Reddit :4 Things Not To Do

Having covered the facts about Squidoo marketing and the importance of social media marketing in our previous posts , we can’t leave behind a major big player in the social media marketing field – Reddit !

Reddit is one of the most powerful social news sites on the Internet.  Internet marketers love the way they can promote their content on Reddit, but many of them don’t get anything out of it.  They get frustrated and say that the bookmarking site simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Instead, they should be looking at what they are doing wrong and start improving their Karma.

Here are three mistakes that Redditors commonly make:

Not engaging in the Reddit community.

Social sites were made for people to communicate with each other, not to spam content, so don’t drop a link and leave. Comment on lots of interesting articles and build your comment karma. You need to gain trust with the community in order to go anywhere with Reddit.

Reddit Hates Too much self-promotion.

Reddit users hate self-promoters.  They feel that promoting your own content takes away from the quality of the site.  This isn’t true, at least not when done correctly.

There is a fine line between self-promotion and spam.  First of all, not all content can be promoted on Reddit.  Secondly, you need to work on not just sharing your own content.

One guideline I use is to self-promote no more than 20% of the content I bookmark.  It also helps if you can submit content from different sources (i.e. a guest post you wrote for another site).  That way, not all of your urls will come from a single domain.

Also, try not to over promote the same content.  Even though we share a lot of tips on getting Nutrisystem discounts and Medifast diet coupons on our weight loss blog, we wouldn’t want to promote all of those articles on Reddit because that would get us flagged as spam.  My rule of thumb is to only promote an article topic once, even if you write multiple posts.  The exception is when you can get someone else to promote the post for you.

Using The Wrong Title

Reddit is a social news site, so it should be engaging.  Readers don’t need to read the same title on your submission that is posted on the original article. Show them that you actually read the article and create a title that will entice them to read and participate.  It is amazing how much of a difference this will make.

At the same time, don’t write anything that will offend or annoy other readers.  Redditors expect you to have a sense of humor, but they also want to see that you are competent and have a similar perception to them.  For example, if our diet blog tried to bookmark a post called “Losing Weight in 2011,” we would probably want a more engaging title to get people to come to our blog.  The title could be: “Share Instead we might share one of our tips in the article in a entertaining and engaging way.

Some Redditors make snide remarks on certain topics, especially in regards to politics and products that weren’t made from Apple.  Of course, you don’t want to get too carried away and offend anyone.  Achieving this balance is one of the keys to using the site.

Posting In The Wrong Reddit

There are a number of different Reddits you can try to post in.  The right Reddit will give you the most traffic.  You will often find that niche marketing (submitting to a less commonly used subreddit) is the way to go. A subreddit may have less traffic, but it is more closely associated with what you want to share.

Reddit is a great site for promoting content.  Make sure you use that time wisely and you can bring a lot of great traffic to your blog.