If you want to get traffic to your new blog or website as quickly as possible, the “Outrank Reddit” method is where I would start.
In this post, I’m going to quickly explain why most new bloggers fail, how you can avoid it, and how you can show up on the first page of Google search results fast.
I even ran an experiment to prove it works (results below).
So if you’re ready to get your site on the map and reap that sweet organic traffic, let’s get started!
Failure all around
There are over 252,000 new websites created every day, and the majority of them will never see a single visitor.
The hard truth is that most people who start a new blog will fail miserably.
This is because new bloggers mostly write self-indulgent posts about things that no one cares about, like themselves. That’s right — unless you’re famous or accomplished, no one cares about you. Oh well!
Most new bloggers also completely ignore how readers actually discover content online (more on that below).
But if you can move past this self-infatuation and ignorance, and learn what really drives internet traffic, then you can capture attention and potentially make some money.
Here’s how it all works:
Feed the algorithm to get the traffic
With 83% of organic search traffic coming from Google, and 75% of people never reading past the first page of search results, the only real way to get your new blog discovered by strangers is to rank in the top 10 search results on Google.
This means you need to:
1. Write about something that people are actually searching for (not just whatever you feel like)
2. Target search queries that are low competition enough that you have a chance of ranking in the top 10 results
But what does “low competition” mean in search engines?
When you’re first starting a blog, you’re weak in Google’s eyes.
You have no history, no posts, and no other websites linking back to you to signal authority or trust. In short, you’re just some random person who probably shouldn’t be trusted.
So when Google’s deciding which of the 500,000 articles about “best credit cards” to put in the top 10 results, you’re not going to make the cut.
Why?
You’re competing against banks who spend millions of dollars per year on writers, editors, PR departments, and SEO specialists to keep their page at the top. Because that attention it’s worth a lot of money.
So when you’re just starting out, be realistic.
Realize that on your quest to massive traffic and fame, you’re going to have to start small by targeting searches with less volume.
High Authority > Low Authority > Forums
But how do I find these magical low-competition keywords (search queries) to target?
I’m glad you asked!
There’s no shortage of posts talking about strategies for finding easy-to-rank longtail keywords, but to start, let’s talk about how Google serves up content.
Here’s a very oversimplified explanation that will serve us well enough in this case.
In Google’s eyes, here’s the order of what content should be served first in the search results:
1. High-quality content from well-known sites with proven authority and expertise in the topic
2. Content from all other sites, ordered by the usefulness of the content and the number of other websites linking back to that content.
3. Content from forums and social media sites like Reddit, Quora, and other user-generated message boards
Enter the Reddit Hack
The Reddit SEO Hack: if you search for a topic and the top results are from Reddit, Quora, or any other user-generated forum, you can likely rank in the top results for that search term very easily, without needing any backlinks or historical authority on the topic.
It’s also likely that you’ll begin ranking in the top search result positions very quickly
While most blog posts take 3-6 months to start getting any organic traffic, with this method you could see results in just a few days.
(note: this doesn’t mean you should write about something you know nothing about, but it does mean that if you happen to know the topic well and notice the weakness in the search results, it’s happy hunting season)
My “Outrank Reddit” experiment to prove it works
I had heard about this “Outrank Reddit” strategy for a few years before I tried it myself.
So when the perfect opportunity came up a few weeks ago, I decided to see if this method could really get me some blog traffic fast.
A random conversation leads to a search
Recently, I was texting with a new Asian friend who kept ending her text messages with the ~ tilde symbol.
Example texts: “Hey~~~” “Yes~~~”.
I was unsure what the significance of this punctuation was, so did a quick Google search and saw the following top result:
The first thing I noticed was that the top result was from Reddit. I also noticed that the post was written 7 years ago in 2015.
And since all things equal, search engines seem to like newer content, this was another positive sign.
So after reading through 5 threads of responses and doing some more independent research, I wrote up a blog post that explained what this meant. Nothing long, maybe 500 words.
I included some more examples and graphics and organized the information in a structured way that was better than anything that currently existed on the topic.
The result: Top 6 rank within 2 weeks!
Within 14 days of publishing my new post, it’s already reached the #6 spot on the search results for the term “Asian tilde mark”.
It’s not at the top yet and is only bringing in a drip of traffic.
But this is a great example of how a new blog can show up on the first page and start getting some visibility for evergreen searches that will continue forever.
Final thoughts
Now that you’ve seen this Reddit/Quora/forum blog traffic hack in action, you can keep your eyes open for opportunities to get fast traffic in your own niche.
Just imagine if you spent the next month finding one of these opportunities per day and writing your own post about it.
At the end of the month, you could potentially have 30 posts that each bring in 10 site visitors per day.
Congratulations, you now have 9,000 monthly visitors to your blog!