Market Your Writing (Hot off the Press!)

I planned on mentioning this site later this week, but things worked more quickly than I anticipated and it wouldn't be fair not to tell you about it right away. I first became familiar with Reddit a few weeks ago from a blogger who obtained over 3,000 hits in a single day from the site, but was banned as a result. His article on the topic generated a few hundred results from other users that, like him, had been banned. I tested out some links from my relationship blog at HubPages by submitting them to people who asked questions that were answered by articles I'd penned. Alas, the moderators threatened to ban me even though I'd only posted two links and they were in direct relation to a question being posed.

Nonetheless, I had over 250 hits on the first link (moderators removed the second one) and continue to receive traffic to it. Obviously, this is a channel I wanted to keep in my promotions arsenal, so I was hugely disappointed by the response I'd received. The site was designed to be a link sharing site, so it confused me, too.

With a bit of digging, I discovered that the forums, called subreddits, have wide latitude in determining whether people may post links. I became hopeful and wanted to find out whether I could create a subreddit for bloggers to post their work. Sure enough, I could, and did. Unfortunately, this got banned outright, too. A bit of shameless grovelling got the ban lifted, however, so now it's available for your use.

When you submit your blog link, it will appear in two places - on the main reddit screen, which has thousands of viewers, and in the subreddit you select. Because many of the niche topics have moderators that dislike links, posting to any of them is risky unless they know you well and approve your material. By posting to a subreddit that is guaranteed to accept legitimate blog posts, you erase that risk.

They have good reasons for their views, of course. Spammers love to pepper forums liberally with irrelevant material that sometimes contains bogus links to unscrupulous sites. To prevent that, the new r/writeitup subreddit will require that all submissions are identified as a blog entry, poem, or other media, and verify that the author and submitter are the same person. (For this reason, it may be convenient to register with Reddit under the same username that you use for your blogs, though you can also post your Reddit user name into your blog profile, if you prefer.)

Thank you for reading, for sharing, and for joining WriteItUp. Also, thank you to Writer Janis for helping promote this article.