My experience with Reddit to gain website traffic

I will first explain to those who don't know what Reddit is, or what it is about.

Reddit is one of many sites called "social bookmarking sites". These types of sites have really one main purpose, that is to increase traffic to good content on the web and in doing so increase awareness to it. Reddit is most probably the most popular out there, another popular one that is on the web that you might of heard of is digg. I have used both sites and can see a huge difference in terms of the amount of traffic that each of these two bookmarking sites deliver. I have found that Reddit, by far, delivers much more traffic.

In my subtitle you will have noticed that I have mentioned that I have mixed feelings, this is because although you can get good traffic from this site, there can be grave difficulty in getting your site's link onto Reddit in the first place. Reddit has a many systems implemented into its system to stop spam, some of these systems are automatic, some are the community. The main problem I have found is that many times, Reddit will mistake a good quality link for spam. I will latter be going over some tips on how to avoid mistaken identity, but first I would like to talk about the community and the sites interface.

Reddit's community, generally speaking are very critical, some would even go as far to say hateful, unless your immune to "haters" on the web like I am, then I would strongly consider not using this site. On many occasions I have had some very nasty comments, these comments are from most probably adolescents that are still in school, these nasty comments are for no particular reason except for the fact the comment's writer probably gets a kick of insulting someone they don't know. This all really begs the question, is it really worth it ? Personally I believe yes it is, once when I submitted a hubpages article I received 120 views withing 50 minutes. This is all genuine traffic so you don't have to worry about committing any Adsense fraud. The community can make your link more or less popular by voting the link you have submitted up or down, if your link receives allot of "upvotes", then you will get in theory allot more traffic.

I will now go over a few points about Reddit's website interface. I personally find that Reddit feels quite out dated, this is mostly because the whole interface is very much text based, and not many, if any, interactive graphics, now of course everyones opinion can differ so you can make you own assumption.

I mentioned earlier about the a problem that is very commonly faced when submitting a link to Reddit's community which is mistaken identity. This problem can prove to be so very annoying that on some occasions I have considered to stop using the site for this single reason. If your familiar with Reddit you will probably already know about this issue, if your not then read on to find out exactly what happens on many occasions. If you go to submit a link on the site that you believe is a good, non spam type link, very often Reddit's automated system of algorithms will remove the link from the main site's link stream before it has even appeared. The problem is only intensified by the sheer fact that you only realize that this has happened after you have gone to the trouble of filling out the form about the link you are submitting.

Tips to avoid your good quality link ending up getting caught in the spam filter.

My most important tip that I can give you is to take a paced, and steady participation in the community. This can be done by viewing other links and commenting, up voting and down voting. My second tip would be to alternate between the links you post, by this I mean don't just keep submitting all your hubpages links, but instead post links to other things you have discovered on the web you find interesting. My third tip would be to pace your link submissions, wait at least an hour between each one at first, failure to to follow all these tips will likely result in getting your profile and IP address "shadowbanned", this means that your IP address will be blocked and be made to automatically block any posts you make int he future.

I hope you found this read interesting, comments are welcome, have a great day.