How To Drive Huge Traffic To Your Blog From Reddit

If you are a blogger or Social media activist then you must be knowing about the social bookmarking website, Reddit that many are using to drive traffic on their website. Reddit is now the number one social bookmarking website. It has recently surpassed Digg and Stumble upon. You can drive huge traffic to your blog or website from Reddit easily by making smart use of it. Before you start submitting links to Reddit, you should first understand how it works, then only you can get the best out of it.

What makes Reddit different

Though Reddit is a social bookmarking website, its quite different than other typical bookmarking sites. What makes it different is the down voting feature and huge number of categories called as subreddit. Its very very strict to spamming and many times its spam filters catch the genuine links also. Its not like Digg where you should get more up votes, its not like stumbleupon where you should get likes and shares. You can start getting visitors immediately after submitting your link on Reddit, without having up votes and shares.

Getting started with Reddit

It very simple to create account on Reddit, it doesn’t ask for much information not even the email. But I suggest you to use the email, as email verified users gets more privileges. After you have created your account don’t start submitting your own links immediately. Just Wait!

Understanding Subreddits

Reddit has many communities where you can submit your links. These communities are called as subreddits. There are subreddits for nearly everything. Pictures, videos, politics, news, funny etc. There are also sub sub-reddits. You can use the reddit search box to find subreddits. The performance of your link depends very much on the sub reddit you choose. Each sub-reddit has its own rules and moderators. You should choose the appropriate sub reddit for your link. If you have something to post about iPhone, then you should post it to iPhone or cell phone subreddit instead of general technology subreddit. Also you should check the number of subscribers of that sub reddit, the more the subssribers more will be the traffic.

Reddit Stealth Ban

Reddit bans spammers silently, its called as stealth ban. A banned user can access his account in a normal way, but none of their activities will be publicly visible on reddit. No other user can view their votes, comments and the links that they have submitted. So they won’t get the fruits on any of their reddit activities.

To check if you are stealth banned or not, Login to your reddit account and copy your profile URL. Your profile URL will be like http://www.reddit.com/user/Yourusername . Now logout and paste your profile url into the address bar. If you see below kind of 404 “page not found“, then you are banned otherwise not.

Reddit Spam filter

Reddit spam filters are very strong, they automatically filters out spam. As I said before each subreddit has its own rules, so filtering rules also varies from subreddit to subreddit. You should read the rules of particular subreddit before submitting anything, otherwise your submitted story will get caught by spam filter. To if check your link is caught by spam filter, immediately look at the new tab of the subreddit where you have submitted your link. If your story in not there in the new section, its means its caught by spam filters.

Building Karma

Reddit gives you points for your submissions and comments, these points are called as karma. There is link karma and comment karma which you earns when people up vote your links and comments. Similarly you lose karma when your links and comments gets down voted. When your karma level goes below a level there are high chances that your account will be banned. So before you start submitting your own links you should build karma, otherwise your account has high probability of getting banned. Building karma is not a big deal, all you have to do is submit links which others reddit users will like. You can start with submitting links of popular websites like cnn, techcrunch etc. You can also submit cute pics and funny videos as they have least chances of getting down-voted  You should also make good comments on others posts, this will help you to increase the comment karma.

Getting Your link on the front page of Reddit

Though you can submit your link any time, but I suggest you only to submit your link after you have earned the karma score of 200. Submit your link to appropriate subreddit. Make sure the title of your story is attractive. After you have submitted the link, also check if your link is caught by spam filters or not. After you have confirmed that your link is not caught by spam filter and is appearing new section in that subreddit, its time to push it on the front page. For that you should get first 10 up votes on it as quick as possible (without much down-votes) .The first 10 up-votes have the same weight as the next 100 up-votes  which have the same weight as the next 1,000. Reddit gives preference to new newer post, if you can manage to get 10 up votes quickly, your post will rise to the top in that subreddit. Your post will appear in the feed of the subscribers of that subreddit. The posts with the greatest number of upvotes in a each subreddit can rise to the front page.