To-reddit-or- not-to-reddit?

Reddit considers itself a “social news” site. This free site allows users to post articles, photos and news items. Other users are given the option of commenting, and voting sites. Votes can either be up or down. Favorable votes are known as ‘karma’. The most popular stories are displayed on the front page of the site. This is a similar to other social bookmarking sites. Some of the differences involve what the available categories in which the news is sorted.

Reddit allows for separate categories of humor, science, politics, photos, world news and programming. With the difference in structure, there is a different audeince than found at digg or technorati. (Here is an article on the debate of Digg versus Reddit debate). Navigating the digg army and th ebury brigade at Digg is often a challenge, which leads many to choose sites like reddit to post their articles.

The site was started in 2005 by two programmers (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) out of Virginia. It was acquired by Conde Nast in 2006. It has increased in popularity and number of users since its arrival.Reddit has developed a loyal following. Many reddit fans gather on a regular basis to socialize and review the most recent reddit activity. Some reddit fans use it as a substitute for mainstream media since the reddit network performs fact checking on items submitted to the site. The ability to comment is limited to the reddit site. This means that comments made on the items submitted are on reddit rather the originating site. Although this is convenient for reddit users, the original sites loose out on valuable feedback.

Like the other networking sites, you will need to generate positive votes in order to gain the attention of the viewing public. If you have a large network of friends, you may want to ask them to vote for your article. When there is some positive momentum and the article or hub is interesting, it will continue generating attention. The attention will in turn lead to increased traffic.

Once visitors are on your hub, you will need to have your product displayed so that they will want to purchase it. The copy can be used to encourage them to buy. With hub pages you can sell your product, sell Google ads along with the items on Ebay or Amazon. This allows you several methods of capturing revenue. The potential multiple sources of revenue is one of the big benefits of hub pages. When you link to other pages, you can also collect some of the revenue from those items as well. The reddit activity will attract the potential buyers. Even though you attract them, you will still need a way to capture their attention and gain the sale. The sales are what generate the revenue. Although some revenue is generated through traffic, the big dollars (or euros) come through the sales of products.

The hubpages that have the highest Reddit ratings are those that contain how to's, list (e.g. top 10, top 4, etc), answer a question or begin with a verb. These seem to be the common elements of hubpages that have achieved high reddit ratings.