SEO Ladder

I don’t know about you, but with numerous social bookmarking sites popping up every day I find it pretty hard to keep up. You have sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, reddit, and StumbleUpon all competing for your attention. In hopes of alleviating some of the confusion I am going to take a look a the social bookmarking site reddit and show you how to use their service to promote and market your blog posts.

Overview

reddit is a news aggregation site very similar to Digg or Tweako. reddit is the brainchild of Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian who founded the site in 2005 (Wikipedia, 2007). reddit follows the same format as other news aggregation sites where the reader community promotes news stories to the “front page”. The long standing advantage of sites like reddit is the ability to drive large amounts of traffic in a short period of time. There are also disadvantages as well!

The reddit team describes their service:

reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for
you. Your votes train a filter, to let reddit know what you liked and disliked,
because you’ll begin to be recommended links
filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on
by users like you.

reddit uses the notion of karma to rank your user account. The better quality content you submit the more karma you acquire. Karma does not seem to have any real impact on what you can and cannot do within the reddit realm though and seems to be more of a gimmick.

First Impressions

Having never used reddit before I headed over and signed up for an account. The registration process was a snap and did not require an email confirmation. From there I was presented with a “dashboard” where I could view/change my account information. Overall the site was clean and easy to navigate.

The reading format mimics that of Digg.

There are two main sections

• The front page - chronological listing of the current “hot” topics/articles,
• upcoming articles – contains all of the recently submitted articles

Submitting an Article

The area that you will be most interested in if you are planning on promoting your own content is the article submission area.

Again, this process is very similar to the Digg “Submit a new Link” process. You supply the URL to your post, a meaningful Title, and finally the category (subreddit) that you would like your article to appear in. Once you submit your article it gets placed in the queue where readers either vote it “up” or “down”. Again, the more votes “up” the article receives the closer the article comes to making an appearance on the front page. …And just like Google, the closer you are to the front page the more potential traffic you will receive.

Conclusion

Overall I liked reddit. While I didn’t have time to see if my submitted article actually generated any “good karma” I was pleased with the design and operation of the site. After reading a number of articles it does appear that reddit users are a little more forgiving than those on Digg…but I am sure there are still a number of haters on any news aggregation site. I plan on using reddit in the future to promote and market some of my “newsworthy” posts and plan to come back to this topic in a month or two to update you on my final impressions.

Admittedly this is an extremely high level overview of the reddit service. I suggest heading over to Steve Olson’s blog for his take on reddit. Steve breaks down the reddit demographic and shares his experience promoting his posts on reddit.

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Note: Our own eMom at Home, Wendy Piersall has done it again!
This post is part of her Second “How To” Group Research Project focused on bloggers helping bloggers. Head on over to Wendy’s site when you have a chance, she has a wealth of information for both new and experienced blogtrepreneurs!

When I signed up for a MyBlogLog account a few months ago I was really impressed by their service.  Not only could I meet other bloggers in my niche, I could also see who was visiting and when.  Around the same time that I added the MyBlogLog tracking widget I also decided to monetize with a few AdSense link units. Now having a MyBlogLog account was not only a great way to see who was reading but it was now also a great way to track my AdSense clicks (or at least I thought).

After a month or two I started to notice that while MyBlogLog was reporting numerous AdSense clicks, AdSense was showing virtually nothing. At first I thought that there might be a lag between when a user clicked the ad and when Google would report the revenue. Unfortunately this is not the case…take a look at a snapshot from the other day (below).

So what gives!? Has anyone else seen this with their own blog? I was under the impression that a click was a click was a click. I guess not!