I’ve been a bit quiet here lately. Been dealing with some personal stuff but out the other side of it now so I’m getting back into the swing of things!
Due to inactivity on my Reddit account I’ve kind of had to start again with RedditGrow. I was already banished to ‘Recovery’ mode because I had the audacity to post some helpful tips in my target (promo) subs.
So I had 45 (ish) tasks to complete to drag my sorry ass out of recovery. Each task requires you to post at least 5 (useful) comments on Reddit in your ‘hobby’ subs.
I’ve had a couple of big wins last couple of days and grabbed around 850 karma in 2 days … lol … so now I’m sitting pretty at 1.2k karma about 5 weeks into this or something.
RedditGrow is indicating that I can leave recovery early if my CQS is ‘moderate’.
What on earth is CQS I hear you say … “Contributor Quality Score” apparently!
Well … my CQS is now moderate so I’m all excited again to test this thing out. I’m pretty happy with the screenshot below. Regenerating now …
Sorry about your personal stuff Rohan, but thanks for the update! I’ve been sitting at 1494 on Reddit for 2 years now. Only using it once and a while to share youtube vids or blog posts on my own subreddit. Scared to ‘spam’ other subreddits lol. Especially in my niche, they are so quickly ban-triggered or people reporting my answers or content ( I think ) . And then the ban- hammer hits quickly lol!
thanks for keeping us updated. Still no time for it though lol, just received a big gift as an ‘influencer’: a lasercutter/engraver, with air purifier and rotary tool and everything. I’m busy lol
Lizzy
Did a few projects already It’s fun, can’t wait to finally have some time to make stuff that are unrelated to my miniature niche, as I have a bit more content to create for xTool lol. Takes quite some time to edit all and review the first impressions/the experiences with it. It will be nice to have some personalised gifts to for Christmas and such.
About Reddit, did you read that ChatGPT has stopped scraping Reddit for its resources? Interesting.. They’ll probably turn it back though.
In the meantime, Google is still doing constant ‘spam’ updates, which gives me a little bit of traffic back, but then again, not worth the hassle at all.
I’m curious how it goes with RedditGrow for Google though, does it help? Very few people still talk about growing on Reddit. I think growing it with AI is bad thing for Reddit, one needs manual work still on that platform. Just like on Linkedn, where they will hide content created with AI. Facebook still no issues with AI though, as long as you put the AI lable on it, there’s no stopping AI in general. I’m also using it more and more for personal stuff.
Like I have a problem with my nose, after I had surgery to it years ago (not esthetic surgery, but to open it up). And I had a second opinion already with ‘nothing we can do about that mam’). Turns out there ARE other doctors in Belgium who could help me out, there just not many of them and they have a large waiting list. (februari 2027 is my first intake) . But thanks to ChatGPT I do have some hope now at least that I could get rid of the issue, which is giving me sleepless nights.
Anyway, got distracted, typicle me hahaha
I think I’m on schedule for a Facebook comeback this year, still thinking about starting a wooccomerce soon with printables on my site, and then add Reddit to the game, we’ll see.
Lizzy
I had noticed Reddit not often showing in the Google AI overviews for a while now but didn’t know about GPT rejecting Reddit … to be fair there is a lot of AI fakery on Reddit now.
For affiliate marketing AI just goes with the territory though I’m afraid. It’s basically an arms race now where the ‘little guy’ has a significantly increased chance of playing with the big dogs.
My Reddit traffic is on the up and up currently though
Still in the early stages here. Life happened and the last 2 months have been a bit full-on so it’s been a slow burn with RedditGrow. But my new Reddit account is in pretty good standing and ‘warmup’ is now nearly finished.
It’ll be interesting to see how the ‘promotion’ phase goes. Need to tread pretty carefully on Reddit!
Yes, very tricky on Reddit, I have been banned before. Well, it was Partha’s fault actually, lol.
( if he still reads this, he knows it’s true).
Anyway, Reddit is such a hit or lose, I don’t get it. On the one hand, they dont want you to ‘spam’, on the other, they advise you to repost the same thing. Ugh.
I had posted some info and a link to my first impressions of the xTool and now Reddit advises me ‘do it again’. No way, I’m sure I’ll get banned lol.
By the way, just as I said that Facebook was going well with referal traffic, they are rolling out limiting links to outside the platform. Darn I’m so mad! (unless you would pay 150$ per month). How can they even do that! It’s like: we know we have all put a knife in your guys backs in the last years, together with Google, Youtube, etc, but it isn’t deep enough you know!
Surely if you’ve actually physically used the product and your post conveys that, Reddit would be cool with it?
Jeeez there’s always something isn’t there! I’m starting to think the only credible route to earning a few bucks online is to learn hacking … lol (not really).
And I’m only half joking - bit off-topic but I don’t know if you remember me talking about the AWS subdomain stuff I’ve been seeing for well over a year now (yes it’s still going strong) … well I did some actual reverse engineering (with Chatty writing some code to snoop around the place) and managed to deconstruct much of the operation.
What I couldn’t work out was how they were managing to publish on existing AWS subdomains and it now seems likely they found a backdoor into vulnerable AWS setups. So not strictly legal!
I’m still going to see if Chatty can find out how they’re doing it but you have to pretend to be doing it for ethical reasons otherwise it’s a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to from my little AI buddy … ha ha
If you are doing it correctly, you should easily be making 10X this a month with a FB page, so the cost is worth it. We make a little less than $10K with our FB page, so the price is probably going to be worth it for us (if we can’t find a different way).
If you’re interested, you’re welcome to send me over what you know and have tried, and I’m happy to take a look. I’ve been able to get Claude to find and do some things that it didn’t think were possible, lol. Sounds like a fun challenge to try though.
Continue to keep us posted about this though, since Reddit is continually on my mind that I need to get into it, so I always look forward to reading your write ups/reviews about how it’s going!
Let me see what I can pull together Andy. Off the back of the reverse engineering I’ve done already, I coded a “AWS Video Site Builder” which takes a few inputs and builds an entire static HTML website on an AWS subdomain (it loads super fast!). I added the home page to Omega indexer and within 2 days I had 75% of the subdomain indexed in Google.
While I didn’t dislodge the spammed ‘video’ results from the video block, I did occupy every tile in the ‘shorts video block’ which was often appearing at the bottom of page 1 … and if you click the ‘Show more’ button my AWS ‘video’ pages were occupying 70% plus of all the shorts videos listed. Pretty crazy!
So I think it might actually work on a search query where there is not so much video competition but as usual time has got the better of me and I haven’t pursued the project for 3 weeks or so now.
Although, the latest Google spam update appears to have nuked all the spammy ‘video’ pages for that query now … lol … but I’m still seeing some of my AWS subdomain in the regular organic results
So that’s that. I don’t think I really have the time nor the inclination to go through all that again! Plus the risk to my already established account is very real.
It seems we need to be a bit more clever with Reddit (proxies, browser identity etc)
My gosh! auwch! I think my advantage could be that when I got banned, it was with an IP adress from England (Partha). So the new one I made is from Belgium now. I’m afraid that once you get banned from a certain adress, it will always be banned again from that same adress.
This is why also, that I won’t put the same links in other subreddits or my own subreddit, their ‘spam’ instinct is way to sensitive. Maybe the same link after a year or so lol. Only new links, and yet even those, like maybe once or twice per week. I’m not sure at all about all of this, but I think 8/10 of any of your posts , need to be regular conversation, and that is bloody hard to keep up with. unless someone is addicted to the platform discussions hahahaha
I am still going to try it one day, but try and build my own subreddit, maybe there’s more ‘allowed’ on your own?
My experience to date would not support this. The way I was managing the two accounts was to start a fresh incognito browser window every time. My main account is still live and not shadowbanned at this point. But I’m going to be super careful from now on because my IP address was always the same and obviously the machine/browser was the same too.
Maybe Reddit let that ride because two or three people in the same household could be on Reddit at the same time. I don’t know.
Yep there’s definitely more allowed on your own subreddit. I think with your own sub you’re more likely to get banned from other users reporting your posts rather than IP issues etc.
I am so far from the 10K per month, I wish! Off course then, it wouldn’t be a problem hahaha. I’m still a small business though, with just 1 team member (Diane), that I can effort. So my main page and all, I am doing everything by myself. And it is working, I saw the spikes in traffic to, although I am assuming not as much as you, but it was steadily growing. Slow, but steady. Sigh.
Remember that I am doing almost everything by myself, I don’t have a cooperating husband (well, he did assisted me in my video’s to unbox my lasercutter lol), and helps in assembling my DIY kits, but actual doing what I do, nothing. Plus, I will still need to do blog posts that take a long time to write, because those do well for Pinterest, etc, etc.. So there is actually not al lot of profit left.
But, and I’m sorry for Diane as well, I just gave up on another FB page that I started, cause it wasnt working. Then with that money I ‘save on Diane’, I will probably subscribe to that, sigh. You still only get 20 post links, and 20 reeel links. Thats still not a lot for that montly amount, even more because my best and most engaged content is tobi posts and memes and images, not reeels. (do people ever click on links from reeels even?) or was it stories, bit confused now.
It’s just not that allone, you know. There’s other costs to. Costs for the postplanner, costs for email listing, costs for blogtopin, costs for AI software to create reeels, for this, for that. Small business= at least half that goes away. I’ve experienced almost 8 months now as a business, and I have like 5k profit so far. I could burn myself up totally and spend my savings, but I dont want to do that now, because my husband is in a special situation now as well, at 54 years old. So , sorry, it is not that ‘easy’ for me, at all. I had those discussions with Partha as well back then. If you dont have the money to spend to get help, it is very hard to get there ‘easily’, by yourself. Turns out, he had a lot of help, for free even. I was shocked.
Lot’s of people gave up in the HCU update, and now that lots of people with original content are also dissepearing, because of Pinterest going down and Facebook going down, whatever they do by themselves (or even with the help of a partner), they are starting to get back to regular jobs, or try something else. I’ve spoken to other Belgian bloggers, it’s pretty horrible what has been happening. google basicly stealing pictures and content for their AI, they have so little profit left, that they can’t invest in courses about how-to-do-well on Facebook or what is happening with their Pinterest account, etc. Please don’t tell everyone it is ‘easy’. yes, it is easy, when you have the money to spend on a team already. Sorry. Still a bit mad here, not at you, to be clear. I’m always thankfull for your genuine help!
Lizzy
… and this is exactly why I have absolutely zero qualms going down the black-hat route with things like SEO Neo and parasite SEO … and maybe even AWS vulnerabilities (but that is probably a bit too black-hat … even for me, lol)
But I will always be up for a bit of ‘authority jacking’ … ha ha
No worries - I know you’re not mad at me! I’m happy to take a look at your FB page if you want. My second page just hit 1K traffic in a day just recently, so I’m willing to share what I know if you want me to
Nice! Guess that wraps up this case study, lol. Do you think this is partly due to Reddit trying to crack down on this more (i.e. it’s harder to do this - still possible, but harder), or do you think it was just something else?
All my posts to date had been either commentary on recent news events (for the Karma) or genuinely helpful posts (sometimes with real effort behind them believe it or not) responding to the OP’s questions.
I had increased the use of this account over the last day or so but only posting 2 or 3 times a day. It might have been the RedditGrow AI content flagging up (although I was editing it and using GPT to create content too as the RG content was a bit lame tbh).
The only thing I did slightly differently on the last post I made before the shadowban was to invite the OP to DM me as they were specifically asking for software recs. So it seemed natural to ask for a DM since the sub prohibited posting promo links.
No idea.
Maybe someone reported me off the back of that post and Reddit took a look at my account.
Or maybe it was purely automated.
It’s definitely time to diversify my parasite portfolio
Thanks, I’ll send you my mini page in a dm
I’m confused by PIB’s latest newsletter.
If it stays at 150$ per month, I still could consider it. But if it goes to more then 600$, I’m even more like ‘what’? I’m afraid I got a little bit mad on his whatsapp group lol
"
In today’s issue: what Meta One Max means for publishers who make money from Facebook links, five stories from the last 24 hours, and the top-performing Facebook posts tracked by NewsBomb.
INSIDER ANALYSIS
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This is honestly really worth it, and long term this is great for the quality of Facebook. A monthly gate will get rid of all the spammers sending traffic to terrible clickbait sites. They run on razor-thin margins and depend on volume, so they will not pay. That cleans up the link ecosystem and allows the quality players to rise up. Over time it retrains the Facebook audience to trust links again, because the links they see will come from publishers who invested in earning that placement. Each click will be worth much more, CTR will be higher, and there will be less throttling.
There is a feature pipeline to watch here too. Paying for Meta One Max and cleaning up the link environment will likely fix the issue where the first comment does not stay at the top of the comments. Once that is resolved, you can expect Meta to release the pin comment feature they have been testing, which turns every high-reach image or Reel into a direct traffic driver. That is another incentive to keep publishers locked in, and we will gladly pay because we will make so much more money as a result.
One important caveat: this is still a limited test. Meta’s own help page states that Meta One is not available everywhere and the link limits are not settled global policy. But the direction is clear. If this rolls out broadly, the publishers who subscribe early and build their workflow around unlimited links and Reel links will be the ones whose content surfaces while everyone else is stuck at two posts a month. Quality publishers paying for access is not a tax. It is a moat."
thats just crazy
Hmmm, I think that might have been the culprit lol. Moderators on subreddits are so darn sensitive, ugh. I think I am going to try focus on building up my own subreddit.
