Monetize a 500k+ Subscriber Subreddit In Financial Niche

Phenom

Phenom

Get Rich Snippets, Or Die Trying
BuSo Pro
Digital Strategist
Joined
Nov 12, 2014
Messages
190
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Hey fellers!
Been awhile since I have posted on here, just been slammed with my 9-5 and rebuilding my house after a fucking water leak destroyed about 1400+ square feet. Anyways, no need for a sob story...

I created a subreddit back in prob 2016 based on trading stocks when I was building a site around the same topic. It grew organically to about 10k subs and I got offered $10k for the site, so I sold the site. The guy was not interested in the subreddit that came with it, so I added 2 mods and let it just do its thing.

I happened to get featured as a trending subreddit in 2018 at some point and the sub count exploded. Currently its sitting at about 580k subs. It has decent engagement/traffic on the subreddit, and the chat built into the subreddit is active all damn day.

Basically I know I am sitting on some potential monies as the niche of trading stocks is deff a money maker, but I dont want to be stupid with aff/referral links and have it banned or get de-modded..... Anyways, I am looking for some ways to monetize this bad boy, besides the obvious choice of building another site and funneling people to it.

Some ideas I have had are:
  • Reaching out to some "learn to trade" websites that offer courses or paid discord chats.
  • Reaching out to an app/exchange and featuring them in the sidebar and as a sticky post
  • Building out the Wiki section and creating lists of top exchanges, top tools, top courses etc and having people pay to be on those lists
  • Creating a Google Form to build a list and use that to send offers too
  • Or just saying fuck it and dropping some referral links in the sidebar.

Anyways would love to hear from anyone who has done anything similar or has any ideas. :smile:

Thanks pals!
 
The typical way of monetizing a sub-reddit is "native advertising" where basically you use a "power account" that's not a mod or not affiliated with you or a brand, and you make a post for the brand about the brand. But you do it in such a way that it's not obvious that it's a marketing ploy.

And since you're the mod, you allow this to exist. You comment with a few other accounts to fluff it up and upvote it (and maybe downvote other posts that happened at the exact same time so yours rises to the top), etc. You use your inside-influence to get it exposure (without buying upvotes lest you get Reddit's detection involved). It helps to have an account that's so active that people recognize it and love it and because it has ten zillion karma every dummy on Reddit plays along, since their main fear and concern is not fitting in.

It'll play out a little different on a finance sub-reddit than it would on /r/Pics/ or whatever, but the general tactic is the same: Native advertising that doesn't' look like advertising that you boost and allow to exist because you're in control. And it's Pay-per-post. Or "PPP + Commissions" or something but you have to take some pay up front or you end up carrying all the risk.
 
I'm working on a financial subreddit too. @Phenom

Mine is very small but a growing and hot topic.

What I did was create a AutoMod bot that links to our FAQs, Rules, and a my own Site. It does this for every single post.

Unsure if Google will consider this parasite SEO. Google loves Reddit now though so I don't see the issue.

I also post full articles in the Subreddit and link to my own site as the source.

You should be building an email list from your own website too imho. I haven't done a great job of this yet, but will.

I have multiple mod accounts in case one gets banned too.
 
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