How To Make $100 Per Day On Reddit

Most people treat Reddit like a place to argue about movies and share memes. A much smaller group uses it to make $100 per day, sometimes more, by showing up in the right communities, answering the right questions, and recommending products that genuinely help people. The entire thing costs zero dollars to start and requires no website, no email list, and no ad budget.

Alston Godbolt walked through the exact process on video, including a live demonstration inside Reddit itself. This post breaks that method down section by section so you can follow along and take action today, not someday.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear picture of how Reddit’s subreddit structure creates ready-made audiences for affiliate marketers
The two-phase approach: help first and build credibility before you ever share a link
Why sorting by “New” is the fastest path to traction when your account is brand new
The exact comment strategy Alston used in the woodworking niche to plant the seed that leads to a sale
Why Reddit bans shortened URLs and what you should use instead
How creating your own subreddit turns Reddit into a search engine that sends you free traffic on autopilot
How to pick affiliate products with commissions high enough that you only need one or two sales a day to hit $100
Not sure which offer to promote? Answer three questions at finder.platformproof.com and find the right fit for your background

What Reddit Actually Is (And Why It Works for Making Money)

Reddit is a social media and forum platform where people from every corner of the internet gather around shared interests. What makes it different from Instagram or Twitter is structure. Instead of one big feed, Reddit is divided into thousands of smaller communities called subreddits, or subs. Each sub is dedicated to a specific topic: woodworking, weight loss, web hosting, personal finance, cooking, parenting, and on and on.

That structure is the opportunity. When you search for “weight loss” inside Reddit, you immediately see communities like r/fatlogic with 292,000 members and r/fitness with 369,000 members. These are not random internet strangers. They are people who actively identified themselves as interested in a specific topic and joined a community around it. That is as pre-qualified an audience as you will find anywhere online, and it costs you nothing to walk in the door.

Alston makes a point that applies across every platform he covers: if it has a search function, you can make money with it. Reddit has a search function. That means people are already typing in questions that correspond directly to the products and services you could recommend. Your job is to show up in those conversations and be genuinely helpful.

Step 1: Create a Free Account and Pick Your Niche

The first thing you need is a free Reddit account. That is it. No credit card, no domain name, no software subscription. You create the account and you are in.

Once you have an account, pick a niche. The niche should connect to an affiliate product or service you can genuinely recommend. In the video, Alston uses woodworking as a concrete example because Ted’s Woodworking is a well-known product on Clickbank. The product offers access to 16,000 woodworking plans, which gives you something specific and useful to mention naturally in a conversation. But you can run this method with almost any niche: web hosting, swimming pools, cooking equipment, personal finance tools, fitness gear, software, whatever lines up with products you believe in.

The niche you pick will determine which subreddits you join. When Alston searched for “woodworking” he found at least three high-quality subreddits covering the same general topic. The biggest had 1.8 million members. You have options, and which one you start with matters.

Why Smaller Subreddits Work Better When You Are Starting Out

When your account is brand new, you have zero credibility. Reddit shows this in several ways: you have no upvotes, no comment history, and no reputation inside any community. Jumping into a subreddit with 1.8 million members as a new account means your comments will get buried under hundreds of existing responses from established users. You need traction before you can compete at that level.

The smarter move is to start in mid-size or smaller subreddits in your niche. A community with 50,000 to 200,000 members still has plenty of active questions but far less competition for attention. Your answer has a real shot at rising to the top if it is genuinely helpful. Once your answers start getting upvoted and people recognize your username, you become the subject matter expert in that space, and that reputation carries weight.

Alston notes that becoming recognized as a subject matter expert can happen faster than you would expect. A few solid, detailed answers posted consistently over less than a week can put your username on people’s radar. Reddit is a meritocracy: good answers get votes, and votes equal visibility.

Step 2: Sort by New and Start Answering Questions

Once you are in a subreddit, do not click on “Hot” or “Top” posts first. Sort by “New.” New posts are questions that were just asked. The people who asked them are still actively waiting for a response. That is a completely different situation from a three-year-old post that already has 400 answers.

When Alston demonstrated this live in the woodworking subreddit, he found a question that had been posted just three minutes earlier. Someone had asked something, had not gotten a good answer yet, and was sitting there watching their notifications. If you go in and answer that question well, they get notified immediately. If they like your response, they upvote it. Your comment rises, more people see it, and your credibility starts building from that single interaction.

At this stage, your only job is to help. No affiliate links. No promotions. No selling. Just find questions you can genuinely answer and answer them as well as you possibly can. This phase builds the account authority you need before Reddit or its users will tolerate any kind of recommendation from you.

The Woodworking Example: Walking a Real Thread

Alston walked through exactly how this plays out in practice using the woodworking niche. Say someone posts a photo of simple shelves they made from Douglas fir and asks for feedback. You go in and comment: “Looks pretty cool. I tried building something similar for my wife and I struggled finding plans that were complete when I was first getting started.” That is it. A genuine, human comment that connects your experience to theirs.

That comment plants a seed. The original poster, or someone else reading the thread, will often come back and ask: “What did you end up doing to find plans?” That is your opening. You can then say something like: “I went to Ted’s Woodworking and it turned out they had 16,000 plans to choose from. I actually spent more time browsing than building because there were so many options.” Then you share your affiliate link or send them to a landing page.

The key is that the recommendation came naturally as a result of a real question. You did not force it. You did not post “BUY THIS PRODUCT” in a thread where nobody asked. You told a story about your own experience and gave a specific, useful answer. That is the difference between spam and genuine marketing.

Alston also points out that for more complex or elaborate woodworking projects, the payoff is even bigger. A simple shelf might not warrant the mention because it is easy enough to figure out without a plan library. But a complicated bookcase, a custom Limburg-style shelf, or a structural piece where you genuinely needed help finding detailed instructions? That is exactly when Ted’s Woodworking becomes a logical recommendation. Match the complexity of the recommendation to the complexity of the problem.

Step 3: Build Credibility First, Then Add Your Affiliate Link

After you have spent some time answering questions, something shifts. People in the subreddit start recognizing your username. They associate you with helpful, knowledgeable responses. When they have a question, they start tagging you or directly asking you what you recommend. That is the moment you have been building toward.

At that point, adding your affiliate link to a response feels completely natural, because someone literally asked you for a recommendation. Alston says this transition can happen in less than a week of consistent participation. You are not waiting months to see results. A focused effort over five to seven days of answering questions in a mid-size subreddit can establish you as someone worth listening to.

Important note: many subreddits have explicit rules against dropping affiliate links, especially in your first few comments. Read the rules before you post anything promotional. Some communities are very welcoming of genuine recommendations from established members. Others have strict no-promotion policies. Knowing the difference saves you from getting banned before you ever build traction.

Why You Cannot Use Shortened URLs on Reddit

Reddit actively blocks shortened URLs. If you try to post a bit.ly link or any other URL shortener, you will run into problems. Reddit may flag the post, the moderators may remove it, or your account may get flagged as spam. This is not something you can work around by using a different shortener. Reddit does not like them, full stop.

The solution is to use a real URL. Ideally, you send people to a landing page or a full website that pre-sells the product before they click through to your affiliate link. A landing page gives you space to explain what the product is, why you recommend it, and what the person can expect. By the time they click your affiliate link, they are already warmed up and much more likely to buy.

Alston gives web hosting as a second example here. When someone on Reddit asks “what is the best web hosting platform,” you can go in and recommend Bluehost, then send them to a YouTube video you made reviewing Bluehost rather than sending them directly to your affiliate link. People prefer watching a five-minute video over reading a wall of text. The video does the selling, the video contains the affiliate link, and Reddit never even sees a shortened URL. That is the clean way to run this.

Strategy 2: Create Your Own Subreddit

The second strategy Alston covers is creating your own subreddit. This one takes about five minutes to set up. As long as you have a Reddit account in good standing, no negative reputation, and no spam flags, you can create a subreddit around any niche you want. You write a brief description, set some basic rules, and it is live.

What you do with your subreddit is post your own content: YouTube videos you have made, blog posts you have written, articles that cover topics in your niche. The posts should be keyword-rich so that when someone searches for a topic on Reddit, your posts show up in the results.

Alston demonstrated this live. He searched “how to promote Clickbank products with paid ads” from Reddit’s main search bar. Scrolling through the results, the first two posts that appeared were his own. The third and fourth were also his. His subreddit content was outranking everything else in those results, which means anyone searching for that topic on Reddit got sent directly to his content, and from there to his YouTube channel or blog. He confirmed in the video that this method drives real traffic back to his other platforms.

This is a longer-term play than answering individual questions, but it compounds over time. Every post you publish in your subreddit has the potential to appear in Reddit search results for months or years after you wrote it. You do the work once and it keeps delivering.

Keyword Research Is the Same Everywhere

Alston makes a point worth repeating: the keywords people type into Google and YouTube are the same keywords they type into Reddit. This simplifies your research considerably. You do not need a separate Reddit keyword tool. Just do keyword research on YouTube or Google the way you normally would, then apply those same terms to your Reddit content and comments.

If you find that “how to choose web hosting for a small business” gets a lot of search volume on YouTube, that tells you people are typing similar phrases into Reddit. Write a subreddit post targeting that phrase. Answer questions that use that language. When someone on Reddit searches for anything related to that phrase, your content has a shot at appearing in their results. The research you do for one platform serves all of them.

Pick Products With Higher Commissions to Hit $100 Faster

Not all affiliate products are created equal when it comes to hitting a daily income target. If you are promoting a product that pays you $3 per sale, you need 34 sales per day to make $100. That is a very different challenge from promoting a product that pays $50 or $100 per sale, where you need one or two sales a day to hit the same number.

Web hosting is one of the examples Alston points to specifically. Hosting companies often pay substantial commissions because the customer lifetime value is high. A customer who signs up for hosting might stay for years. The hosting company can afford to pay you well for that referral. Clickbank products in niches like woodworking, fitness, or cooking can also pay significant commissions. ClickFunnels is another example, one that Alston mentions directly, because it is a product with recurring commissions tied to a software subscription. Every month the customer stays subscribed, you earn again on the same referral.

The math matters. Before you pick a niche and start building Reddit credibility, look at what the affiliate product actually pays per sale. Make sure the commission structure gives you a realistic path to $100 per day without needing an unrealistic volume of conversions.

Not sure which affiliate offer lines up with your background and skills?

Answer three questions at finder.platformproof.com and get a specific recommendation based on what you already know and what you are willing to learn.

Honest Drawbacks of Making Money on Reddit

Reddit is a real opportunity, but it is not instant money and it is not without friction. Here are the honest limitations you should know before you start.

First, the credibility-building phase takes time and real effort. You cannot create an account today and start dropping affiliate links tomorrow. You need to put in the work of answering questions, getting upvotes, and establishing yourself as someone worth listening to. For most people this takes several days to a couple of weeks before results start appearing.

Reddit can shadowban or ban accounts that promote too aggressively, even if you think you are being subtle. The moderators of individual subreddits also have full authority to remove posts and ban users from their communities.
Some subreddits have strict no-affiliate and no-promotion rules. Always read the rules pinned at the top of any subreddit before you post anything that could be seen as commercial.
Your comments can get buried in larger subreddits if you do not have enough account history or upvotes. Starting in smaller communities and working your way up is the safer path.
Reddit users are famously skeptical of anything that feels like marketing. The second they sense you are there only to sell, the community will push back hard. Genuine helpfulness is not optional here. It is the entire strategy.
Results are not guaranteed to be consistent day to day. Some days a thread you answered catches fire and brings real traffic. Other days nothing moves. Building a system across multiple subreddits and your own sub gives you more stability over time.

A Step-by-Step Action Plan to Start This Week

If you want to put this into motion now rather than filing it away as something you might do someday, here is the sequence to follow.

Create a free Reddit account at reddit.com. Use a username that is neutral, not obviously promotional.
Pick one niche that connects to an affiliate product you can genuinely stand behind. Do not try to work five niches at once when you are starting out.
Search your niche in Reddit and identify two or three subreddits with 50,000 to 500,000 members. Note their rules before you comment on anything.
Sort each subreddit by New. Spend 30 to 45 minutes each day finding questions you can answer well and writing genuine, detailed responses. No links yet.
Do this for five to seven days. Track which answers are getting upvoted. Notice when people start engaging with you directly or tagging you in follow-up comments.
Once you have established some credibility, begin weaving in recommendations naturally when someone asks a question that your affiliate product directly solves. Use a full URL to a landing page or a YouTube video review, not a shortened link.
In parallel, create your own subreddit around your niche. Start posting keyword-optimized content: summaries of YouTube videos, original posts answering common questions in your niche. Do keyword research on YouTube or Google first, then mirror those search terms in your Reddit posts.
Monitor which posts in your own sub are getting search traffic. Double down on those topics. Create more content in the same vein.

Find Your X

Reddit gives you the distribution. What it cannot give you is clarity on which offer to promote. Picking the wrong product, one with a low commission rate, weak conversions, or a topic you know nothing about, will waste all the credibility-building work you put in. Get the offer right first, then build your Reddit presence around it.

Take three minutes at finder.platformproof.com to answer a few questions about your background, your interests, and how much time you have. The Finder gives you a specific recommendation rather than a generic list of options. Start there, then come back and apply the Reddit strategy to the niche that actually fits you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need to spend any money to start making money on Reddit?

No. Creating a Reddit account is completely free and you can begin participating in subreddits the same day. The affiliate programs Alston references, including Clickbank, Amazon Associates, and ClickFunnels, are also free to join. The only cost involved would be if you decided to build a landing page or website to send people to, and even then there are free options available at the start.

How long does it actually take to see the first sale?

Alston says credibility can build in less than a week with consistent effort. That said, your first sale depends on a lot of factors: how active the subreddit is, how good your answers are, whether someone in the thread actually needs the product you are recommending, and whether your affiliate link converts well. Some people see results in the first week. Others take a few weeks to find their footing. Do not quit after day three.

Can you get banned for promoting affiliate links on Reddit?

Yes, if you do it wrong. Dropping affiliate links in your first few comments, posting the same link across many subreddits in a short time window, or posting in subreddits that explicitly prohibit promotional links are all paths to getting banned. The way to stay safe is to build credibility first, read subreddit rules carefully, and only share links when someone specifically asked for a recommendation. That context makes your link useful rather than spammy.

What affiliate products work best for this Reddit strategy?

Products that solve specific, searchable problems tend to work best. Ted’s Woodworking works because woodworkers have a clear, recurring problem: finding quality plans. Bluehost and other web hosting affiliates work because people regularly ask “what hosting should I use” in tech and entrepreneur subreddits. ClickFunnels works in business and marketing communities. The key is that the product is a direct answer to a question people are already asking on Reddit, not something you have to convince them they need.

How many subreddits should you participate in at once?

Alston’s approach when starting out is to focus on one niche and two or three subreddits within that niche. Spreading yourself across ten different niches and twenty subreddits when you are new will dilute your effort and slow your credibility building in any one place. Once you have established yourself in one niche and the income there is consistent, you can expand into a second niche with a new account or a new subreddit focus.

What should you do if a subreddit does not allow affiliate links?

There are two options. First, you can still participate and build credibility in that subreddit, then direct people who ask for recommendations to your own subreddit, your YouTube channel, or a blog post where the affiliate link lives. Second, you can simply find a different subreddit in the same niche that has more permissive rules. Most large niches have multiple subreddits with different rule sets. You do not have to fight the rules; you find the communities that work with your approach.

Is creating your own subreddit worth it, or is it better to just comment in existing ones?

Both strategies have value, and Alston recommends running them in parallel. Commenting in existing subreddits gets you in front of an established audience quickly. Creating your own subreddit builds a long-term asset that works for you through Reddit search without depending on anyone else’s community rules or moderation decisions. In the video, Alston showed that his subreddit posts ranked at the top of Reddit search results for specific keyword phrases, which means he gets ongoing traffic from posts he wrote once. That is the kind of compounding return that makes the extra five minutes of setup worth it.

Does this work in niches other than woodworking or web hosting?

Yes. Alston specifically says this method works with any niche and any affiliate product or service. He mentions weight loss, swimming pools, Amazon Associates (for physical products), and ClickFunnels as examples beyond woodworking and web hosting. The principle is universal: find a community of people with a specific problem, become genuinely helpful inside that community, and recommend products that solve the problem. As long as there are active subreddits in your niche and an affiliate product that people in those subreddits would actually want, the strategy applies.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Make 100 Dollars Per Day On Reddit,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/pswWFM8cgq8
Reddit.com, subreddit directory and search function, accessed 2026
Clickbank Marketplace, Ted’s Woodworking product listing
ClickFunnels Affiliate Program, clickfunnels.com
Amazon Associates Program, affiliate-program.amazon.com