Posted by MiriamEllis
I’ve written this post for two of my favorite groups of people: local SEOs and local business owners.
Local SEOs: We’ve had this conversation again and again in the community over the years. On a regular basis, you receive calls… Continue reading →
Posted by anthonycoraggio
If you’ve so far neglected the advertising and marketing opportunities on Reddit, you’re not alone. Historically, the relationship between Redditors and those who market to them has been contentious—Reddit is a cohesive community in a way that social platforms like Facebook or Twitter are not, and Redditors will fight to protect its integrity from spammers and lazy attempts at commercial gain. Done well, however, advertising on Reddit represents a tremendous opportunity. The site is one of the fundamental drivers of internet culture, and boasts roughly 115 million monthly unique visitors, low ad costs, and high potential for engagement and virality. Even better, Reddit is finally getting serious about monetizing the business and attaining profitability, rolling out new features for advertisers and even offering free campaigns for international advertisers to get started. Reddit can be a tough nut to crack, but handled correctly it can become your secret weapon—and I’m here to show you how.
There are three main things you need to know to successfully brave the brash, quick-witted, and anonymous crowds of Reddit as a paid advertiser.
Alright, pencils ready? Let’s get rolling!
Before I delve into working with and advertising to the Reddit community, let’s get familiar with the tools at your disposal. Reddit offers a number of options you can mix and match as appropriate in the lifecycle of a campaign or larger marketing strategy – here’s a quick rundown of what they are and where they fit into the Reddit ecosystem.
Reddit’s self-serve advertising is the best place to start for the novice Reddit advertiser. Cheap, easy, and surprisingly flexible, they are the “promoted post” of the Reddit world.
A sponsored link, as seen live on Reddit
As you would in typical Reddit use, you have the option of submitting either an external link or an internal link to a text post, which users may then upvote/downvote or comment on. Your money buys you the top-of-page spot for your link in the feed of either Reddit’s front page or a topic-specific subreddit of your choice.
Reddit is currently offering a flat $0.75 CPM for self-serve advertising—you’ll get the same price regardless of the choices you make in targeting or content. There is a minimum buy of $5 for any individual sponsored link (which you’ll also have to pay for individually). This isn’t a big hurdle budget-wise, but can be problematic when there isn’t $5 worth of impressions left to buy in your chosen timeframe. Smaller, niche subreddits are particularly vulnerable to this issue, and it’s not yet possible to make multiple-subreddit buys through the interface. Plan early and don’t wait until the last minute to make your buys, or you might get shut out entirely!
Inventory is limited; act fast!
You’ll be given space for a title and either an external URL or a text post. There are no hard limits here in character length like you’ll find on AdWords, Bing, or Twitter, but don’t get caught up writing a novel. Your title should be punchy and engaging to draw interest, and if you use a text post be clear and concise in communicating your message and actions for the reader. You’ll also note that you have an option to allow or disallow user comments. I strongly recommend you allow them to get the most bang for your buck—I’ll circle back to that here in a minute.
Reddit’s traffic data isn’t the prettiest, but you’ll get a solid picture of spend, impressions, and clicks down to the hour. In general, you can expect clickthrough rates similar to most display advertising (0.10-0.20%), but exceptionally well done campaigns can reach far higher. Remember, you’ll need to manually tag your links before you submit your ad so you can track your campaign performance properly in analytics!
One more caveat—you can’t launch your ads near-instantaneously as you might on a platform like Facebook or Twitter. It can take up to 2 days for your ads to be reviewed and set live, and the interface will typically not allow you to choose same or even next day start dates.
Display advertising on Reddit runs on the AdZerk engine, and is much closer to what you might find on a standard network, with a couple of twists. Users can upvote and downvote banner ads (the latter will block the ad for that user in the future), and while banner ads don’t quite fit into the normal discussion thread flow, each is linked to a unique comment thread on a subreddit designated for discussion of banner ads on the site.
Reddit sidebar banner, with downvoting options selected
To buy these ads you’ll need to get in touch with Reddit’s ads team directly—you can choose from homepage or subreddit roadblocks, individual banners, or the design and creation of cobranded ad units with the Reddit team.
Sponsored Q&A’s are similar to Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” threads, but are set up directly with Reddit and targeted for promotion across select subreddits. These can run over the course of a few hours or a few days, with specified times set for your Q&A experts to interact with the Reddit community. You can check out an example here, a Q&A with the physicists behind the Higgs Boson discover for Particle Fever.
Right then! Now that we know what we have to work with, let’s learn how to be good citizens of Reddit.
I am writing this article both as a Redditor and a professional in advertising – I believe good advertising should bring value to the audience as well as the advertiser, and nowhere is that principle better enforced than on Reddit. Reddiquette is Reddit’s informal code of conduct—a codification of the values that have grown organically within the community. Taken as a whole, it creates an environment that demands five key things of marketers who want to participate in this community. Defy these at your own peril!
This is possibly the most important and fundamental law of advertising on Reddit. If you’re not contributing, you’re wasting your time. The essence of being successful in Reddit advertising is the same principle common to social media and content marketing in general: Contribute value to the community. As an advertiser you’ve already been marked “sponsored”—a potential invader to be scrutinized—and have to meet a high bar to prove you’re not a faceless corporate con man come to poison the well or game the system. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t sell a product; you just have to deliver it the right way, to the people who are going to smile when they see what it can do. For example:
The above image is an ad run on /r/showerthoughts, “a subreddit for you to share all those thoughts, ideas, or philosophical questions that race through your head when in the shower.” Note the 323 upvotes, and the subsequent comments:
Don’t try to game the system or trick users into clicking to your over-optimized conversion page. Redditors live the internet, are thus experts at spotting cheap online marketing tactic, and you will get mauled if you contaminate their precious community with scams or clickbait. Instead, be honest, straightforward, and prepared to communicate. Who are you? Why are you here? If you are questioned in the comments, respond as a real person. This alone won’t guarantee you success, but it will earn you sorely needed respect.
Redditors are for the most part here for entertainment, socializing, discovering new things, and generally just to waste time. If you get in the way of that or take yourself too seriously, they will take corrective action and you’ll likely wind up skewered in the comments. Take Woody Harrelson’s calamitous attempt to hawk the movie Rampart in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA, in Reddit lingo) thread as a cautionary tale.
Know your subreddit’s culture—any specific rules, language used, common posts, themes, or memes. If you haven’t spent at least a half hour on that subreddit reading comments and following links, you’re not ready to run an ad there.
Get comfortable with anonymity and brutal honesty. If you screw up, Redditors will let you know about it. Sure, you could disable comments, but this is merely avoidance, and tosses out the baby with the bathwater. Think of this as the most honest focus group in the world—if Redditors think it, they’ll probably post it. Respond (again, with good humor), validate any concerns, and use the feedback to juice up your next run.
These rules can be a little tough to process if you’re not a Redditor yourself, so before we move on I’m about to give you the best assignment of your working life. Just use reddit. Find fun topics. Comment, post, and find part of the community that speaks to you. Native advertising works a lot better if you’re a native yourself!
Of course, to run an engaging promotion on Reddit, you need to start by talking to the right people and hold up your end of the conversation. You might be surprised at the breadth and depth of audience you can find on Reddit—yes, you will find a lot of geeky males aged 18-29, but the user base and the interests represented on the site go far beyond that stereotype. You can find subreddits dedicated to everything from ethnomusicology to baking. Take the time to do your research and find the parts of the community that will really care about what you have to say.
Once you find the right spot for your promotion, don’t simply fire and forget or use the same subreddits every time. Check back every time you launch a new campaign and stay up to date on the doings of your target subreddits—moderation controversies can lead to the breakout, similar subreddits with different standards of conduct that may be better or worse for your purposes as a marketer.
For example, a banner ad for the film Under The Skin featuring an underwear clad Scarlett Johansson was recently placed on the /r/gentlemanboners subreddit, which I expect the advertiser (not unreasonably) assumed would appreciate the ad. No dice—the subreddit is strictly PG-13 and doesn’t permit images without full clothing. The community and moderators responded harshly, and the ad was actually taken down.
You can run basic, conversion focused ads pushed to a PPC style landing page, like the Audible and Aquanotes examples above. But don’t think of Reddit as just a set of ad inventory. Rather, consider it as a social ecosystem, enhanced with the power of paid promotions tools. You can still ultimately point users to a conversion, but don’t waste the opportunity to do more. Ask questions, share opinions, and start a conversation. You can also offer incentives unique to Redditors to make your message that much more special—this recent ad by Vodo created in partnership with Reddit is an excellent example:
There’s also a lot of value to be had in launching your content marketing into the Reddit universe to be shared, talked about, and built upon. It can be challenging to get off the ground at times, but that’s where the paid advertising comes in—point a few thousand users at your piece, hit critical mass, and the ball rolls from there.
You can also find success by intertwining organic and paid activity, for example, using a sponsored Q&A or paid promotions to redirect people to visit an AMA so others can tweet it, share it on social media, and multiply your impact. Degree antiperspirant’s clever use of an AMA with Bear Grylls is a classic example, sending Twitter traffic to the thread and creating storm of reciprocal visits and coverage across various channels.
In a more recent example, Ethan Hawke’s AMA gathered 9.6 million unique viewers in 24 hours and generated press coverage that brought in 15 million more. Not a bad bit of marketing!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Continue reading → Posted by randfish
It’s probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but there’s a common misconception in just how much time. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how things… Continue reading →
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
*drumroll* … That’s right, friends, the MozCon 2014 Agenda is here! You can now show this to your boss to get that final approval and start making plans for how many notebooks you’ll be filling with ideas and tips.
But first, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you to buy your ticket today, as MozCon has sold out the last several years.
For the best current deal on MozCon, make sure you’re a Moz Pro subscriber. If you’re not, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial and get the Pro subscriber MozCon price immediately. Cancel your subscription at any time if it’s not for you, and we’ll see you at MozCon 2014 either way!
Okay, let’s talk about just how great this MozCon’s going to be. We have topics ranging from technical mobile SEO and A/B testing to “big content” idea generation and getting maximum value from your PR efforts. There is truly something for every type of online marketer. We have returning MozCon favorites such as Wil Reynolds, Dr. Pete Meyers, and Nathalie Nahai, as well as new speakers like Kerry Bodine, Cindy Krum, and Jeremy Bloom. Plus, we’re trying a new format—a fireside chat—with our CEO Sarah Bird, so we can really dig into what life at Moz has been like since she and Rand switched places.
Not to mention all the photos with Roger, the wonderful swag, yummy food, and all the other MozCon trimmings you expect. And yes, we’re letting Cyrus Shepard emcee again. (I’m pretty sure it’s in his Moz employment contract.)
Wil Reynolds at MozCon 2013
8:00-9:00am Breakfast
9:00-9:20am Welcome to MozCon 2014! with Rand Fishkin
As our ever-changing industry keeps us on our toes, Rand gives a look at recent changes and where he sees the future of search and online marketing going.
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and helping marketers worldwide level-up their game.
9:20-10:20am Broken Brand Promises: The Disconnect Between Marketing and Customer Experience with Kerry Bodine
Companies chase the business benefits of customer experience, but advertising and marketing communications that aren’t aligned with the true capabilities of the organization foil these efforts.
Kerry Bodine is the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites like Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age. She holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and has designed interfaces for websites, mobile apps, wearable devices, and robots.
10:20-10:40am AM Break
10:40-11:20am Improve Your SEO by Mastering These Core Principles with Lindsay Wassell
Discover how SEO tactics that win in the long run complement web-friendly business practices and core principles, and how to incorporate this approach into optimization strategies for changes in search results.
Lindsay Wassell is the CEO at Keyphraseology, an Inbound & Search Marketing agency. Prior to Keyphraseology, she led the Moz SEO Consulting Team.
11:20am-12:00pm How to Use Social Science to Build Addictive Communities with Richard Millington
Richard will explain how you can use proven principles from community science to build highly addictive online communities for your organization.
Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee, an organization which has figured out how to apply proven science to build powerful communities from any group of people.
12:00-1:30pm Lunch
1:30-2:30pm Architecting Great Experiments with Kyle Rush
A/B testing will no longer be a mystery after Kyle does a deep-dive on every part of the experimentation process.
Kyle Rush is the Head of Optimization at Optimizely. He uses a data-driven engineering approach to execute hundreds of A/B tests.
2:30-3:10pm Mobile SEO Geekout: Key Strategies and Concepts with Cindy Krum
Learn all the technical nuances necessary to make your websites rank and perform well in mobile and tablet search!
Cindy Krum is CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, a mobile SEO consulting and tools provider based in Denver, CO. She is also author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are, which is the first book to explain mobile SEO and gets 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon.
3:10-3:30pm PM Break
3:30-4:00pm Local Lessons from Small Town USA with Mike Ramsey
Whether your audience is in one region or thousands of major metros across the world, these small town lessons will guide you through the complex world of local search.
Mike Ramsey is the president of Nifty Marketing with offices in Burley and Boise, Idaho. He is also a Partner at LocalU and has an awesome wife and 3 kids who put up with all his talk about search.
4:00-4:30pm Top 10 PR Tactics and Strategies of Successful Content and Link Building with Lexi Mills
Everyone’s had an outreach pitch rejected, but Lexi will show you that by slicing and dicing your content, you can turn those no’s into yes’s.
Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients.
4:30-5:10pm Digital Body Language with Mike King
No matter your business goals, Mike will teach you how to harness the power of lead qualification and nurturing through both implicit and explicit user information.
Currently a consultant, Mike King has led teams covering consumer insights, content, social strategy, and SEO for Enterprise brands. With working for brands like HSBC, SanDisk, Ralph Lauren, Johnson & Johnson, and Citibank, his breadth and depth of experience continues to fuel game-changing insights. Mike is a frequent speaker, blogger, and a published author that loves to share his insights on how to do better marketing.
7:00-9:00pm #MozCrawl
More details coming soon!
8:00-9:00am Breakfast
9:00-10:00am How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas with Pete Meyers
Learn how to stay afloat in the coming flood of content, as Dr. Pete provides concrete tactics for sustainably creating high-value content.
Dr. Pete Meyers is a marketing scientist for Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past year building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast Project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History, a chronicle of Google updates back to 2003.
10:00-10:30am Scaling Creativity: Making Content Marketing More Efficient with Stacey Cavanagh
Stacey will talk you through tactics and tricks to help you scale your content marketing efforts without cutting corners on quality.
Stacey Cavanagh lives in Manchester, UK, and works as head of search for Tecmark. Stacey also blogs regularly on digital marketing, social media, and her favorite TV ads.
10:30-10:50am AM Break
10:50-12:10pm Community Speakers!
While not finalized, community speakers are one of our most popular sessions. Four speakers from our community will give 15 minute presentations on what they’re passionate about. This year, Moz’s Director of Community, Jen Lopez, will be introducing them.
12:10pm-1:40pm Lunch
1:40-2:20pm Keep the Focus on the Doughnuts with Marshall Simmonds
If you’re in a time and resource crunch, Marshall will share which tactics you should implement and prioritize, from the basic to the highly technical, based on measured and quantified data from billions of page views.
Marshall Simmonds has been involved in the search industry since it began. Over the past 17 years, he’s solidified himself as one of the top consultants in publishing and enterprise audience development. Many of the tactics you continue to employ today as best practices were either developed or refined by this guy; he’s “Internet Old.”
2:20pm-2:50pm Dare to Fail: How the Best Lessons Come in the Form of Defeat with Jeremy Bloom
Everyone experiences failure, but Jeremy will share the lessons he’s learned from an athlete to start-up CEO in how to leverage adversity and turn it into a road-map for success.
Jeremy Bloom is a world-champion skier, a two-time Olympian, a World Cup gold medalist, and a member of the United States Skiing Hall of Fame. He played professional football in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 2008, Bloom founded Wish of a Lifetime, which grants lifelong wishes to 80-, 90-, and 100+-year-old people, and in 2010, Bloom co-founded the marketing software company Integrate. Integrate has raised over $20M of venture capital from Comcast, Foundry Group, and Liberty Global. It was named “Best New Company” at the 2011 American Business Awards in New York.
2:50-3:30pm Supercharging Your Digital Analytics! with Justin Cutroni
Despite having lots of analytics tools, we too often settle for the default data and reports so let’s look at a few ways that you can get more insightful, actionable data to make better decisions!
Justin Cutroni is an author, blogger, father, skier, and the Analytics Evangelist at Google. He is a long-time fixture in the digital analytics community and has been nominated as the most influential industry contributor for the past four years.
3:30-3:50pm PM Break
3:50-4:20pm Developing a Formidable Social Platform with Amber Naslund
Learn what makes for a compelling online presence, balance your personal and professional self, and build a system to keep yourself sane.
Amber Naslund is a business strategist and the president of SideraWorks, a social business advisory firm that helps companies adapt their culture and operations to the demands of the social web. She’s the co-author of The Now Revolution, and you can find her on Twitter at @ambercadabra.
4:20-4:50pm Shop ’til You Drop: Google Shopping PPC with Elizabeth Marsten
If you’re wondering what happened to Google Shopping, Elizabeth will explain all, including how to set up PPC the right way and why it matters for your overall marketing.
Elizabeth Marsten is the Vice President of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc. here in Seattle. She is a PPC person at heart, but also oversees the SEO, Social, Content, and Project Management teams.
4:50-5:30pm YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For with Phil Nottingham
Phil will take a deep-dive into YouTube, the world’s second biggest and most forgotten search engine, looking at the best ways to use the channel on both a strategic and tactical marketing level, no matter your budget.
Phil Nottingham is the video strategist at Distilled, where he works with businesses of all shapes and sizes to define their approach to video on both a creative and technical level. He joined Distilled in April 2011, after impressing the company founders with his ability to look like a serviceable pirate, following minimal costume changes, and has since spent loads of their money on cameras and lights.
7:00pm-12:00am MozCon Party at Garage Billiards (MozCon badge required!)
8:20-9:20am Breakfast
9:20-10:20am You Are so Much More than an SEO with Wil Reynolds
The label’s irrelevant as you have skills, tools, and knowledge to help get rankings and so much more, and Wil will show you the marketing goldmine you’ve been sitting on.
Wil Reynolds founded SEER Interactive in 2002, which now employs over 70 people and is among the 100 fastest growing companies in Philadelphia. In addition to digital marketing, Wil is also passionate about giving back to the community and sits on the advisory board of Covenant House.
10:20-10:50am Beyond SEO – Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing Campaign with Paddy Moogan
Everyone talks about the need for SEOs to diversify, but Paddy will give you actionable tips to go away and do it, no matter what your current role is.
Paddy Moogan is Head of Growth Markets at Distilled, working in their London office. He is a comic book geek and loves Aston Martins. His heart lives with the Hobbits in New Zealand.
10:50-11:10am AM Break
11:10-11:40am A Mozzy View with Sarah Bird and John Cook
Moz CEO Sarah Bird sits down with GeekWire’s John Cook for a candid discussion about risk-taking, thriving with constant change, and the future of Moz.
Sarah Bird serves as CEO and as a member of Moz’s board. She loves and welcomes conversations on inbound marketing, business models, entrepreneurship, productivity tips, women in tech, and fostering inspiring company culture. Sarah’s sharp business acumen is always paired with her passionate belief in TAGFEE, Moz’s core values.
John Cook is the co-founder of GeekWire, a leading technology news site and community based in Seattle. A long-time tech journalist, John has covered hundreds of startup companies over the years, everything from aQuantive to Zillow.
11:40am-12:20pm Developing Your Own Great Interactive Content – What You’ll Need to Know with Richard Baxter
Even if you’re not a technical genius when it comes to interactive front-end web development projects, Richard will show you how to make something the Internet loves from ideation and conceptualization to rapid prototyping, launch, and huge coverage.
Richard Baxter is founder and CEO of SEOgadget, a digital marketing agency specializing in conversion rate optimization, large scale SEO, keyword research, technical strategy, and link building in high competition industries, with offices in London and San Francisco. He is a regular SEO industry commentator and proud Moz Associate.
12:20-1:50pm Lunch
1:50-2:30pm Demystifying Data Visualization for Marketers with Annie Cushing
We’ve all been frustrated with not knowing how to corral data into cool, sexy visualizations, but Annie Cushing will pull back the curtain and provide tips, tricks, and hacks to transform raw marketing data into works of art in plain English.
Annie blogs at annielytics.com, teaching marketers how to scavenge for marketing data and then make it sexy.
2:30-3:10pm Prove Your Value with Dana DiTomaso
Dana will show you how to report so there’s no doubt in your client’s mind that they’d be lost without you.
Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing BS into real strategies to grow your business. After 10+ years, she’s seen (almost) everything. It’s true, Dana will meet with you and teach you the ways of the digital world, but she is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of Dana’s diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
3:10-3:30pm PM Break
3:30-4:10pm The Psychology of Persuasive Content for “Boring” Industries with Nathalie Nahai
If your content needs a jolt of life, Nathalie will show you how to apply targeted persuasion through psychology.
Nathalie Nahai, also known as The Web Psychologist, is a best-selling author, consultant, and international speaker who specializes on the psychology of online persuasion. With a background in psychology, web design, and digital strategy, Nathalie coined the term “web psychology” in 2011, defining it as “the empirical study of how our online environments influence our attitudes and behaviours.”
4:10-5:10pm Mad Science Experiments in SEO & Social Media with Rand Fishkin
Whether it’s anchor text or sharing on Google+ instead of Facebook, Rand’s spent the last few months formulating hypotheses and running tests, and now he’ll share these fascinating results to help you.
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz, and he currently serves as an individual contributor, blogging, speaking, designing tools, and generally trying to be helpful to marketers worldwide.
Now, are you ready to buy your ticket? 🙂 We’ll see you there!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Continue reading →