Reddit is one of the social bookmarking sites that relies heavily on your interaction with the user community on the site. Reddit uses a point system in which users can vote on each post; the posts with the most points get pushed to Reddit’s home page for all to see. But Reddit is even more complex than this basic voting system implies; there are also ways to discuss the posts and to vote on the comments that are left on the posts which can affect their visibility as well. In order to be able to use Reddit to effectively direct traffic to your website, you need to get a handle on the voting system and user interaction that drives this particular social bookmarking tool.

In order to start using Reddit, you simply need to go to the site and register for an account. There are no toolbars to install and no confirmation emails to get you started which makes this a very easy site to sign up with. But once you’ve done that, you need to spend a significant amount of time networking on the site in order to gain popularity on the site and get traffic to head over to your site from there. The first thing that you should do is to begin submitting websites to Reddit. You should submit your website as well as relevant quality pages on your website (particular blog posts for example).

Next, you need to start meeting other Reddit users. This is best done by getting involved in discussions that are going on about other people’s posts. Do a search to find posts that are similar to your own and work your way into the discussions there by leaving comments. Be aware that your comments can be voted down so you don’t just want to spam posts with your own links. You want to leave interesting comments that show that you read the posts on which you are commenting. For this reason, it’s better to get involved in just a few discussions at a time and to contribute well to them.

You should know that Reddit is somewhat specialized in the kind of content that is found there. There are “subreddits” which are kind of like major topics that are of interest to Reddit users. The popularity of these varies depending on the day but top categories usually include programming, science and politics. If your content doesn’t relate to these categories or ones that would be of interest to people who enjoy these categories, you might not be able to get the attention of Reddit users. If that’s the case, you should consider using a different social bookmarking site instead of this one.

However, Reddit does get a fair amount of traffic, so if you have regular or occasional posts on your site or blog that are relevant to Reddit, you should think about using the site. It allows you to get into some interesting discussion which can prompt additional posts that will then be seen by Reddit users. The interaction that’s necessary to make it work can be time-consuming but it can also pay off in high traffic directed to your site.