The Marketer’s Guide to reddit with Brent Csutoras

Transcript

Brent, it’s so great to have you on the show.

It’s a pleasure to be on the show and chat with you. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. I’m looking forward to it.

We need to keep in better touch.

We say that with so many people. Life gets busy, but they’re just excuses, right? We have to get past that and make it happen.

Well, there’s busy which doesn’t mean that you’re creating value and there’s intentional busy where you’re intentional and you’re busy doing amazing world-changing things. Let’s talk about some of the world-changing things that you’re up to. You are a master at reddit. You’ve really figured out the value behind reddit for business people and marketers, how to play that well, and not get in trouble with reddit. Let’s talk a bit about that.

Sure. reddit’s been one of my favorite communities for a long time and I strongly believe that it’s not that hard. I think a lot of times as marketers, we just get insanely lazy when it comes to putting in the effort to succeed.

reddit is definitely a community that is vibrant. It’s extremely large. I think they have about 350+ million active users right now. I think the stats are 82% English-speaking and 62% US. You could calculate it out to be half of Americans are on reddit every month, if you want to extrapolate some connecting points in the stats.

There's a lot of ways for companies to benefit from reddit. You just have to be creative to understand the platform and do it. Click To Tweet

It’s definitely been a community that has been left alone to grow on its own, which I think is a huge key to its success. Where a lot of the aggregate sites like Digg and a lot of those early social news aggregator sites, those early social media sites, I think a lot of them got caught into the investment game. I think it’s the investors, they get some funding, everybody wants a bigger valuation. Facebook and Twitter are starting to get these huge valuations.

All the aggregate sites were like, “You need to be more like Facebook. I think a lot of those companies ended up going down. Really trying to get that grass is greener on the other side, where reddit never had that requirement. Alexis and Steve made the site as a part of Y Combinator and Conde Nast ended up buying the site. They never really had a requirement to make revenue. They never really had a requirement to provide some mass value. They were able to really grow the way they wanted to grow.

Steve and Alexis both left in 2010. Again, the site wasn’t really doing anything and it wasn’t really going anywhere. When they left, that’s when Digg and all these other sites are closing down and their users went to reddit. You really had that whole early internet culture looking for a home and reddit became that home. If you think about all the mentality behind the people that were early advocates, people who want to find information fast, wanted to have a say or a voice in scripting the culture of the internet, that was the audience that all flocked to reddit and stuck with reddit.

As you saw the years, you saw the AMAs, the interviews, you see crowdfunding. A lot of that really started on reddit. You have people asking for PayPal email addresses so they can give people money or come up with the money to help each other. I think it’s really an exciting place for setting the standard for what is cool, what is popular and what the internet culture is. And I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

Most marketers are not that familiar with reddit as a platform to market on or even as a market research opportunity. But it really is the front page of the internet. I think that’s part of their tagline, right?

Absolutely. Initially, it was going to be called ‘Snoo’ and the idea was, “What Snoo,” like “What’s new?” Snoo ended up becoming the name of the reddit alien and reddit became the front page of the internet. “I read it on reddit. I saw it on reddit.” That’s where a lot of that came together. But yeah, it’s absolutely the front page of the internet. Most of the people that I know that use reddit uses it to find news. That’s where you find out what’s happening in all of the different spaces you’re interested in. Then you can turn around and go share it in other social sites. You can go talk about it, but to get it first, you’ve got to get it on reddit.

Some people would say that you’d get the latest news on Twitter.

Twitter’s very specific. Twitter has always been extremely specific for news, politics, sports, and celebrities. It’s really about real-time communication without any substance. I still do have an account, Weird News. That account ended up having—at one point they do all the statistic—85% celebrity follow. I had Ashton Kutcher, I had all of these really big celebrities, and I would get retweeted quite a bit for the post that I would put on there.

I had the sense of what was the return for that. Some of the biggest Twitter users on the platform go and retweet, and you see very little traffic and click-through because it’s not about driving people off the platform. People are using it for updates. Twitter is extremely effective in 140–280 character updates where the meat of your update is in your tweet. But as far as my experience and my feelings on the platform, I don’t feel that it really gets people coming in for deep education or deep learning. I think it’s more surface and really light reading.

I would agree with you on that. Now, as far as reddit’s concerned, do you think this is a platform where a marketer can get good ROI?

I do. I will say that I think it is important to really emphasize that reddit is best approached from a marketing standpoint as an anonymous user. If you really get into reddit, reddit doesn’t really focus on having user accounts. It’s not about who you’re following or who are following you. It’s not really about going and connecting with other people. The founders, the admins, the moderators, they all use pseudonyms. They all approach using the site as being very anonymous because it’s not about who you are. It’s about what you’re talking about. It’s about the substance of your interactions.

I will say that reddit has taken on funding. They’ve started to grow, they started to try to establish themselves. It’s like a more professional platform for businesses. They just really haven’t done a good job with that. Steve, who’s the CEO right now, doesn’t care about marketers or business. He has always been really about programming and platform. We never hacksaw it on most of our conversations because I was a marketer and marketers were all scumbags. That type of mentality. The same with Delicious. A lot of people have that mentality early on.

Even with building accounts for a company on reddit, you can run into a lot of problems and issues. You need to have a relatively large budget. I think one of the requirements to have a branded presence on reddit is to be a brand redditors already love. Bill Gates is able to do it really great. There’s a lot of politicians and companies that have been able to do well on reddit, but they were already doing well on reddit before the brand took over that presence.

It’s very difficult for brands to come in and say, “I’m going to make brand page A, I’m going to talk about our brand, and I’m going to participate,” because that’s not how reddit necessarily was founded, how it was meant to be set-up, and it’s not really fundamentally supported in that way by the people behind the site.

So no matter what, you’re always swimming upstream when you’re doing that and it takes a lot of time. I had seen it work. I know how to make it work. But it takes investment and a long period of time – a year or two. The better way to really approach it is just be an anonymous user and focus on identifying the opportunities to talk about your brand, product and service in a normal dialog throughout the experience on reddit, – through comments and posting content anonymously. Those different ways are how brands are probably going to have the most success on reddit today.

Success can be huge. I can tell a story about a guy on reddit. Somebody says, “Why the hell is beef jerky so expensive?” and a guy goes, “Well, my family happens to run beef jerky company. The reason why it’s so expensive is you’re taking prime meat, you’re drawing it, dehydrating I down to a small piece of beef jerky but you’re still taking a large quantity of meat to get that jerky in the end. If you’re doing high quality, the cost ends up being quite a bit.” The guy comes back and the only response was, “Hah, so you’re family owns the business. Can we get a reddit discount?” and he’s like, “Sure. Here’s your reddit discount.”

This starts a chain reaction of conversations. It ends up having this guy do a reddit AMA, ends up having him do another coupon, ends up coming back afterwards. His little family business is doing $1000 per month in sales and after hitting on reddit, he started doing I think $10,000–$15,000 a month in sales.

It was a huge boost and very organic, very opportunistic for him. You see that happen with multiple different small businesses. You see it happen all the time with companies coming in. Transamerica came in, big financial institutions used reddit as a way to identify what topics are people trying to learn more about. They created a bunch of content, did a big contest, have a lot of fun with it, had a lot of exposure and was able to get market research that would have cost them probably $250,000–$500,000 for probably less than $5000. There’s a lot of ways for companies to get in and get the benefit. You just have to be creative to understand the platform and do it.

Speaking of understanding the platform, let’s say that you are an anonymous user and you just want to add value to the communities, the relevant subreddits, and then soft sell your products and services in a non-scammy way. You need to have some street cred in that community. You need to have what is referred to in reddit’s terms as post karma and comment karma in order to have the juice to get noticed.

It’s slightly different with reddit. Really, it’s not so much about the accounts. There are some elements to having a good account and having karma. Definitely, there are limitations that say, “If your account is not 30 days old, you can’t submit to certain subreddits. There is an essence of saying if you want to submit to a certain subreddit you might need to have a certain amount of karma.

People are going to look at your account. When you’re engaging, you’re participating, they’re going to go and say, “Who’s this person?” The mods are going to look at you and they’re going to look and say, “This person has no success in their account. They have no submissions that have gone anywhere, they have no comments that have gotten a lot of karma, they’ve been around for three weeks.” They’re gonna look at you and they might look at you as a spammer if you’re trying to do something that’s promotional or could be promotional.

Like various online social communities, reddit is also about identifying where you belong and fit in. Click To Tweet

There’s definitely a value in building an account. But that said, that’s where it ends. I’ve been through this for, I think, 15 years with reddit and I go through accounts left and right. If I want a throwaway account and make a new account, that’s easy to do. The time it takes—once you know reddit—to build an account is 30 days and you can build them regularly.

reddit actually encourages or has no rule against having multiple accounts. You can make 20 different accounts if you want to make 20 different accounts. The only thing you can’t do is try to game the system with your account. If you try to get into a gaming practice, you’ll get in trouble. But if you’re just want to have different accounts for different purposes, you can do that all day and not have any problems.

I think people have a big disconnect when it comes to social media and social environments. For years, you go to conferences, you go to meetups, you go to places where you physically walk in a room and there’s a room full of people. Could you imagine walking into a conference that nobody knows who you are, walking up on stage, grabbing the microphone, and just starting to talk to the entire room as if you were a speaker then? As if you’re the keynote speaker at an event that nobody knew who you were?

Immediately, what would happen is security come and tell you to get out and leave. Everybody would say, “God, who is this guy?” But we do that on the internet with no sense of problem whatsoever. People who have never been on reddit can go, “I’m going to go in, I’m going to submit my own article, I’m going to say it’s awesome, I’m going to defend it, I’m going to fight with everybody, then I’m going to be confused as to why I was there.”

It just always struck me as odd how people don’t see that connection. reddit is like any social community. You need to come in, you need to identify where you fit. reddit is a platform that is run by moderators who create their own subreddits which are their own communities. You have to go in and find the ones you’re happy with, the ones that make sense to you. This helps you learn the site. It helps you have credibility. Your comments have credibility. Your submissions make more sense to subreddits that have more engagement.

You’re a big fan of cars or you’re a big fan of Game of Thrones. You want to go in and be in those communities. Then you want to find the communities that are going to match up for what your business goals are, but you really have to pay attention. You might say, “I want to drive traffic back to my site as a publisher.” But if you go in and look at a subreddit and you look at the area you want to be in, it has a rule that says you cannot submit URLs, then that’s not going to work for you. You’re not going to get enough traffic, you’re not going to get the exposure, you’re not going to get the opportunity, and you need to move on and find a different subreddit.

There’s understanding the community, there’s looking at the different subreddits, which ones are active, which ones are not, which one is going to accept the type of content that you want to have to participate, and which ones are going to have the tone that you want, that they’re going to agree with your point of view.

That’s just the starting point. You get in there and start looking at that stuff, and then you should spend a month or two. reddit is such a great site for getting information. If you’re a fan of anything, you’re going to get really great information from reddit. It’s almost a great opportunity for people to just use it for what it’s really meant to be for, understand it, get a good feel for it, and then start thinking about how your content or your business’ content or services or media can fit in your reddit. But don’t start out growing in day one, “How am I going to submit something?” Give yourself about 30–60 days before you start thinking like that.

Makes sense. How many subreddits are there in reddit and how do you tell which are active and which ones are inactive?

I think that on any given day, there’s probably, let’s just call it 100,000 subreddits. There’s a lot of communities. I would say there’s a community for every single topic you have an interest in. Whether or not those communities have two members or they have two million is a different story. But there’s a ton of communities.

It’s really important to always understand, you can get more from a subreddit that’s really on point to you. For instance, one really great campaign was a small town in Canada that was doing a big barbecue. They promoted to that group that has I think, 2000 or 3000 people in it. They got 50 or 60 sign-ups for that event. I think they spent $100 on the ads and ran a little ad in that one little group. Their return on investment was huge compared to other aspects.

There’s always how you figure out your ROI and what your goal is, but there’s a lot of communities out there and there are the open source sites like Crazy Bingo and if you google reddit, subreddits, or subreddit stats, there’s redditlist.com, there’s redditstats… all of these have statistics on the activity levels, the growth levels, the type of content, the top content, the moderators. There’s a lot of information that you can learn about subreddits to determine which ones make the most sense for you.

There are other things you can do. You can go and then use their search engines and you could just put in like the ‘site:’ and then the domain, you can find out what subreddits that domain’s content is already performing in. So, if you go in and you put the domain in, you’re like, “Hey, the top five submissions from this domain are all in technology and they did really well in the last year.” Well, technology is probably a good subreddit for your content.

After the non-active, it’s pretty easy because reddit right now has a signal. So when you go and open up the subreddit, it might say that it has two million subscribers but it will say 1287 are online right now. You just track that. You can open up a couple of different subreddits and look at how many people are active at that given time. I believe that some of those open source sites I mentioned also show those activity levels. You can determine that pretty easily.

Are there other tools our listeners should know regarding reddit besides reddit list and reddit stats in terms of identifying influencers inside of those communities, for example, or tools that will help you to post content better or be the first to the gate with a new piece of content?

One thing you definitely want to know is that reddit runs on a JSON RSS script. Any section of reddit that you want to get into an RSS feed, you could just put like /.rss and it turns it into a feed. You can use that information to keep you on point if you want to go and search your own domain and identify, “Hey, I want to know when my content gets submitted,” then you can turn that into an RSS feed just by adding that and then you can set-up a script so that when you’re content is submitted, within an hour you’re notified.

There are little things like that you can do to help you. There’s one that’s called redditinvestigator.com which allows you to go in and put moderators’ names in and then you can find a bunch of information about the moderators. You definitely want to pay attention to moderators in any subreddit that you’re involved in. That’s information that will help you a lot really going into the subreddits and taking the time. That’s the tool. redditinvestigator.com is a great tool.

A lot of times it’s just searching for these tools because they open and they get closed, not by reddit, but because they don’t make money. Somebody sets it on fire and a new tool pops up later. But you have the reddit Investigator tool. You can use reddit itself and it has an RSS tool. You don’t necessarily need a tool but a tactic to pay attention to what performs. That’s going in and looking at the top content. reddit has a filter by top. You can go in and put in your competitor’s domains. You can put in your own domains. You can sort by the top and find out which content really performs long.

One thing we all need to remember is that content can be repurposed. I typically run on a rule set of about three months. If you see a really funny stand-up comedy video that’s like a two-minute segment and you get a good kick out of it, and then about two months later or three months later that clip comes up in your timeline again, you’re not going to be upset. You’ll watch it again, you’ll enjoy it, it will be something you enjoy seeing. So knowing that a lot of times you can go and hack the system by going to reddit and looking at what’s really popular, say,  over a year ago and then repurposing and rewriting that content to make it popular for yourself.

But you can’t submit a URL that’s already been submitted, right?

You can after three months, I think. When you submit something that used to be in the code, it was like every three months you’d be able to submit it. If you try to submit it too early, it will show you it was already submitted here, but after three months, you’d be able to submit it. I honestly don’t remember if it’s in the code anymore at this point, but it’s just something to know that you can resubmit the same content. You can go and put it to other subreddits, you can move it around to other subreddits, or you can submit it to the same subreddit again.

You want to avoid doing this a lot because knowing this opens up a door that says, “Well, I can just go in and submit my same content every three months.” You don’t really want to approach reddit from a “how to game it” standpoint. You really want to approach reddit from a “how to understand how it works” so that you can have the best experience. All of this information is about better understanding the subreddit, better understanding what people want, better understanding what content’s going to perform, understanding who are the gatekeepers, and really saying, “Okay, with that information, let me create and find something that really fits in this community so that you get to really benefit from it.”

Good stuff. Another tool that I’ve heard really good things about is the Reddit Enhancement Suite, RES.

I have actually not even looked at that.

It’s a Chrome extension, a browser extension. There are versions for different browsers. Unfortunately not available on Safari anymore, but my understanding is you can use it on Firefox, Chrome, and so forth. I heard good things about it.

I’ll take a look at that. I’m on the website already. I’ll have to take a peek at that and see what it’s working. There are so many tools and we have developed a lot of our own tools as well that we utilize and that helps us because a lot of this stuff was open source for so long, so it’s pretty easy. It’s not open source anymore and reddit has been rewriting its code for a while now. That’s what they’ve been really focused on. I don’t know how long a lot of these open source things are going to continue to benefit and be as accurate as they used to be, but I think they’re still in that space, for now at least.

Let’s hope our listeners get a deeper understanding of the quirks and nuances of reddit. For example, these anonymous users that most people are, they don’t have their name associated with the account, sometimes they will get what is referred to as doxed. Maybe you could describe what doxing is?

I’m guessing doxing essentially mean silent ban, like ghost ban?

No. It’s basically outing the person’s real identity.

Yeah. You will always have to be careful of that. People will always be a little rough on that. But this is also where it comes back to don’t do things that are spammy and you really don’t run into these problems. For instance, I have screenshots all over the web that have my reddit user names all over them. I don’t block them out. reddit has banned and unbanned a couple of my accounts multiple times. They know my IPs, they know everything that I’m doing with them. I have zero problems. In 15 years I have to make a new account here and there but I have no problems about my domains being banned. I really haven’t had any of these issues. That’s because I’m not trying to abuse and break the system.

I think for the most part, the only people I ever see that get doxed or have these issues are people that are doing something that’s not in adherence with the system. They are doing something where they’re posting stuff that’s illegal or something that violates some of the privacy and then they’re found out. Where this affects us more is the market. You come in and you start spamming a bunch of stuff and then you get somebody who says, “This is crap. This is a stupid article, I don’t like it.” Somebody gets extremely defensive which you should never do and they say, “Oh, this is a good article,” they’re defending it.

All of these are telltale signs of marketers, not redditors because you wouldn’t do that as a redditor. You wouldn’t care. You wouldn’t get all defensive about a piece of content that’s not supposed to be yours. That’s when people go and look at them—this happened a lot more in the past, not so much today—where somebody would make a statement and they’d go, “Oh, well based on what you’ve done here, what you’ve submitted, and what you said, you’re actually this person who’s an SEO over here, and so forth.” Again, I never saw that as a big issue. If that happens, just make a new account. Who cares? It’s really not a huge deal.

What you have to be careful with is getting your domains banned or getting your content banned from reddit. But again, this isn’t an issue if you’re not abusing the system. If you’re going to try to go and gain the system, you’re going to try to break the system, you’re going to try to hack the system, you’re going to try to black hat the system, then you’re going to deal with all of these problems. If you’re not, you’re not likely to deal with these problems.

Makes sense. When you said that there are a lot of folks who have multiple accounts, there’s nothing stopping the terms of service folks from creating multiple accounts. Those are referred to, I think, alt accounts?

Yup. Alts. You can even have it in there. I don’t have it bookmarked or something, but it’s the rules. You’re welcome to have multiple accounts. It doesn’t matter.

And people do that so they can have a different persona or take a stand on a particular issue. They could be all political on an alt account and they don’t get a lot of haters on their main account that way.

Absolutely. I’ve told people, we used to actually get rid of accounts or put them in dormant when they start getting too popular, just because we didn’t want the visibility. We can make an account and get 100,000 karma in a week. This is really easy. Just go in and make an account that’s a top account in no time. But that just draws a lot of attention and ultimately, what you want to do is not draw so much attention.

Speaking of karma, just for the sake of anybody who’s listening, one thing that people do not understand about reddit is, two things I think we should cover. One is what is spam to redditors? First off, spam is different because a lot of people approach reddit thinking, “Oh, if I’m promoting my own thing, then I’m a spammer. If I promote 20 different articles from my site, then I’m spamming. If I’m promoting some kind of virus or something like that, then maybe I’m a spammer.”

reddit has a different view of that. If you are a redditor and you do not respond to comments or comment, they will view you as a spammer. reddit is a place for commenting. In fact, the majority of your action on reddit should be commenting. The most popular and the most powerful—if you want to call that—accounts have very little submission karma and most have massive comment karma. The commenters own reddit. The people that do the submissions, they’re not viewed as really important for reddit. Even though it’s important to the system to work, they’re not viewed as important. Submissions are not viewed as important. Comments are.

reddit doesn't focus on who and how many your followers are. It's all about the substance of what you're talking about. Click To Tweet

If you’re on the site and let’s say you go into technology and you’re thinking like this from the spammer. You’re thinking, “Okay, well, I want to submit my article into tech but I know I can’t be just promoting my own content. I’m going to do what everybody thinks always works. I’m going to go find nine other technology-based publications like Wired, PCMag, and all these really good sources. Then I’m going to submit a bunch of that stuff as well because that will diversify my account.”

That doesn’t really work on reddit. It has never really worked on reddit because of the way they approach spam prevention. People think it does so that’s an idea to diversify yourself and eliminate your footprints so that you can spam without getting caught. The problem with that is that even if you go into the technology subreddit and you were to submit 10 articles, let’s say you did it in one day, and they were all different resources, that’s considered spamming on reddit. You’re not supposed to submit that much. If you submit PCMag every day, people download it everyday, and you keep submitting it, even though it’s not yours and it’s a known publication, that’s spamming.

Any action that you take on reddit that goes against how the subreddit actually functions, can be construed as spam. But there’s breaking the rules of a subreddit. Every subreddit has its own rules and they can be very confusing because you can have one subreddit that says, “You can only submit Huffington Post URLs.” Then you have another subreddit that says, “You cannot submit Huffington Post URLs at all.” If you don’t take the time to learn the rules of each subreddit, then you end up breaking the rules. You break the rules, you become a spammer, you get banned.

This is where people run into problems. They don’t take the time to slow down and understand the communities. They end up breaking the rules, they end up getting banned, and then they come back and say, “Oh, reddit’s too hard. It’s not a good site.”

There are a lot of nuances here that are different from traditional online communities, social networks you need to wrap your head around. Is shadowbanning something that happens inside of reddit?

Absolutely. There’s only been a couple of sites that really do this. reddit and Delicious are two that really had done it historically. Of course, people prior to knowing, know what Delicious is these days, but shadowbanning absolutely exists on reddit. This is the fun thing about reddit.

As a company, they are historically horrible about follow-through. They’re really like a never-ending startup. They don’t have a blog where they tell you features. People don’t realize six months ago, they watched profiles. Now you can go in, you can actually make your own profile, you can submit content to your profile, and you can get followers to follow your profile. If you do that, it shows up in your timeline. It’s exactly like Facebook pages. Whole feature launches, it’s a part of the site, it’s an effective part of the site, not a blog post out there from reddit talking about it at all.

So, reddit has been historically horrible about announcing things, about following through. They came out a while back and said, “Yes, we realized that a lot of people don’t know that we shadowban.” Shadowbanning, in case you don’t know, is where you do something that triggers reddit that makes you look like a spammer to reddit as a site. This is not subreddit. Subreddits have no power to shadowban. For the most part, they don’t. The reddit as a site as a whole can shadowban you. What that means is you can still submit content, you can still log in, you can still comment, and you can still vote. It’s just that only you see any of that. Your submissions, your votes, your comments, everything, nobody else sees them.

There are hundreds of stories on reddit that you can find where people are like, “Seven months later, I just thought nobody likes my comments. Then I found out I’m shadowbanned. For seven months I’ve been participating, writing long stories, writing huge things with comments, doing self-posts, completely only I can see it.” There’s a lot of complaints about that. There were so many complaints that reddit came out probably five years ago. It was like, “Oh, we’re going to get rid of shadowban. It was a bad idea.” It never went away.

It’s still in place today and how you check is you go log out of your account and go to your profile. If you’re shadowbanned, it will be a 404 page. You always have to do that. You always have to log out, check again. Your submissions get moderated, they show up invisible. You see it in the new section, you see it submitted, you see it on the page, nobody else does. You always have to log out whenever you do something and go check the subreddit and look in the new. “Is my submission there? No? Okay, I got to message the moderators and find out why am I being moderated,” because it’s all silent. Nobody sees it.

Wow. That’s crazy that they are so secretive about it. You can spend all this time, energy, and effort doing stuff that helps the communities there and you don’t even know that it’s not getting seen by anybody.

Yeah. I forget there was just the post a week ago that I was creating. It was on the front page of reddit. It was a thread and the guy found out, contacted reddit, and got unbanned. People are going through the history of his account, and this guy has been writing massive long comments. Well-thought out, really engaged comments and people were like, “Dude, this is so sad. This is weeks, if not months of somebody’s life, that they tried so hard to participate in this community, and were just completely invisible.” He didn’t even do anything wrong. He wasn’t a spammer. He was just a regular guy who got caught up in something. A ban for whatever reason and had no idea that it was even happening. I actually found that. I’ve been at conferences and have people come up and be like, “I just don’t seem to have any traction.” I’m like, “Let me see that. Yup, you’re banned.” They be like, “But I’ve done this for a year,” and I be like, “Sorry. Yup, that’s the way it works.” reddit has always been like this historically. I say this because I was in the office. I spent time. I used to live in San Francisco. I knew Alexis really decently. He would come over have tacos with me. We’d go have lunch. I knew him well enough that I had some insight into this and I helped them promote a bunch of stuff on Digg for reddit. I met Steve a couple of times and he just never liked me. I was an SEO there, I was evil, therefore, we just never really saw eye-to-eye.

They would create things. I remember times when I would submit something. It would be moderated, and this was something that was for reddit. I was actually doing it with people from reddit. I would say, “Hey, the post isn’t showing up.” They would go find it, fix it. I’ll be, “What happened?” They’re like, “We don’t know.” We had so many band-aid pieces of code, so many anti-spam mechanisms in place, that sometimes things would happen and they don’t even know why.

Now, it’s getting cleaned up a lot more because they’re redoing all the code. They’ve taken it, they’ve close-sourced it, and they’ve started rewriting a lot of it. So, some of the mechanisms that used to be in place are getting a little bit easier. But it used to be heavy-handed where 10 people could get banned just to suit one person who might be spammy. It happens a lot.

Let’s say that you’re not shadowbanned, you’ve built up a lot of post karma and hopefully comment karma as well because, as you said, that’s important – arguably maybe even more important. Let’s say that you do a submission and you’re aiming to get maximum visibility. Are you still aiming for the front page of reddit like back in the old days?

Absolutely. I would say 95% of all traffic on reddit is lurkers. It’s always been that way for these sites where you have to register and participate. People who want to comment and participate is a very small percentage. Let’s be super generous and say it’s 25%, which would be crazy high of active registered users. You’re still talking about ¾ of the visibility you’re going to get coming from people who are not logged in. People who are not logged in are going to see that front page of reddit maybe the first two pages, the top 50 pieces of content. Ultimately, that’s what you’re going for.

People that might be listening might say, “Oh, isn’t it just specific subreddits?” Yes, for many years, it started out when reddit created subreddits, they automatically subscribe everybody to the top 10. Then that was what made the reddit front page for people that were logged out. You got the top 10 subreddits. That evolved to 20, 25, 30, 40, and then even to 50. At one point there were 50 subreddits that if you weren’t in these 50 subreddits, then you would not be shown to people that are logged out, unless they were searching unless they were going to those specific subreddits, they wouldn’t hit the front page for people that were logged out.

Now, I want to say within the last two years, they’ve gone away from that. Now, any subreddit at all has the opportunity for hitting the front page. But if you only have a subreddit that only has 1000 members, you’ll never be going to get the number of votes you need in that subreddit to hit the front page of reddit. It’s going to require you to be in a subreddit that’s generally pretty large and pretty active. If you go, again, these open-source tools out there—there’s quite a few tools—that you can search for, that will tell you the subreddits that are hitting the front page. There’s a whole analysis on which subreddit hit the front page and how often, and you can start to determine which subreddit you should look into.

Again, no matter what research you do, don’t force a square peg into a circle hole. You really have to find the subreddit that matches what you’re trying to accomplish. Don’t find the subreddit that’s like, “This is the one but they don’t accept URL submissions,” so you’re going to drop URLs in the comments the whole day. You’re just going to get banned.

The whole point of not having URL submissions, they don’t want people putting URLs in there. If you just go and put them in as comments or try to circumvent their system, it only takes them a couple of days to figure it out and they’re going to ban you and then you’re down forever.

So, just be smart and approach it from a clean way, but absolutely you can go in and use these tools to figure out what subreddits are on the front page. Also, really focus on the return. Sometimes, being on the front page is great when you want a lot of exposure, possible links in traffic and stuff, but if you’re looking for users to come test your app, then you want targeted users. You really want to get to a certain area. If you’re looking for specific information or specific engagement, sometimes it’s better to be in a smaller subreddits.

Alright, cool. Would you say that there’s a minimum amount of post karma that you would need in order to have a shot at hitting the front page?

It really has nothing to do with post karma for hitting the front page. The only thing that post and comment karma are going to do for you is two things. One, it is going to allow you to get past any restrictions and that is only going to require you to have an account that’s 30 days old and maybe half a thousand karma, which is super easy to get. It’s nothing that’s monumental. Nothing you have to work hard for.

The second thing that it does and this is more important, there are moderators. They’re going to say, “Huh, this looks a little suspicious.” They’re going to go look. If they look and they see that you have a crap account essentially, if you don’t really participate, then they’re going to be more likely to take an action against you. It might not be a big action. It might just be, “Remove this from the subreddit.” That happens a lot. Somebody hits the front page of reddit, it is there for 30 minutes, and all of a sudden the post disappears. Somebody looked at it and said, “This isn’t really what I wanted to be up here,” and they remove it. And they have the right to do that. they run their own subreddits.

It really gives you that sense of somebody looking at that and saying, “Oh, this person’s a moderator of four different pretty decent subreddits. They’re a gold member. They have the reddit Gold Boost,” or I think they call it Premium now. “They’re a premium member. They’ve been around for three years. They have 20,000 or 30,000 karma in comments and in posts. This is more a legit redditor. I’m going to give this person the benefit of the doubt.” That’s really what your karma is doing is it’s helping you look and feel legitimate so that you get the benefit of the doubt.

But you can absolutely go in with age. The brand new account that has 200 karma, it’s 30 days old, submit to a subreddit, hit the front page up reddit and win the whole game with nothing more than a pretty small account.

Win the internet for the day.

Yeah. It can do a lot. Hitting the front page of reddit still drives probably 100,000–250,000 visits in a day, it’s still going to get you a lot of links, it’s still going to get you a ton of exposure, it’s still a big deal. I don’t think that’s going to change. I think it will continue to be a big deal.

And how often do you hit the front page?

Right now, we’re doing a lot less. We’re doing more testing than promotions. But I would say about six months ago, we would run it pretty heavily with a couple of publishers doing probably about four promotions a day. We were hitting it at least once a day.

That’s impressive.

Sometimes, two times a day. Sometimes, we have a day where we don’t get anything, but I would say we had probably about 20%–25% success ratio. Right now, we kind of adjusted what we’re doing. We’re really focusing on doing some more testing and what we’re really trying right now is to legitimize reddit-branded accounts. We’re doing a ton of testing with brands. Building branded accounts, building branded subreddits, building up the dialog, giving people reddit gold, engaging, running contests. We’re really trying to establish what it looks like for a legitimate brand to build a brand presence and have success.

We’ve had some success. We had some really good success with a couple of campaigns. But it’s not consistent. The ones that have success are the ones that people who know the brand. We’re trying to figure out how to take a brand that’s not as well known and get followers on their profile, get followers on their subreddit organically. That’s a bit of a challenge right now because those features and those functions are not very well-announced. Not a lot of people use them because they’re not packaged in the way they’re usable for most people. That’s really what we’re focused on right now, so we’ve been doing a lot less publishing promotions lately.

One of the requirements to have a branded presence on reddit is to be a brand redditors already love. Click To Tweet

Can you share an example of a reddit-branded presence?

Sure. I’ll give you a fun one. This one I have permission to talk about. Have you heard of the app TikTok?

I have.

TikTok, about six months ago, started massively advertising on YouTube. Massively. You couldn’t get away from TikTok on YouTube. The problem was they were really cringey. They were really bad. The ads were just these really random things and a lot of people started getting upset. People started getting mad about the fact that the ads would have some 14-year old girl that was in a lingerie dress or some of these things have people were like, “Ugh.” There are some cultural things here that don’t really jive so well with the US audience.

It’s a Chinese company they were just running for users. They’re doing what they think they need to do to get a lot of users. They have a lot of budget. It caused a big problem for their branding, especially on reddit, where people just got annoyed really quick. I was not aware of this story. I knew what TikTok was. I knew what reddit was. I was not aware of how much hatred there was for that app on reddit, particularly.

TikTok, through another company, approached us to work on a campaign to help them get more exposure. They wanted to get on reddit and get some exposure. We came up with a lot of what we thought were really cool ads and we submitted them to reddit. We did the reddit ads to the ad system as well as doing some customer engagement and just, in general, participating as a brand. Within five minutes, I have 300–500 comments that were all along the lines of, “You are a cancer and I want you to die.” “Go die in the closet.” “I hope you fall down and die.” It was pretty much a lot about me dying, me being TikTok. We had a really big issue right off the bat with that campaign. We quickly realized this is probably one of the most hated reactions to a campaign we have ever had.

I was borderline. I’m not a believer in cutting and running from reddit. It never ever works out good. No matter what the situation is, you just have to engage it, talk through it, not be defensive, engage with people. I just started having fun with it and I started posting little comments back to people. Somebody was like, “Get off of reddit. Go to YouTube,” and I was like, “I heard they have a lot of TikTok ads, smiley face.” Somebody wrote a whole paragraph on why TikTok was the worst app ever and I bought them reddit gold. I gave them a platinum award on their comment and they were like, “Did you just buy me platinum for tearing you apart?” and I said, “We truly appreciate the feedback.”

I started gathering all the feedback and all the “these are the spam accounts that are spamming. These are the ones that are breaking the rules.” I took all that and I sent it back to TikTok, but I spent two days pretty much non-stop engaging. After about the first couple of hours, people started responding, “Yeah, I’m sorry I was really harsh earlier. I shouldn’t have been so harsh. You’re just a person. You guys are just doing your job.” All of a sudden, people started apologizing, I started getting platinum and gold awards on the ads themselves. I started getting awards on my comments.

By the second day, I had numerous messages with people who were like, “Here’s how you could do your ads better.” “Here’s the subreddits you could have success.” “Why don’t you partner with PewDiePie and do some stuff with his videos since he’s the one who’s really helping you guys get so much exposure?” By the end of the second day, our counts had something like 2000 or 3000 karma on the TikTok-branded account. We had a bunch of awards on ads which I never saw in the history of running ads before and see awards and stuff, and we were able to turn the brand around pretty good within about 48 hours. So, that’s one example of a recent campaign that we did. It started out a little rough but turned out pretty good.

That is awesome. Very well done. For our listeners who don’t really understand reddit gold and platinum, could you just really briefly explain what the value is for a redditor to get that?

Sure. Alexis Ohanian, the founder of reddit, at one point said, “What really gold is, is like a virtual six-pack of beer.” reddit has, I think for $5 a month, you can buy a premium account. It doesn’t do much. It allows your comments to have a different color. It allows you to eliminate the ads from the site. You are allowed into one of these subreddits called Lounge and it’s only for premium members. It’s just a couple of features that you get for being a premium. It’s not about the features. It’s about supporting the site, paying for some of the servers and stuff like that. Helping them out.

People started out with reddit gold and it became something where they were like, “Well, what if we just want to give somebody a kudos?” like, “Hey, good job.” You could spend a dollar and you could send somebody a regular award. I think it’s a silver award or something like that. I can’t remember now. It’s gold and platinum but I think it’s silver. Then you can give them gold, which gives them seven days of premium features and then you have platinum, which gives them one month and 800 coins that they can then turn around and use to buy other people awards with.

It’s basically just a way of telling somebody that they’re doing a good job, you like what they’re doing, your comment was good, your submission was good. It’s just a virtual six-pack that says, “Good job. Here’s a six-pack of beer.”

That’s great. Let’s say that you created a branded presence at reddit, you want to advertise and get this kind of positive engagement, what should you be prepared to spend in ad budget? How does this all work with the whole ad site of it?

I’m going to be very honest. reddit is constantly trying to send me information about their new ad system. I’m not a big fan of the ad system. I know a couple of people that have good luck with it, but I don’t approach it like an advertising system. The way I tell people to approach it is like a boost system. You’re using it to amplify a post that would already do well.

Let me give you some examples of why. reddit really doesn’t understand their own system. They need to push an ad system for brands that are used to paying for stuff off of Facebook and AdWords. You go there, you say, “Hey, I don’t want to pick every site that I’m running my AdWords on it. I just want to pick some keywords and I want it to be on every site, where I want it to be on all of these searches. Facebook’s like, “I want this big pool of people with these demographics.”

The problem with reddit is they’re trying to do the same thing. Let me give you an example of how that works. Let’s say you have 10 different subreddits that are really popular about automotive. Each one of them has different rules. Some of them are like, “No pictures.” Some of them are like, “No details about the car.” Some of them are like, “Have to be your own picture of your own car.” You have different rules in every single one of these subreddits. Some of them might be like, “We hate Ferraris,” and the others are like, “We love Ferraris.” you can figure out that this whole entire group of people’s against a type of car, and this whole group of people is for a type of car. reddit will tell you because the way it’s packaged and all, and I think they’re making improvements on this.

In reddit’s defense, I have heard they’re hiring some people that better understand and are taking a little bit more time and they’re doing better about it. But what they’ll do is they’ll say, “Hey, you can go target automotive.” Well, that doesn’t help you because when you run an ad for Ferraris, the people that want to see only the hobbyist cars are like, “What the hell? This is not supposed to be here.” The people who hate Ferraris in their group are getting a Ferrari ad, that’s not going to go well.

You really have to be careful using it as an ad system. However, you’re doing boosted post. If you’re doing something like, “I have a contest,” or, “We’re looking for feedback,” or, “We just launched this new feature and we want to know what you think,” or, “We’re showing you the very first commercial for this.” If you go in and find an Avengers subreddit, you are working on the Avengers: Endgame movie, and you come in and say, “We have a special exclusive trailer just for you guys,” and you pay the ad system for that one subreddit, it’s going to do really well.

But if you go and just try to sell something across all of reddit, and you start using the categories and you try to run it like it was PPC, like a traditional ad campaign, we have found that it just really doesn’t perform as well. There are some exceptions to that, again, like some of them are fake, being in the industry that’s really well, and some of the industry is really targeting.

If you are going to do ads, do not use these all-encompassing categories. Go in, find the subreddit that you want to advertise to, maybe you find 10, read the subreddit rules. Think, if I was going to do an organic post for this subreddit on this topic, how would I write it up? To follow their rules, to use the language that they use to touch on the topics that they care about, how would I write that up? Write that up specifically for the subreddit and then do the paid ad, so that you’re just boosting it instead of trying to run an ad.

Go it. Now, what would a contest look like if you’re just doing that organically within reddit or you are boosting that contest, get some more visibility through the ads platform?

It’s the same thing. You were talking about budgets earlier. You can spend anything from a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand dollars. reddit will actually help you, I think for $30,000 monthly spend, you can work with somebody at reddit and they’ll help you do the campaigns and so forth. Budgets are all across. It really is across the board. Depending on the subreddit, $100 might go a long way or it could go nowhere. It just depends.

What are you going to do with contests? Again, it comes with the subreddits. Toyota came in and did something with Amazon, when Toyota was selling their first model of the new car, it was to be sold through Amazon. They came in and did a whole campaign where they were like, “Hey, tell us the number one thing you want on Amazon and we’ll buy it for you.”

It was basic. Everybody was posting what they wanted from Amazon, little different products and as long as it’s within reason, they would go in, contacted them, buying them the product, and sending it to them. Then everybody was posting the product which ones to take out of, they were talking about it. So, they’ve got months of conversation from this one campaign that they did. Another one would be, “Hey, go check out our app, finish watching it, tell us your favorite part, and we’ll enter you to win a contest.” Any of the contest ideas that work in general will work on reddit.

What I found and what I think really is probably the best right now is that reddit is pretty well-known for doing Photoshop and there is a ton of people who are super happy in creating memes or creating Photoshop stuff. If you were to go in and say, “Turn this into a meme. The funniest one wins.” “Photoshop this. The funniest one wins,” those types of things are very in-tune and I’ll tell you what. One way you can tell if it’s in-tune is reddit will actually run its own contest on reddit, and they always do Photoshop contests. reddit is a big photoshopping meme-creation kind of audience and I think that is a really great way to start as far as a contest on reddit.

Some of these viral things are pretty funny like some person innocently posts to reddit like, “Hey, can you photoshop out my ex-boyfriend out of the photo?” and then the submissions that come back are absolutely hilarious.

It’s 25 cows have been added in. There’s a whole thing of doing it the worst way possible. It’s like put a big black square over… oh, there you go. It’s photoshopped now.” Then you say, “Wait,” and have it show like it’s supposed to look. The ad’s fun. There’s a lot of memes that come out. Sometimes, those actually turn into internet memes. They take off and they become real memes.

Yeah and that’s great. There’s this sister site that’s not owned by reddit but a lot of these images end up there and that’s Imgur.

Imgur was actually created by a redditor. I had a big problem with Imgur when it first came out. I thought it was hypocritical. At the time, the servers would go down from too much traffic and they made Imgur. They were like, “Look, it has no ads. It has nothing. It’s just image hosting.” Everybody was like, “Okay, you have to use Imgur.” Then of course, basically people started stealing content. That was the whole thing. You’re not supposed to steal content and submit it to reddit but Imgur was like, “If you want to submit this image, you have to have to have it at Imgur.” So, you have to go steal the image from somebody’s site, put it on Imgur, and then submit it.

Then a couple of months later, Imgur was like, “Well, our server bills are high. We need to add advertisements to our site in order to pay server bills. So, we’re going to add ads to the site.” Now, everybody’s stealing content, putting it on Imgur, and then Imgur’s making money from it. It was totally hypocritical, but nobody cared because it was created by a redditor. I actually wrote a whole post about Imgur on my blog a long time ago about the hypocrisy of the whole Imgur thing.

Gfycat is another one. Gfycat right now is where all the GIFs are going. Very similar to Imgur. If you’re looking, a lot of the subreddits will only allow Gfycat to be used.

And then there’s for animated GIFs, isn’t it just Giphy?

The subreddits can dictate which they use. Your best bet is to go for what is being used there. In Gfycat if you submit your GIF to Gfycat from the source URL on your site, it will actually put a source link site back to your site on Gfycat page, which is a great way to get some sort of credit for the image that you’re going to promote on reddit.

There are ways to play with a lot of these things and get some value out of them, but I would really look at the subreddit and look at what is the predominant hosting source for that media.

Awesome. Do you have time for one more question about AMAs?

Absolutely.

Okay. Ask Me Anything really took off on reddit. reddit really made the AMA a thing. We even had presidents do AMAs. What would be some best practices and some big no-nos for doing an AMA?

You have to remember, AMAs are about the interest factor. It’s not about who it is. It’s about the interest factor. The biggest AMAs today, you might have been dwarfed now by Obama, Bill Gates, and some of the other ones. But a lot of some of the biggest AMAs today are no names. Somebody who’s a vacuum repair guy who’s just answering questions or somebody who work at this specific job.

First and foremost, you need a topic of interest. You can have an AMA in any subreddit, but ‘I Am A’ is the main one. That’s the one with millions and millions of followers. That’s the one that people are talking about when you get on reddit for a major AMA. But you can have great successes on some of the subreddits as well. You can go to any subreddit, tips and tricks, have something of interest. It’s always good if people are asking for some AMA.

This is how an AMA starts. People would start asking questions and we get a lot of information, somebody sees it, being a wealth of knowledge, and they would say, “Hey, you know? You should go and do a thread and answer all these questions. You should do an AMA.” And that’s where a lot of this stuff kicked off. It’s always effective. I don’t want to tell people to game the system, but it’s always effective if you can read between the lines and say, “People are requesting that you do an AMA. It opens the gate for you saying, “Hey, I was requested to do an AMA.” If you can get requested, that’s a great way of doing that and I’m sure people are smart enough to figure out what who’s doing that.

On top of that, have a topic of interest and not just to go in blind. If you look at a lot of the big AMAs, AMAs are self-posts, you’re going in and you’re going to type in. But if you look at Bill Gates when he comes on, he doesn’t say, “I’m Bill Gates. Ask me anything.” He says, “I’m Bill Gates. We just launched this new program. It’s doing really well. Ask me anything.” He’s setting the stage to say, “I really want you to ask questions about this program. I really want to talk about this program.”

You should go in and set the standard for what you’re looking to gear people towards. It doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to ask you off-topic questions, but the more you can set it up, talk about the interest point that you want to share, the more that interest point relates to something people truly want to know about, you’re going to have a lot more success. So, only go for ‘I Am A,’ the big one if you have somebody who’s notable. Those are so oversaturated with major people that you need to go find the celebrity.

A friend of mine actually did this. I won’t say who and where because I don’t know if he wants it public, but I talked to him about this and he works in the sports industry. He went and got football quarterbacks. These people were able to come in and give ‘I Am A’ AMAs in the main category because they have the number one quarterback whatever team at that moment. They were able to get some big names. If you can do that, that’s a great way of getting in and doing a big AMA. Otherwise, I’d look at some subreddits and I’d look at ways to build with us so you can talk about it.

AMAs are set-up in advance, so you’ll have a time and a date and a sticky and people start putting questions well in advance. The idea is those questions are voted on. The top questions float up to the top so that whoever the guest is can answer the most important question first. A lot of people think I’m going to come in and do this for an hour or two. You really need to dedicate probably 36 hours to an AMA. It doesn’t need to be just the main person but you should have some admins and some people watching.

If you're a fan of anything, you can get some really great information from reddit. Click To Tweet

A lot of times, somebody will say, “Okay, well I’m out,” and all of a sudden people are like, “Well, there are three questions you ignored,” and these are clearly edgy questions or questions that you want to dodge. Then people can take the conversation nonetheless. I highly suggest monitoring the entire 36-hour period. It could be visible. I would highly suggest coming in and answering all the questions, even the controversial ones. Do not run from any question. As soon as you do that, it’s all everybody is going to focus on. It is, “Why are you not answering this one?” and that could be very detrimental.

Know your skeletons before you come into an AMA and be prepared to address them. If you have skeletons that are so bad you can’t address them, then do not do any interview anywhere in the world because that’s what they’re going to ask you. So, pretty common sense approach to doing an interview. Be prepared, have people that are charismatic but know the information to be involved in the project, spend some time reading some AMAs, get a sense of how people talk. Do not be arrogant or dismissive or people will take it very seriously. I see AMAs go south all the time by somebody who gives one-word answers or starts being arrogant or starts getting an attitude. That’s not going to work on reddit.

So, really take it seriously and be professional. If you are of importance and you do go on doing an AMA, the news will pick up on it. A lot of AMAs get newsworthy because somebody says something in the AMA and that was basically been released, so some of the big companies will do AMAs to release new updates or new information.

One of the worst examples of an AMA gone horribly wrong, it apparently was Woody Harrelson’s AMA that promotes his role in Rampart.

There’s a lot of them. I forget who it was. There was another hip-hop artist or something came out and people were like, “How does it work with all the people in your offices in Africa being raped on a daily basis?” or something like being assaulted and like, “How do you sleep at night?” Things went really bad really quick.

Great examples are like REI, the outdoors company. They came on and did one. Employees started tearing the company apart, saying like, “You guys are forcing us to sell these membership programs. We’re having to go through all this crap and blah-blah-blah.” They were really talking about all these issues. Instead of running from it, they were like, “Look, we didn’t realize this was such a big deal to our employees. We hear you. We’re going to call an emergency board meeting tomorrow, we’re going to sit down and address this, and we will come back and update you. They went, they did this, they came back, changed some of their policies, ended up turning a negative situation into a relatively positive one, by just not running but embracing it.

I’ve seen companies really failed but mostly because they did not prepare themselves, they didn’t realize what they were getting into, and they tried to run away from the problem instead of addressing it. If you don’t do that, then you’re pretty much to deal with.

We’re out of time but thank you so much for sharing so much wisdom and experience with the reddit platform. It’s a great opportunity, even just to play with it and learn how it works. It really is the front page of the internet. You all should really dig in and get some real-world understanding of it by playing with it.

Now, if somebody wanted to work with you and your team to help with reddit or other social media platforms, what would be the best way to get in touch?

brentcsutoras.com is my website. You can contact me through there. My email is my first name at my last name dot com. You can email me there as well. That’s pretty much it. Definitely, I’m always open to the conversation. I pretty much only work with people that I feel like I can actually help you, so if I can’t, I’ll tell you what you need to do on your own, but yeah, absolutely welcome to reach out if you like.

All right. Thank you so much, Brent. Thank you, listeners. Have fun with reddit and we’ll catch you on the next episode of Marketing Speak.

Important Links:

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

☑ Get creative with marketing. I can save thousands of dollars by thinking outside the box and pursuing ideas other than traditional online and offline advertising.
☑ Look into reddit and determine whether the platform is a good fit for what I am promoting. Take note that reddit is a community-centered site that is all about creating authentic conversations and engagement.
☑ Consider creating several different reddit accounts for various purposes. Each account must maintain a particular brand or persona that is cohesive with what I’m promoting.
☑ Find the subreddits that suit my brand so that I can join in on conversations or start my own topic that can create interest and traffic by itself.
☑ Utilize redditinvestigator.com so that I can acquire some useful information about moderators on the subreddits I am involved in. Having good connections can help me become more visible on the platform.
☑ Be careful not to get my domains banned by making sure I adhere to reddit’s terms of agreement. Read each subreddits’ set of rules as well and make sure that I follow them.
☑ Comment on as many topics/questions as I can on reddit to stay relevant and active.
☑ Give out reddit gold or platinum to users who leave good comments as a sign of appreciation.
☑ Run a mix of tests, paid ads and organic marketing so that I know what performs well on reddit.
☑ Check out Brent Csutoras’ website to learn more about reddit marketing.

About Brent Csutoras

Digital Marketing Consultant at Brent Csutoras, LLC and Managing Partner at Search Engine Journal, one of the top Digital Marketing publications online.

Speaker at many of the top marketing conferences, such as Pubcon, Affiliate Summit, SMX, SMX Advanced, State of Search, SES, Ungagged, SEOktoberfest, and more.

Over 13 years experience in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing, and an avid Futurist, focusing on the implications of future technology on society and societal growth.