Picking The Right Sub-Reddit

Let me be honest with you: Reddit can be a terrible, terrible place filled with incredibly rude, troll-ish people. They will downvote your hubs. They will post mean comments on your links. They will make you cry if you're a sensitive person. Ok, maybe not that last one, but the other two are true. Redditors are not always nice people. They are not like you and me. You and me, we try to help one another, we're a community. Redditors can be anyone from your next-door-neighbor to some random guy in another country who's hiding behind a username so they can flame others and be a general pain in the rear. Don't say I didn't warn you. Reddit can be a great source of traffic, but it can also be a heartbreaking source of people calling you a spammer and trying to make you feel bad for wanting to be a successful internet writer.

Please keep that in mind when using Reddit. I might have 16,000 views from that site, but they came with banned accounts, the title of 'spammer', and negative comments on almost all of my articles - whether they were put in the correct sub-Reddit or not. I'm going to try and limit your exposure to this side of Reddit. You'll still get some jerks on the site who won't mind flaming you for posting, but if you follow my advice, you might be able to spare yourself some of the pain these people try to inflict on hubbers like us.

Whenever I publish a hub, I almost always submit it to Reddit. The only times I don't are when they are related to this site and its members. For instance, my hub reports don't get submitted to Reddit. I sincerely doubt anyone on there has any use for them. After all, what are they going to do with the statistics? Eat them with a side of baked beans? Unless someone is really interested in joining this site and wants to know what to expect or what they can achieve, my hub reports have zero interest to anyone on Reddit. That goes for my pros and cons of Reddit hub as well. Since most of the people on that site aren't submitting links because they want traffic, they have no interest in how using Reddit can be good and bad for their daily impressions and AdSense clicks.

So what do I submit? Virtually everything else, especially if in my stats the metrics list the revenue potential as three or more dollar signs. I've begun to realize that the more dollar signs there are, the higher my CPM will be for the HubPages Ad Program. I didn't realize that when I started writing Harry Potter articles. So even though I was getting several hundred impressions a day, my CPM was just a little over two dollars. Not to say that making a dollar a day is a bad thing considering I just started here on the site, just that I would like a little more money for my troubles. I'm not throwing myself to the Redditor lions to be eaten alive for pennies.

I found all of my favorite sub-Reddits through the search feature. Whenever I would publish a hub I would submit it to all the usual sites, saving Reddit for last. I would take the theme of my hub, say "inspirational quotes", and type it into the search box. I did that so I could figure out where people with similar links were submitting theirs. Quotes is one of the first sub-Reddits that pop up, but you need to be careful. There are some sub-Reddits, like quotes, that accept text-only or image-only submissions. The quotes sub-Reddit is strict text-only and since I didn't want to get immediately downvoted for writing some text and including a link, I just moved on. That's how I found the Get Motivated sub-Reddit. It wasn't 100% ideal, but it worked well nonetheless.

You also need to read the sidebars of each sub-Reddit you check out. Certain sub-Reddits will have rules. I know that when I was trying to figure out where to publish my 9/11 tribute hub, I immediately looked for the politics sub-Reddit. It has over 700,000 readers and would probably have brought in some amazing traffic to my hub, but self-posts were banned. I ended up not being able to find the right sub-Reddit to post that link. So I submitted it to Shameless Plugs and yes, I got a few negative comments, but it was the only place available at the time. Since yesterday the self-post ban has been revoked on politics, but that doesn't happen on all sub-Reddits. World News doesn't allow self-posts and reserves the right to delete your link if it breaks their rules. You have to be careful when submitting to certain sub-Reddits. An easy way to get banned is to keep submitting over and over to the same sub-Reddit without knowing you're breaking their rules each time.

If you have no patience and don't want to spend time looking through the sub-Reddits in the way described above, then you can just follow the links to your right. They are Reddit-approved sites that contain lists of the sub-Reddits in the Reddit universe. I personally like Meta-Reddit, given the options, the other two interfaces confuse me a little. Still, use whatever works for you. Just as long as your hub fits under the sub-Reddit you've chosen, it shouldn't matter how you found it or how long it took.

When submitting to a sub-Reddit, you are allowed to change the title to appeal to others. I've done that on multiple occasions. I'm not distorting the purpose of my hub, I'm just attempting to gain a specific clientele and let them know that my link does belong in their sub-Reddit. When I submitted my Halloween costume hub to the Harry Potter sub-Reddit, I changed the title to "I want to be Luna for Halloween!" That ended up attracting more viewers than "Halloween With Harry Potter". My hub talked about dressing up as Luna, so I hadn't purposely mislead anyone. I also change my quote titles when submitting to the Get Motivated sub-Reddit. Putting "reflective quotes" doesn't exactly draw in the traffic. I used "motivational quotes about life" instead, considering the reflective quotes title was followed by the words "quotes to make you think about life". Altering a word or two can really help you appeal to more people.

I have multiple accounts on Reddit and it's completely allowed, it says so in the FAQ. I use those accounts for when one gets banned or put on suspension for a temporary amount of time. Because even though I'm submitting to sub-Reddits correctly and using the site right, not all people enjoy my hubs. That's ok. I'm thick-skinned. I can handle it. With that being said, I don't always just submit my hub to one sub-Reddit and call it done.

Usually I'll pick out a couple sub-Reddits when I'm researching where to plug my link and I'll write them down. I'll leave my link up on one for a couple days and once the traffic starts dying down, sometimes I will delete that link and post it elsewhere. Lately I've been using short URL HubPages offers in the metrics section of the stats area and not deleting the original link. Because if you post the same link without deleting the other, it'll show up in "other discussions" area on Reddit. I haven't found it on the site where it says you're not allowed to post the same thing twice, but I try to keep the double posting to a minimum by just deleting one link or using the short URL. I also don't submit the same hub twice using the same account. Not only is that asking for trouble, it would just seem suspicious to me if I were a true Redditor at heart.

Cross-posting is completely allowed. People do it on sub-Reddits all the time. So if someone tells you not to do it, unless it's a moderator for the site, ignore them. You can check the rules if you want, but there are plenty of people who are cross-posting on the site. Take a couple of them down with you if someone tries to harass you about it. You can always put in the title (x-post from politics) or whatever. On the Harry Potter sub-Reddit they have even smaller sub-Reddits for each of the four houses. People who post random things in the Slytherin common room post them in r/harrypotter all the time, labeling it as a x-post, and no one complains. If it were truly against the rules, I'm sure I'd see this cross-posting habit less often.

These are just a few tips and tricks I've picked up along the way. Hopefully they help others looking for success using Reddit as a traffic source. I'm not sure how great it is for AdSense clicks, since I haven't been getting those for the past week or so, but it helps if you're looking for a boost in your traffic and earning more from the HubPage Ad Program.

If you have any questions about anything in this article, the comment box is below and I'll help you out the best I can. Thanks for reading and good luck with submitting.