Last weekend I ran a social experiment.
I shared 4 things on Reddit…
Here’s what I learned…
- Redditors (reddit users) love good content
- Conversely, they HATE bad content
- Bad content isn’t “lame” or “stupid,” it’s irrelevant
I submitted my first post to the minimalism subreddit, Monday night around 8pm. After checking my Google Analytics (GA) account, I realized I was immediately picking up direct traffic from Reddit. Score.
I got excited and posted another bit of content. This was actually just a cut/paste from the bottom of my first post. I figured some people are more interested in reading about ‘pro’ minimalists than just a regular guy’s story. I also realized I never included details of resources in the testimony post. Since this self post also got a lot of traffic, it meant Redditors pay very close attention to headlines. Got it.
Next came a daring move — a cross-post to another subreddit (entrepreneur).
This time I followed the same strategy as my first post by redirecting Redditor traffic to this blog post called “An Ode to Michael Gerber.” That name doesn’t mean much to most people, so instead of using my blog title I headlined the post “Recipe for Scalability – Make Your Business Systems-Dependent Rather Than People-Dependent.” Long winded, I know.
Nonetheless, the traffic continued. I think some Redditors respected my post more because I credited Michael Gerber, the author who made that headline ideal (systems-dependent) recognizable. But here’s the thing — I still got credit in the form of blog traffic and referral book sales. We’ll get to that later though.
Now for my 4th and most recent post. This morning, just after midnight, I posted My 1st Startup – Selling Candy Canes in 7th Grade. The redirect in traffic doesn’t actually go to my site, however. Instead I sent curious Redditors to an image I scanned, which I uploaded to imgur.com.
I’m not sure why, but for some reason Redditors LOVE using Imgur for image sharing. Rather than question this fascination, I exploited it.
I went with it and it’s paid me back in spades. Within hours there were 10,000 hits on the image. The traffic itself doesn’t equate to dollars but it did generate Karma on my Reddit user account, a win for the long run since I have plenty more content that needs sharing.
This submission was also just a snippet of a prior blog post. But Redditors don’t want extra flab like captions and descriptions. Images, especially those hosted on Imgur and shared on Reddit, should be self-explanatory. The element of KISS (keep it simple stupid) is truly one of the key success factors to image sharing on Reddit.
These four posts, which took about 20 minutes to write and 5 minutes to post on Reddit, scored a lot of traffic in just 24 hours. Check it out below.
As you can see, my daily traffic is ~250-300 hits until Saturday, October 20. On Sunday and Monday I score 350-450 hits per day. But beginning Monday evening at 8p (first post), the traffic increase is substantial.
The highest point on this graph, measured around 30 minutes ago at 6pm EST, is 1,800 hits. And as you can see, 96% of this traffic is brand spanking new.
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s review.
- Reddit is an amazing tool for promoting content (either your own or others’, as I demonstrated)
- Good content on Reddit is relevant, fits a niche topic, and sparks conversation / interaction (demonstrated by comments)
- I posted 2 unique pieces of content, and 2 cut/paste abridged versions of that same content
- Website traffic increased 5x in 22 hours
- Karma points / influence on Reddit increased 8x in 22 hours
Reddit = good