by May Monten

Created on: September 16, 2009   Last Updated: September 18, 2009

Many people have gotten bad advice about self-promoting on Reddit. They have been told they can make a lot of money by posting links to their articles on Reddit, that doing so is a great way to get a surge of traffic to their pay-per-click articles or to their own blogs. And so off to Reddit they go, only to be stunned and bewildered when they find the comment sections on their submissions filled with angry, profanity-laden comments. Many soon find themselves banned from the site altogether.

It doesn't have to be that way. I've been able to successfully promote my own blog on Reddit. It is possible to do self-promotion there without antagonizing the natives or getting kicked off the site. But it's not as easy as you may have been led to believe, and it's not for everyone. It requires a genuine interest in being part of the community of the site, and a willingness to do your homework by becoming familiar with the site's rules and culture.

Redditors, as a group, tend to be young, male, geeky, smart, pun-loving, employed in the technology field, leftist or libertarian, and militantly atheist. You don't need to be all or any of these things to be a part of Reddit, but you do need to look for areas where you might have interests in common. For example, unless I was in the mood for an argument, I wouldn't post a rant there proclaiming that Baby Boomers are better than today's 20-somethings. It's just the wrong crowd for that. I might, though, post a link mocking Rush Limbaugh in fact, one such link landed me on Reddit's front page and got hundreds of comments.

Once you become familiar with the Redditor population, your next stop should be to check the rules. At the bottom of each page are links for FAQs and for "reddiquette." Read both of these. Then read them again. Take them to heart. The people who hang out there do. They expect you to become familiar with the way things work there before you start posting. And because the site is largely self-policing by its users, if you break the rules or violate the site etiquette, the users will come down hard on you. From their point of view, they are defending the site from the kind of spamming that has destroyed many similar sites in the past.. They will be passionate in their attempts to try to drive off anyone they believe is a threat to the site.

Even if you follow all the rules and respect the site's culture, you might still run into hostility if you post links from certain domains whose users have clashed with Redditors

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