The hack
Comment on a Reddit post related to what you do and get free relevant impressions.
Why it works
People are ditching Google when it comes to finding reliable reviews of products.
Google is unable to properly distinguish between a blog post written for the sole purpose of selling a product vs. one that's a genuine well-researched review.
This leads to poor search results, dominated by listicles written by SEO farm websites (promoting the product with the highest paying affiliate program) and brands themselves (naturally putting their product on the top).
Because of this people flock to Reddit and Twitter to find honest recommendations from real people.
As a result, those Reddit posts have high traffic volume. Here are the results for the search term "top running shoes Reddit" from Ahrefs (July 2024). If you’re unfamiliar with SEO, the traffic column states the estimate of monthly visitors and those are great numbers.
The best part is that, unlike all the other search results, adding your product to those Reddit posts only requires you to write a good comment and you can get there instantly.
How to do it
Find the relevant search term people are looking for.
For example, if you launched a new brand of running shoes, you would go with: "Best running shoes Reddit" or "Alternative to Nike shoes for running Reddit".
You can also use the "site:Reddit" to only get results from the Reddit website.
Some of the older posts will be archived. This is done on a subreddit level, so there can be posts that are 6 months old and archived, but also 7 years old and still open to comments.
If you don't find a relevant post, you can ask it yourself and then comment under it to spark a conversation. This sometimes works even better than commenting on existing posts.
Since you’re the first to comment it’s easier to get to the top. And since you’re writing the post you can phrase the question to favour your product.
Once you find your post, think of a relevant comment. There are several ways how you can approach it. Here are three ideas of how to comment on our new running shoe brand Forrest Runs:
- Link: Forrestruns.com
- Simple: For me the best-running shoe brand is Forrest Runs, really great if you want to balance performance with a reasonable price.
- Honest life story: I’ve been running for over 15 years, and injury was always a problem. I missed more marathons because of it than I can remember. I wanted to change it because I love running and never really got into other sports. I am just 35 so I don’t feel like I have finished my running era. So 3 years ago I started making my own running shoes. With the number one priority being to prevent injury. I am now selling it to like-minded people, who want to run but are troubled with injury. It’s called Forrest Runs and we hand-made all of them here in Oregon, USA. Hope it helps!
The honest life story usually works the best. If you’re authentic people will appreciate it, but if you just post your product features and benefits, you’ll get downvoted. So post as an independent indie hacker, who just wants to share something cool.
Getting upvotes
Comments like the honest life story will get you a lot more organic upvotes. The link comment you’ll need to push up with some manual upvotes.
You can ask your friends for upvotes. Another way is to create a few new Reddit accounts and upvote from there. Be sure to post, upvote and comment from these accounts as well, otherwise, you’ll get a shadow ban — you’ll see the comment or upvote when in your account, but others won’t see it. Check this using the incognito window.
Measuring success
Measure the organic traffic coming from Reddit. Read → Making the perfect landing page (when you have <100 customers) if you don’t have a landing page just yet.
