Hello, fellow content peeps!

Back again this week to talk about something I’m really excited about!

We’ve been going back to our ‘figure shit out’ days and I think we’re onto something…

It’s Times of Disruptions Where We Find The BIG Opportunities

I know a lot of people that made a serious ton of money in the early days of the internet.

I’ve heard many a tale about the growth hacks and traffic strategies that worked so well.

When I first started working with Venture 4th Media, over 8 years ago, there seemed to be endless opportunities to launch new sites, grow them (fairly) quickly and start making money.

In the the past year, our industry has been seriously disrupted.

AI.

Google updates.

It’s much harder to just be in the digital content business space.

And while disruption of this magnitude does have collateral damage, I think it’s also a time of great, untapped opportunities…that is, if you are willing to do the hard work of figuring shit out.

I have talked a lot these past few months of harnessing that ‘early biz energy’. Ewen (our founder) started growing Venture 4th Media after his 9-5, working late nights and weekends in a coffee shop. Just him, his ideas, computer and coffee.

When I first started my personal freelance, then agency journey, I didn’t know anything about SEO, content, or even where to begin. I didn’t know anyone who had even made any money online. All I had was my laptop, an ‘office’ space in my tiny living room and nothing to lose.

There is an energy and dare I say excitement we can all tap into when our backs are against the wall, when we’re starting from ground zero and we just have to figure something out.

You see, too often once we’ve seen some success, we get rigid in our approach. We want to stick to what works, but in times of disruption, we need to flex those early day muscles.

This is where the magic happens!

So, this year, we’ve been forced to some harsh realities.

Yes. Google has broken the covenant with publishers.

We cannot rely on search alone for the traffic strategy it once was.

Today’s Google and search landscape loves communities, forums and yes, that includes the big daddy of them all, Reddit.

And today we’re going to discuss what this looks like and dig in a bit more.

The BLUF of it all: Reddit feels the next big blue sky opportunity in our industry right now.

The Rise of Communities

With the proliferation of AI in our digital world, it’s shouldn’t be a surprise that we are seeing the growth of user generated communities.

But, I don’t think many of us could have predicted that in 2024, we’d see Reddit become as massive as Amazon.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

For the past couple of months, we’ve been hearing about a lot of different traffic strategies.

We’ve heard a lot about Pinterest, Facebook, or other social platforms. Many of us have talked about diversification of traffic strategies.

The problem with many of these strategies for our publications:

• Diversification of traffic to many sources means diversification of resources. It’s hard to really double down on anything when you’re stretched too thin.

• We need to create many different types of content and have the resources to distribute.

• You are still on someone else’s rented land, and now we’re learning a new set of rules to follow and keep up with!

• Depending on the platform, all your previous content learnings and strategies may become obsolete.

• It can take time to see results (Pinterest, for example has a sandbox of sorts).

• It often requires a pay-to-play strategy.

Over the past few years, we’ve done a ton of small traffic tests to see where we might hit paydirt. We’ve tested Flipboard, Tik Tok, Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter (sorry, I can’t call it X) just to name a few.

While we’ve seen mixed results in these, so we’ve always come back to what we know: SEO + great content to grow our publications because that’s where our ROI has always been best and most reliable.

But, yeah, this isn’t working the same these days.

Now, instead of our indie publications in the SERPs, we’re seeing forums, and yes, tons and tons of Reddit.

So, it kind of hit us like a brick wall — If you can’t beat them, why don’t you join them?

Our initial thesis was this: what if we could just start to use Reddit as a search engine proxy and recover some of the traffic we lost?

People are still searching for the queries we used to rank for. But now, people are being served Reddit answers.

So, we harnessed that ‘early days’ energy and started to really experiment with Reddit as a distribution channel to see if we could get some traffic that way.

This meant we could re-share our huge library of content without having to invest in a ton of new content production.

This also meant that we could still monetize our content the way we’ve been doing and start seeing ROI quickly.

Yes. This did mean that people would have to find us first through Reddit and then click to our sites, but at least they could find us! That’s a huge first step!

But, as we continue to dig deeper into the ecosystem of Reddit, we’ve discovered so many more ways to take advantage of this platform and we’ve really just scratched the surface.

It feels like the wild west days of the internet again. We’ve got a new massive playground to experiment in.

Some Reddit Use Cases We’ve Discovered

1. Traffic Strategy - Reddit as a search engine proxy.

This is the best advice you are going to get today:

2. Reddit for organic viral distribution.

You can hit paydirt on Reddit as well. I’m seeing a lot of this happen lately.

3. Idea Validation

As creators, we have a lot of ideas. Launching a new idea into the internet can be time consuming and costly. I have been on the losing end of a seemingly great idea that took thousands of dollars to launch only to realize after months that people didn’t really want to buy it.

But what if you could validate your next biz offering without even investing in a landing page?

Reddit can be a great place to test your idea in the ‘real’ world and start to grow an audience before you go all in.

I love this!

There is so much more to Reddit (these days) than I have time to get into here. Luckily I’ve got a great resource for you if you want to dig deeper.

Ewen finally decided to block some time to share his learnings and he created a course called Reddit Leverage!

The good news — you can implement this strategy in a weekend and start seeing results right away.

I’ve been going through this course and I’m learning a lot.

And, he gave me a special deal just for all of my Content Forward peeps.

If you are not taking advantage of Reddit, you are missing out:

Check it out here!

This is the CLOSEST thing to the Google playbook that is WORKING right now.

Use code: CONTENTFORWARD if discount is not applied.

Things to Read, Watch, and Ponder

▶️ Should we rethink our SEO strategies after the Google API leak? Rand Fishkin weighs in again this week, this time at Moz Con. Check out the learnings from our friends at Search Engine Land here if you’re curious. 

▶️ I don’t think I’ve shared this yet, but it’s a great resource on what content marketing managers do. Check it out now!

▶️ Freelance rates are all over the place, but Kaitlyn Arford has a great resource here on the all the rate databases that are out there. Good to know if you are looking to hire a freelancer as well! Read that here!

▶️Not every SEO job is a good one, but how do you know when it’s time to walk away? Kavi Kardos sat down with Women in Tech SEO’s Isaline Muelhauser to discuss. A worthy discussion to listen to here! 

Thank you for joining me here again this week!

I’m surprised that more of us are not talking about Reddit and forums, but I think that will change. This is just the start! We’re digging into a ton of strategies here, I’ll keep you all in the loop.

This is a really exciting time to be in our industry as we navigate new waters but I’m here for all of it!

Cheers! Amy

Some Bonus Newsletters You’ll Love

If you want to get into the weeds on these topics, here are some newsletters that I read regularly that I think you’ll enjoy: