[METHOD] Consistently Getting To The Front Page Of Reddit

Since lock down happened, I've been playing with a few fun ways to generate traffic. I don't have an Adsense account, so I haven't been trying to earn money - just grab as much traffic as I can!

Anyway, I kinda stumbled on Reddit a few years ago. I've always spotted the same websites getting to the front page of /r/popular - so I wanted to see if I could achieve this too.

First a bunch of exciting stats

Since I started actively pushing content to Reddit, I've managed to trend on popular 28 times. Oddly enough, I'm getting better at predicting a trending piece of content too - there are signs that you learn to spot when a post is about to go huge! Anyway, here are some stats I pulled from my Reddit account and Google Analytics.

• A trending post should breeze past 50,000 hits in a day. By the time a post is finished, it's usually much, much higher depending on the subreddit it comes from.
• Max hits at any one time within Google Analytics is usually 1000 - 2000 people. Oddly, this doesn't happen for very long - the typical number of people at any one time during a hug of death is about 300-600.
• Number of up votes can vary wildly! IMHO it normally takes a few thousand (and hundreds of comments too) in the first 4 hours of a posts life for it to be a contender.

The process I started to formulate

In the early days, I really didn't know what I was doing! My first front page caught me off guard because I didn't know what signs to watch our for. I also made silly mistakes like annoying moderators and getting v&nned from certain subreddits. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes!

Anyway, here's what you need to get started. This is 100% not a quick project, getting good aged accounts will take time unless you buy them. Even if you do buy them, moderators are quick to spot such accounts and will ban you!

• You need an aged account. As you progress you'll want more, but one good quality account with some karma and age is worth a million new accounts! Some subreddits won't allow you to post until your account has some age and karma anyway. Easiest and cheapest way is to simply set them up yourself.
• IP address is not nearly as important as you think. If you have less than 5 decent accounts, you can do this off one IP - just be sure to avoid overt spamming. If you expand, you'll begin to need a VPN/Proxy/Virtual Machine implementation of some sort.
• You can obtain karma easy. The best way is to find a subreddit for a hobby you know lots about. Reply to some posts with meaningful content for a few weeks and you'll soon get your stats up.
• You need a blog/website. Ideally you want some decent hosting and also W3 Cache installed. When the hug of death comes, your site needs to be able to cope with demand.
• Not gonna talk much about WordPress, pick a news theme and pretty it up a bit - simple!

Now you have some aged accounts and a good website, here's my current process.

• The best subreddits to post to, have about 2500+ people online at any one time. You also want to discover subreddits that thrive on posted external content and also ones that have a user base that will actively up vote stuff.
• The best time to post content, is about 2pm GMT - IMHO this is the time when certain parts of America are starting to get into work and most of Europe are awake already.
• I try to schedule a number of different content pieces for that magic 2pm time slot. I will pick my favourite subreddits and posts manually in turn - it's about half an hours work.

How to get new content.

• Reddit is a weird place, some types of obvious click bait will be killed off - yet other types will nail that front page spot within 6 hours.
• Spend some time on /r/frontpage. Seriously, there's no better research than looking yourself. If you read between the lines you soon learn to spot good subreddits and themes to post about.
• Reposts and fake stories work perfectly, a small percentage of Reddit types will call BS - yet by the time your content is on the way to trending they get completely drowned out.
• Posts that get people angry or happy work best. Content that's "middle of the road" will normally wither and die. You have to be extreme one way or the other!

How to spot a trending post.

There are a couple of things IMHO that need to happen during the life cycle of a front page post.

• 15 minutes, your post needs to start getting a handful of up votes and comments. As you gain experience posting to certain subreddits, you'll learn when a post is performing well early on.
• Up to 1 hour, not much will happen. Your post will gain up votes and comments at a steady pace. You should begin to notice your content trending well by clicking the "rising" tab within your subreddit.
• After 1 hour, up vote numbers become public. Your post should now be starting to trend (and be easier to discover) on the front page of your chosen subreddit. You might have to scroll down a little, but it should be reasonably easy to find. Up votes and comments should be a steady stream now.
• 2 - 4 hours, there is a make or break moment here. Your content is being seen by most people online within your subreddit. Hopefully, you've picked a subreddit and time that means thousands of people now have eyeball on your content. Ideally, you need to be grabbing 1000 up votes per hour and plenty of comments to go with them.
• 4 hours, your post will have grabbed an average of 1000 up votes per hour. If your up votes and comments are still flowing at the 1000 per hour level by this time, then you can safely say you're going to get into the top 25 on /r/all. You might notice your post pops up within your own personal feed at this point. IMHO it's worth following all the popular subreddits in your personal feed. If your post starts to trend compared to everything churned out by the top 10 subreddits - then you can sit back, grab a Corona and lime and wait for the "congrats on the top 25 /r/all" email to drop.
• 6 hours, you'll receive the standard "Congrats on making it to top 25 /r/all". You'll also get added to a bunch of pretty useless subreddits that you can only be a member of if you manage certain feats. To be honest, most members got there by chance rather than design. The Century Club is kinda cool though.
• When you finally trend. Well, the obvious thing is that you'll find your content by visiting /r/all or simply the Reddit homepage. Traffic to your site will be flowing very strongly now, hopefully your hosting is top notch and you have W3 Cache implemented. Enjoy those Google Analytics stats - they're hella fun to watch!
• IMHO, making stuff trend on Reddit becomes addictive after a while. I do it for fun at this point - although I really do need to try for an Adsense account again!

Things that go wrong along the way.

• You will get v&nned from certain subreddits. Moderators on Reddit are a law to their own IMHO - don't sweat it and just move on. You can use a VPN and another account/domain if you need to.
• Don't put personal details on your website.
• Get good hosting and use W3 Cache. A good hug of death with kill most cheap shared plans.
• People will "sniff" about your website when it gets posted to Reddit. Make sure it looks legit and put a decent bit of quality content on there before posting.
• PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T PUT PERSONAL DETAILS ON YOUR WEBSITE.
• Did I mention not putting personal details on your website?

One website VS multiple websites.

One issue I have discovered whilst posting to Reddit, is that you really have to be careful with spam. You literally have to post 9 pieces of other content for every post from your own website - it's just the way it is and you'll get v&nned if you get lazy on it. Anyway, to combat this problem I came up with two different solutions.

1. You setup multiple Reddit accounts/VPN, rotating them evenly and posting good comments and up votes between posts to your own website.
2. You setup multiple websites, rotating them evenly so you're not always spamming the same domain.

Both methods take time and effort to achieve. I think that the PBN builders out there might be interested in the second method - purely because they have the skills to maintain multiple sites.

Cool write up, why you use the word "v&nned"

Anyway, good tip about personal details.

Panther28 said:

Cool write up, why you use the word "v&nned"

Anyway, good tip about personal details.

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It's kinda a hangover from when I used to frequent *****. I still remember the Party Bus!

How you pass the spam filter? Like any domains other than imgur and giffy gets automatically removed.

How to solve this?

Really nice and detailed method, thanks for sharing heres one upvote for you

Summary, is finding sub reddit ?
I does happen post one cannabise stuff , it does instantly get traffic but that one is not a sub reddit. Is a main page on cannabise stuff . The content is more like positive on using it , as the main page those people inside is pro on cannabis stuff so tend to comment a lot and upvote and that is true , it can last nearly one day the traffic but later die off

will try this

Dhaval750 said:

How you pass the spam filter? Like any domains other than imgur and giffy gets automatically removed.

How to solve this?

Click to expand...

Most subreddits allow you to post any domain really. It's only the really big subreddits that don't like /r/politics, /r/news etc etc...

Of course YMMV but there are plenty of decent subreddits that you can post to fine.

RebeccaThomas said:

The best time to post content, is about 2pm GMT

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Great write up. I usually post NY time 8-10 PM. I had more success with sales this timeframe, I think people aren't in buying mode on the way to work.

If you don't put your personal details on your site, how will people know it's your site?

Great guide man. Reddit is working for me, daily I get few users from post I made almost 6 months ago.

My 2 cents: If You want to schedule posts then you can use: https://cronnit.us
It's free and works great. (Not affiliated)

For different websites or avoid getting domain banned use blogspot redirect.

mylastvacation said:

If you don't put your personal details on your site, how will people know it's your site?

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Still it's better to don't show your personal details.
I get abusive emails on like why you are spamming reddit.

Sushant Pawar said:

Still it's better to don't show your personal details.
I get abusive emails on like why you are spamming reddit.

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Say it wasn't you.

Some nice tips there, thanks.

Interested to know how you're monetizing all the traffic?

mylastvacation said:

Say it wasn't you.

Click to expand...

Exactly.

Anyhow, this method seems like a good one. I'll considering implementing it for my website.

Thank for sharing, OP!

Amazing post! This will be useful for a lot of people. Especially the timing you said is extremely important. Doesn't matter how much people seems to be online, there's that "magic" time which opens up the gateway to frontpage.

PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T PUT PERSONAL DETAILS ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Click to expand...

This. People don't understand how dangerous the reddit is compared to other websites. One needs to understand that users on reddit have way to much time to ruin your entire life over nothing. If you are going to try to pull some BH stuff on reddit, you better stay as a separate identity apart from all your social profiles.

I would also like to add couple of points for everyone.

1 : Never post personal stuff in your reddit account. No matter what.

If you post something on Facebook or any other public platform, like an image of food you cooked and then you post that on reddit, you have revealed your identity already. So don't do that. That's a part of your personal life and you never expose yourself to hundreds of thousands of anonymous people.

2 : Doesn't matter your political leaning, never try to disagree with the popular opinion unless you want to get your account banned from the subreddit and even from reddit. Users and Mods will mass report your account to Reddit admins and admin has no time to check. They just ban you. Currently, most of the subs are left leaning and if you are right leaning, keep that to yourself. Don't argue or try to correct others. Reddit is a huge circlejerk in itself and you don't want to get caught between that circle of people jerking each others right? I have seen accounts with thousands of Karma shot to negative just because they posted an actual news debunking fake news. You don't simply do that. Let people live in their own bubble and you should work towards earning money. Elections are coming, expect to see a lot of political posts everywhere. Use this as an opportunity rather than being a keyboard warriors against anonymous nobodies.

3 : Your account should be dedicated to the things you are going to promote. Never use that account for irrelevant things. There are certain subreddit that automatically ban you for posting on certain other subreddits. Example, r/Feminism will ghost you if you post on r/MensRights. r/Politics used to ban anyone who posted in r/The_Donald. So much for free speech right? Anyway, understand this and start your journey.

4 : Never, never upvote your own posts with your own accounts especially if those accounts are not active. You'll get automatic warning for first offence. Then 3 days ban. Then 1 week ban. After that your account is reported to Admins and you are permanently banned for vote manipulation. No coming back from that. Also, you'll get banned if you downvote or upvote other's posts with multiple accounts. That's the reason there's almost no working SMM for reddit. Maybe some users are selling upvote services but that's not a sustainable business unless you have an office with 100 people working full time on reddit accounts.

5 : You need a dedicated VPS hosting if you are planning to reach front page.
If you can't afford that, use websites like Blogger, WIX, WordPress or any other blogging platforms. Then use a domain redirect (with URL masking). Namecheap has this feature. This is the cheapest & easiest way you can do churn and burn. Don't bother with getting an expensive hosting if you are just starting out. Your chances of failures about reaching the front page are more than 70% so if you don't have the budget, don't invest because most people will give up after couple of tries on reddit.

6 : If you have the budget, award your post with some Gold. Ofcourse with other accounts. Your post will end up in Glided section.



See the above posts that has very little upvotes? Yes, they are in popular glided section. Because they have gold awards. Learn more about it.


Important Point. This alone increases the chances of getting on front page.

If you are promoting a blog or website with a ton of ads, like Quiz methods or porn sites, I will suggest you to turn off every single ad until the post reaches the front page of the subreddit. Make it seem like you are serving the content ad free. Even add a top alert on your website that says "We don't like to spam users with ads so enjoy your clean experience on our website." something like that will play with the emotions of people and they will return back to upvote your post. Once the post reaches front page, then you enable the ads. Yes, you'll loose out on first couple of thousand visits but in return, you just increased your chances of being on front page.

That's all folks.

Thank you very much, that's really helpful!

key thing here is that I have to find a hobby

This is dope!!!! Really appreciate it.

Great and useful guide!! Thanks for this!