question!
ReplyDeleteWow... I don't even begin to really understand how to get Redditors to return to your blog. I'm assuming that every Reddit link is a fresh batch of viewers. Was that 1,700 vies or 107 views?
Placing RSS icons, and the feed burner count in an easy to find location (See the Feed Me! Section) up above, to try and capture their attention... Then follow up with worthy blog posts.
Check out thetrafficblogger.com, he's my go to guy for advice about blogging. He also happens to be a gamer as well as an entrepreneur.
Thanks, I'll check that out.
ReplyDeleteWhat I mean by 1,07 pageviews from reddit is that when I look at Google Analytics the average reader from reddit views 1,07 pages on my blog, or out of 100 people, 107 pages are viewed.
I can get anywhere from 50 views to 2k+ (2 submissions I did there) from a link.