Starting a Reddit Farm

Couple of updates today.

Firstly, if you want to see insane amounts of cognitive dissonance at work - post something on Reddit. Post what they want to read, regardless of the actual content and the people arguing against it get themselves downvoted.

Secondly, I had a post with 3x the number of upvotes compared to actual visitors. That's a new one. It was an informational piece so it's not like there's even an opinion to agree on or anything but hundreds of people upvoted it without reading. Not sure what to make of that.

Still astounded a mod kicked off my link because of one affiliate link in great content and a ton of legit backlinks. So I ran a test. Posted a very low effort curation piece with 9 (yes, 9) banners. Absolutely fine. Adblock wouldn't have picked them up and this thing provided so little quality to the sub... but it doesn't get pulled.

You could say it's luck if the mod happens to see it or not but I've had much less blatant affiliate links in the text and commenters called it out for having an affiliate link. Throw a bunch of big aggressive banners and iFrames around in different subs and nobody says anything.

People say Redditors are too smart to be marketed to. I'm starting to disagree.

Spend time making good quality content and add a single subtle link and these clever Reddit users complain about marketing. Blast a ton of subreddits with pretty crappy content and smother it in ads and they'll upvote it. Because herp derp.
 
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Cognitive dissonance also backfires when you share great content that they disagree with. I've never seen anything get downvoted so fast. If your goal is traffic - agree with them. Even if they're wrong or the controversial content is great - just agree with them.

Some subs will have an issue with you posting in them every day. Doesn't matter if you're also posting other sources and the sub likes your content. A prerequisite to being a mod is a lobotomy to remove any logic or reasoning. This isn't an issue when you're not worried about the SEO value of a single domain, however. Rotate between them - just use different layouts so it's not immediately obvious. If the farm gets blocked it'll automatically rotate to the next one but it hasn't been much of an issue so far.

Having blatantly annoying ads are still working better than trying to drop a subtle affiliate link in the text. Don't try and be smart about it. They're apparently so used to being bombarded with ads you can be way more annoying with a pile of them. The page can be covered with 9 banners. Banners can take up way more space than the actual content, but that's fine, there's no affiliate link in the text so all is well.

Redditor logic astounds me.

I've been busy getting another project off the ground but the farms been churning away building up. I've got a couple of new tests today I want to try out but I really need the farm built up so I can experiment on a bigger scale.
 
everr thought about that they might using an adblocker and they don't see the ads?
 
I tried something once once that may help to get your affiliate links through....
so lets say your going to post content with a total of 7 links, 1 of them is your affiliate link. Lets say the affiliate link is link number 6 of 7.. This assumes you control an alternate web asset that you can link to that is inline with the context of the article, and that you are redirecting your affiliate link.
Lets say our subject is cars. The content of the article is car washes. Within the content your links are as follows:

1. link to other obscure car site.
2. legit link to your other site about cars
3. link to Wikipedia
4. legit link to your other site about cars
5. legit link to your other site about cars
6. your affiliate link
7. link to other obscure car site.

The people who are hunting down the affiliate links don't just randomly click on links.. They click the last, or, start from the beginning and click through the links they are not familiar with (usually), as well, they click through those links pretty quickly...like less than 20 seconds for between links... So, spy on them, like they spy on you. if you get a hit from the same IP, on links 2,4,5 in that order, if that same IP hits your affiliate redirect, in under 120 seconds, 302 to a non affiliate link, or throw a 404 ... check to make sure that the IP is not from a mobile carrier ASN, and log that IP. Most ISPs don't rotate IP's every months so if you see that pattern twice without random clicks inside of a week, its likely a link hunter....

Obviously this takes some creative planning...but if conversions revenue is greater than your ad revenue by enough to justify aligning a couple planets....
 
One of the subs I'm testing in has a weird and repeatable behaviour. Links can get over 1k upvotes (99.999% of them NOT from the farm) and hundreds of comments... but the traffic is a third of that. It's not like the title has any kind of opinion which you could just agree with. Either my analytics is on the blink or people are just so determined to agree with their herd.

It's not like the titles aren't appealing and even if that was the issue - why the hell would people upvote. It's weird.

On the flip side, smaller subs can get a few dozen upvotes and send a thousand views in a couple of hours.

The banner CTR is (unsurprisingly) lower than a call to action in the text. They'll take some split testing but I have another idea on getting a call to action back there and I'm trying out some new lead gen ideas.

ScrapeActive said:
I tried something once once that may help to get your affiliate links through....
so lets say your going to post content with a total of 7 links, 1 of them is your affiliate link. Lets say the affiliate link is link number 6 of 7.. This assumes you control an alternate web asset that you can link to that is inline with the context of the article, and that you are redirecting your affiliate link.
Lets say our subject is cars. The content of the article is car washes. Within the content your links are as follows:

1. link to other obscure car site.
2. legit link to your other site about cars
3. link to Wikipedia
4. legit link to your other site about cars
5. legit link to your other site about cars
6. your affiliate link
7. link to other obscure car site.

The people who are hunting down the affiliate links don't just randomly click on links.. They click the last, or, start from the beginning and click through the links they are not familiar with (usually), as well, they click through those links pretty quickly...like less than 20 seconds for between links... So, spy on them, like they spy on you. if you get a hit from the same IP, on links 2,4,5 in that order, if that same IP hits your affiliate redirect, in under 120 seconds, 302 to a non affiliate link, or throw a 404 ... check to make sure that the IP is not from a mobile carrier ASN, and log that IP. Most ISPs don't rotate IP's every months so if you see that pattern twice without random clicks inside of a week, its likely a link hunter....

Obviously this takes some creative planning...but if conversions revenue is greater than your ad revenue by enough to justify aligning a couple planets....
Click to expand...

Appreciate the suggestion but I'm so not going to do that. It'd be a lot of work for a questionable result and likely result a lower click through than just using banners.
 
SEOMadHatter said:
One of the subs I'm testing in has a weird and repeatable behaviour. Links can get over 1k upvotes (99.999% of them NOT from the farm) and hundreds of comments... but the traffic is a third of that..
Click to expand...
When you say traffic,do you mean traffic to the sub? or traffic to the link?
if to the link, Where are you getting your traffic metrics? GA, webserver logs? monitoring service?
also, is there any reason to to believe that the sub is more commonly read on a specific device type?





SEOMadHatter said:
Appreciate the suggestion but I'm so not going to do that. It'd be a lot of work for a questionable result and likely result a lower click through than just using banners.
Click to expand...
No worries, just a method of identifying affiliate link hunters by IP address., one overkill implementation can provide a layer of protection for all of your other subs that moderator may read.
 
This is really interesting journey thread. I especially like the last few posts about what type of content does well and what doesn't. Does the affiliate link get spotted in your article because it has something like "?ref=yourrefname" in the url or have you also tried doing a "yoursite.com/product" that 301 redirects to the aff offer?
 
ScrapeActive said:
When you say traffic,do you mean traffic to the sub? or traffic to the link?
if to the link, Where are you getting your traffic metrics? GA, webserver logs? monitoring service?
also, is there any reason to to believe that the sub is more commonly read on a specific device type?
Click to expand...

Traffic to the link itself. The sub isn't especially technical but Reddit in general probably is compared to most of my traffic sources so it might be worth digging into the webserver logs vs the analytics. There's always going to be a discrepancy there when the analytics try and discount bots but it might be there's more traffic there just blocking the script.

I guess at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. Free traffic is free traffic. Would be nice to know they're not just agreeing with things they don't read, though Reddit has sadly said people do this all the time.

Fenix19 said:
How much upvotes by you are enough to get you to frontpage of subreddit?
Click to expand...

There's no real answer to this. Depends on the sub, the accounts, the amount of other new posts and especially the content. A small sub with good content, yeah 5 upvotes is enough to get the ball rolling but it really depends. The farm mixes up the count and can push a little harder if the initial ones don't get it done the first time.

karupoiss said:
This is really interesting journey thread. I especially like the last few posts about what type of content does well and what doesn't. Does the affiliate link get spotted in your article because it has something like "?ref=yourrefname" in the url or have you also tried doing a "yoursite.com/product" that 301 redirects to the aff offer?
Click to expand...

It'll always depend on the individual mod. They don't have set rules of what an URL looks like and think of it this way: If I start dropping a masked link in this thread to Reddit Blaster 9000 (not a real thing) you're obviously going to know I'm either the affiliate or the vendor.

Depending on what you're promoting you could try and be subtle about it and slide it into the conversation but anything with a clear call to action is going to stick out if that's what they're looking for - no matter what the URL looks like. In some subs, you'll get away with a clear call to action. You won't really know for sure unless you either ask the mods or post until you see your links removed/banned.
 
Thanks for the answer. Are they in general aware of clickbank products promoting or do they in general suspect they are being advertised all the time?
 
What proxy service do you use? I noticed that my upvotes doesnt seem to stick anymore after like 10 votes from one proxy service.
 
karupoiss said:
Thanks for the answer. Are they in general aware of clickbank products promoting or do they in general suspect they are being advertised all the time?
Click to expand...

It'll be mod dependant. Most probably won't know (or care) what Clickbank is but if another marketer has posted to that sub they might recognise the product.

It's the same as the link structure. It won't matter what the link or product looks like if you're promoting it then it's a safe bet there's a financial incentive for you to do so. An obscure link without a good call to action mixed in with a bunch of other links might pass but it would also defeat the entire purpose.

Personally I plan to use a good call to action. If I'm not spamming a sub and able to provide good content then I think it'll be fine for the most part. If a mod decides to get pissy about it then absurd amounts of banners it is.

gamera666 said:
What proxy service do you use? I noticed that my upvotes doesnt seem to stick anymore after like 10 votes from one proxy service.
Click to expand...

I have a bunch of different types of proxies for different projects but I can't tell you exactly which ones obviously. I don't want you botting on the same ranges I'm on. Haven't seen an issue yet but I'll keep my eye out.
 
Making some big changes to the karma farming setup to speed things along a bit and provide some better value to the subs along the way. Had not one but two subreddit mods thank the bot so that's probably a good sign.

Tweaking the system a bit and ranked in the biggest sub yet. Pushed a Facebook page post which ended up getting a couple of hundred shares on Facebook itself so that was a nice boost to the page.
 
A couple of updates for today.

First of all, I watched the results of a different network of accounts. Apparently, this would have worked before Reddit's last update but now it resulted in 89% of the accounts being wiped out. So that's fun. Reddit definitely doesn't like you taking the piss.

This project has been unaffected so far. Hopefully, it stays that way.

Finished the karma scaling. Two messages of thanks from mods and another sub pinned my link to the top. That's probably a good sign. Going to let it run for a while and reevaluate how much more to add.

Reddit seems like a great place to build up something like a YouTube channel or IG/Facebook account. I've had a steady stream of shares and some decent growth from a small scale test so far. This or lead captures would make me feel better about the one time traffic if I'm going to work on the content I want to at least try to build something at the same time.

The main part I'm currently working on is scaling. If I know I can get traffic from a sub (and ideally build something up with it) then I want to be able to post to that sub at least on a semi-regular basis.
 
I've had a busy two weeks working on some other things so not much new here.

You can absolutely consistently get traffic from Reddit and it's a nice change of pace from SEO. If I put a piece of content together just now I'll have eyeballs on it within the hour. I'm going to put together a proper case study in a week or so after I've got some things off my plate.
 
How long does a post get you traffic ?
Wont it go down as time progresses.. unlike SEO which is much less active posting ?
 
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