How to Market on Reddit Without Getting Shadowbanned

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You took this client from 57 keywords to 1,100 keywords with 6,200 clicks per month and that compounded into 200 back links and overall you built over like 10,000 Reddit threads without being flagged. How did you do that? Meet Anne Smarty, co-founder of Smarty Marketing, former editor and chief at Search Engine Journal and a longtime Pubcon speaker. She's been in SEO since 2005 and she's been doing Reddit marketing for 15 years, long before the recent AIdriven hype. She just published a case study

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where one of her assets went from 250 clicks per month to 6,200 clicks per month. And pickups weren't random either. Forbes, Investopedia, MSN, and the independent, all the big players. Today, we're breaking down the system behind that so you can replicate it for your business. So, welcome everybody and Smarty. So an um it's very exciting to have you on today and I'm eager to understand what made you um and the company direction get into Reddit you know what was the decision behind that

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and what really pushed that >> why we ended up sticking with Reddit is that first it's real so you can find the community for just about any topic and be there and heard there without building necessarily the influence which is what you need to do on other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and whatnot. And the other thing is that we were at that point targeting um linking links for the most part. It was 15 years ago it was about links and we found that bloggers, journalists all use

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Reddit for ideation. So if you position your research, your study, your infographic, whatever linkable asset you have, you have much bigger chances to get it linked organically. People are genuinely there to find information and engage with it. And unless you provide something of value, however you can fake it, it will only go well on Reddit if it's really something valuable. Reddit is because it's UGC, user generated content. It's authentic and real and it tests the BS. >> It's much more handbased than any social

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media um platform now or then because you could reach huge crowd through say Stumble Upon, but they were not there on Stumble Upon to find about this topic. I'm I'm a huge fan of intent-based marketing. It's when someone wants to know about something. It's not random feed where you just find very diverse stuff. It's not like Facebook or Instagram or Tik Tok where yes, everything is interesting, but you're not ready to engage necessarily buy something because you're not as much

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interested in the topic. You're there to entertain yourself. And Google Google is different in that way because someone types search queries in an effort to solve a problem or find out the answer to the question. So it's very intent based at this very moment that particular person wants to know something and Reddit is very similar in that because they are members of that particular subreddit to because they are highly interested in the topic >> in terms of the right businesses for

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Reddit um going back maybe 10 years 5 years ago um what's the change and are there any businesses that you know won't utilize Reddit? Uh I think the big change here is the interest the marketing business interest in Reddit and that is not going well for the platform because those people that want to be an active member within a subre they don't like businesses that much especially when they try to be sneaky about uh what they're doing by vote comments threads they and it is much

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more spammed these Okay, Reddit has gotten much more challenging and difficult for anyone, even those people who want to be authentically there. So, there are like account suspensions, shadow banning, all of that has gotten much more aggressive than let's 10 years ago. 10 years ago, Reddit was a popular platform and businesses were shying away because they didn't know how to handle it. Five years ago, same. These days in for most businesses, it's almost like not a choice. You have to be on Reddit

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because those threads are ranking for branded searches. >> Overall, you built over like 10,000 um Reddit threads without being flagged. How how did you do that? Like was there a proprietary data set that you had? Like what was the strategy and approach that you made this work? Um and are there any insights that you could give our audience of how they could kind of um scale uh with useful content without being flagged? >> Basically have to take every subreddit differently. There are generic

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subreddits which of course you can be part of and some of them are very newbie friendly and you may be safer there than outside of it. But even as a user, when you join a particular subreddit, you have to take at least one or two weeks to actually dive in and understand what is frowned upon there. What can get you in trouble? Don't post any links. Don't try to be proactive about sharing your business right away. Don't try to talk about your business at all for like one or two months, two or three months. You

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stay inside your subreddit. you read everything outside of it of course everything that's relevant I mean so you try to get comfortable with like building editorial calendar there and it will work organically if you be consistent like with any organic channel just being consistent is mostly enough to see some kind of growth >> and just to jump on that like when you say consistent is that like a post per day or so many posts per week is Is there like not winning structures but like a good practice of like okay to

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show up on Reddit because there's so much going on you need to post daily or is it you know Twitter for example like X you've got to post quite a lot compared to like LinkedIn it's a lot less um what would be the approach of cadence >> on Reddit there is no frequency so much as consistency because some subreddit can be updated once a week some of them once a month and still be visible if it's a useful piece of content that everyone finds um useful and valuable in that particular

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niche. So, it's not just posting a link, you know, it's actually thoughtful understanding. Even if it's one post a week, there will still be growth if you remain consistently useful and valuable within the community. >> Mhm. And and for the case study that um you you did with this um this client, they end up getting cited by Forbes, Investopedia, MSN, the Independent. Um how how did that strategy come about? How did you land that? So somebody else who wanted to you know be in you know

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they're inspired by this case study like how could they replicate that? You know what was the method that you did and approach to to make that? There is a combination of many things in in this kind of projects. First of all, we ideulate very carefully. We take like two weeks to brainstorm an idea with good potential and we have our own uh method of doing that that combines SEO. We want those assets to rank in Google at some point because that is the long-term discoverability channel that gets more and more clicks uh as we go.

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We we also use Reddit. So depending on the topic of your business, you can just join subreddits on that topic, filter them by most popular and just see at a glance which topics trigger the most conversations. You can tell which topics actually trigger conversations and interest and brainstorm from there. We also search for available data that we could utilize. If there is no nothing we can utilize that exists in public, we can also suggest some kind of original survey that we can just create our own

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data. So when we combine that, there are like five 10 ideas that we think will have a huge potential. But again, it's also something that people are searching for because we want that to rank and ad lamps also site those studies a lot. So they give you they will give you additional exposure too. Once we have that then we create the research the study. We like them to be localized like local based for example comparing different states in different based on different criteria or cities or even

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counties like because people on Reddit people love losers and winners. So we like it's not always we do local uh based research but it's something that does very well on Reddit based on our experience and um it's like anytime you think about something creating a linkable asset think about like if there is a comparison comparison is comparisons are great for Reddit because then there is the whole conversation on how to solve that how to get attention to that journalists especially local

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journalists discover that in local subreddits so and then it goes the global or like nationwide media as well after local journalists picks that up pick them up. So we we uh create the research, we visualize it, we publish that on the site and we promote it in subre just like I described best ways. >> How does this relate and how does it empower AI search because we're seeing today that more than ever you need a lot of brand entity. Um can you kind of give us an understanding of how you use this

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in in in AI strategy? >> Yes. And it's interesting because we've been doing that for like more 15 years or so. And it's more relevant today than it was relevant to 15 10 years ago. Because I always um describe this as think about LLMs think like people. They have the structure. They know they think they know the answer. They have the training data associations topic with topic. But unless you keep reminding them of your brand, they will easily forget it even when it's very relevant

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because it's training data that builds up. So those uh Reddit and journalistic mentions of your brand especially they're tightly relevant. >> Thank you everyone for watching and we would like to bring on the guests that you would like to see on the show. If you've got any recommendations, drop them in the comment. And if you want to know more about AI search, you might want to check this video out