Share



This entry is part of the Group Research Project sponsored by Wendy Piersall at emomsathome – 28 Internet Marketing and Home Business How To’s.


Writing blog posts that do well on Reddit can be a powerful tool for marketing your blog. From the beginning, Reddit has been an integral part of this blog’s audience and is one of my top three social media sites – Delicious and Stumble Upon being the others.

This is some of what I’ve learned about Reddit over the past 10 months:

Audience:

  • Predominantly Male
  • Highly Intelligent – however this seems to be changing (sorry guys, but there seems to be more trolls and inane comments than a year ago)
  • A large number of users are on college campuses – many of them Ivy League
  • Large numbers of activist Atheists
  • Libertarian or Socialist leaning audience – little conservative presence. Posting something positive about GWB or Christianity will go nowhere – even if it is well written.

Topics that do well:

  • GTD – Productivity
  • Writing Tips
  • Financial Advice – “How to save money on X”
  • Psychology
  • Intelligence
  • Education
  • Sex
  • Science
  • Programming
  • Drug Policy
  • Anti-Corporate – “How I got screwed by Circuit City”
  • Anti-War
  • Libertarian Politics
  • Socialist Politics
  • Conservative Bashing
  • Religion Bashing

Topics which rarely fly:

  • Blogging
  • Family/Parenting: one exception – 10 Things I Learned from my 4-Year-Old did well – not sure why.
  • Marketing – SEO
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Business Advice
  • The Law of Attraction
  • Spirituality
  • Pro-Religion
  • Conservatism

Read the Dos and Donts on Reddiquette. Here are a couple of items that make Reddit unique among social media sites.

  • sometimes bad timing, a bad title, or just plain bad luck can cause an interesting story to fail to get noticed. Feel free to post something again if you feel that the earlier posting didn’t get the attention it deserved and you think you can do better.
  • Old content and self-promotion are okay, because Reddit is a meritocracy

From Reddiquette discussion:

davidmccabe: Just so it’s clear, is it alright to resubmit one’s own submissions with an improved title? If so, how long should one wait before doing that?

akkartik: Just don’t flood the new queue. If the old one doesn’t have any comments consider deleting it before resubmitting. Aside from that I think anything is fine.

If one of your posts makes the front page of Reddit (especially if it climbs above #10) it will likely result in dozens of link backs, possibly hundreds of delicious bookmarks, and often is a catalyst to landing on Digg’s homepage. Popular and powerful social media users monitor Reddit for material and submit it to other social media sites.

Once a post moves from the new category into the main content area, making it to the front page requires getting past the first round of downmodders. No matter how good your content, bots or trolls will downmod everything that makes the main content area. It appears some users think that downmodding everything except their stories will result in better odds of hitting the front page. I have no idea if the downmodding strategy works. In any case, it violates the spirit of the community, so don’t do it. Most posts are downvoted immediately, which means they can disappear quickly. Luckily, I have some fans in the community that usually help me past those first few downmods so the bulk of redditors get to see the post. From there it lives or dies.

Reddit is a meritocracy so your post cannot be buried by a minority of voters like it can on Digg. A post can still do well even if 40% of voters hate it.

Remember if you use Reddit to promote yourself, please support the community by submitting stories other than your own, leaving meaningful comments, and voting for others submissions. Use your presence to contribute to the quality of the Reddit community.