The Ultimate Social Bookmarking Content Creation Guide (Part 3: Reddit)

This is part 3 of a 5 part series that covers creating content for the following social bookmarking sites. The other parts will be released over the next few weeks so keep checking back.

Reddit is a bit of a funny community. It seems to be stuck in the middle between Digg and StumbleUpon. It is not necessarily randomized like StumbleUpon, but it is not influenced heavily on the power-users like Digg. There is a balance, where being active like in any community is going to help and publishing quality content that fits within the guidelines and allowed topics. For a detailed guide to what Reddit likes and doesn’t like, check out the Reddiquette guidelines created by Redddit.

Reddit is primary male dominated and highly intelligent. Of course, like any site that gains lots of traffic and visibility, there are going to be your normal spammers who are able to crack the first page and dirty up the results.

Because the Reddit community is very loyal, you need to be careful about self-promotion. If you try to promote your content too often or submit the wrong type of content, Reddit will ban your submission or even your account. Personally I have noticed that the Reddit community is much more likely to down vote post that they dislike, compared to Digg and StumbleUpon where that rarely happens.

Content Style

You will probably start to see a pattern across all of these social bookmarking sites. They all enjoy posts that include pictures and videos. They also like content that is well-written, interesting, and is easy to read. The target audience for Reddit are college-students in their 20s, so if your content is created to cater to that audience, it will help!

Tips for Reddit:

A useful and/or entertaining title can also go a long way toward piquing someone’s interest. Alternatively, deceiving readers with false or misleading titles is a surefire way to suffer karmic retribution from your fellow redditors.

Likewise, linkjacking an article from its original source in order to drive traffic to your personal blog will likely just drive down your karma. Submitting personal work isn’t taboo, but trying to flood reddit with every blog entry you’ve ever written is certain to be punished.

Topics for Content

One of the great things about Reddit is the wide variety of domains that will be featured on the front page. Unlike Digg, you will not necessarily see the same 30-40 domains ALWAYS on the front page. There is also a wider variety of topics that can do well.

Topics that do Particularly Well:

Politics
Religion
Science
Education
Programming
Financial Advice
Productivity Tips

Unlike StumbleUpon but similar to Digg, you probably want to stay away from SEO/Internet Marketing, Blogging, Entrepreneur, Making Money type posts, as they rarely do well.

Examples of Content That Went Viral on StumbleUpon:

Other StumbleUpon Content Creation Resources: