@Steve L... All these experiments are awesome. Huge respect to you for making all these ideas happen! Good stuff is coming your way for sure. Keep it up!

Viral Hits - 🔥

• Most upvotes yet: 553

Content Experiment - ✍🏽 🧪

I ran my 1st contest. 

Josh Haroldson said on 5/27/2022 at 11:48 AM:

@Steve L... All these experiments are awesome. Huge respect to you for making all these ideas happen! Good stuff is coming your way for sure. Keep it up!

@Josh HaroldsonThanks man! I appreciate that

Path to monetization 🤑

I applied to 45 affiliate programs last week. So far, 7 approvals. The bulk is pending approval. Ebay & Amazon let anybody in - they should all be like that IMO. 

Now, why does one rejection low key bother me lol 

I just want to say this is a dope business idea! Congratulations.

Krista Summitt said 5 minutes ago:

I just want to say this is a dope business idea! Congratulations.

Thanks! I appreciate that 

I was so excited as a copywriter AND sneakerhead when I heard Neville mention this on his latest STUPID email podcast!

Community Insights - 🔬

My assumption was that the majority of my community was sneakerheads. I was wrong...

Steven: I think what this says is: with the fashion bloggers and pro athlete fashion accounts on Insta and Snapchat, sneaker culture has broadened out. I saw a pic of a pulitzer prize winning journalist at a sneaker shop in Tulsa rocking an unreleased pair of AJ1s this week! 

Krista Summitt said 1 hour ago:

 sneaker culture has broadened out. 

Yes very true! I read the sneaker market is going 120B by 2026 - I just need a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that to be happy lol 

Growth Updates - 🚀 

7k subs hit (3k to goal) 

I am averaging about 200-50 new subs per week. This is a large result from posting two listicles of deals per week to a mega sub reddit(3m subs) & tagging my sub in the post. 

To get the 3k I need, I will keep repeating this process. 

On top of that, I will repost a guide for deal hunting i wrote. I wonder if It will result in more upvotes and subs rather than deal post. STay tuned for results. 

Swing & Miss - 🤦🏽‍♂️

I applied to over 100 affiliate programs & got accepted into about 10 so far. most are still pending.  

I had a great idea to post nothing but affiliate links for the next two weeks. I started in that direction.... 

Then I got some hate from my subs. It was just a few ppl so I don't really care. I learned that many ppl are on reddit just to complain about stuff. I have had many positive comments on my sub over the months with people saying "I hope you are getting paid for your hard work" & other stuff to that effect. 

If the complainers keep complaining, I will just boot them. Instead of trolling them - which is always so damn tempting. It's fun to troll a troller. I will admit it. ha 

Besides that... Reddit does not like affiliate links or at least the ones from Rakuten. (& yes Rakuten runs a huge affiliate network.) 

So i would normally auto post deals to my page for 2-3 weeks in advance. When I posted the deals with affiliate links they required my manual approval to publish. So that blew the auto publishing plan out of the water. I then went in and manually approved those post the next day. The following day Reddit's internal "spam" bot unpublished them. 

New plan: 

1. Go back to normal non affiliate link posting so I don't get my account banned

2. Create listicles of affiliate deals once a week. Be upfront about the post containing affiliate links & mention this is a good way to support my work. 

3. Work harder on getting email subs. I can post affiliate deals freely that way. 

Community Insights - 🔬

1 benefit to building a community on Reddit is the polling feature. Here are two that I recently ran & why I ran them...

Engagement Experiments - 👨🏽‍🔬 What I tried to get the community talking

The goal is to get more members to post more content. 

So I made a list of all of the member who has ever posted on the sub within the last few months. I am going to send them a personalised thank you message & try to strike up a convo with them via reddit chat. 

Hopefully this inspires them to post more + I can get to know some of the active members better. 

They could possibly be MODs for the page day. 

Growth Hacks - 🪚

over the past few weeks, I have been publishing "best of/ wrap up" newsletter style posts which covers all of the most popular content on the sub for the past week. 

Thanks @Neville for this idea in office hours a few weeks ago. 

So on the most recent, I put a little spin on it.  

Milestone Hit - 👊🏾 = 8k subs! (2k to go)

Engagement Experiments - 👨🏽‍🔬

I cold DMed all of my followers on reddit (95 or so) 

One simple message to strike up a convo:

"Thanks for the follow"

"hey, just wanted to say hi. How are you enjoying the midsoledeals community? "

 So far, I got roughly 12 replies. 

All positive! I asked for ways I can improve. 

here are some replies: