I know, now you’re asking “Brooks, what the hell is Reddit and what exactly are you getting me into now?” Well, hear me out.

Reddit is one of those things that you didn’t realize was going on right under your nose, kind of like neighborhood swingers parties or free coupon swapping. These things are huge subcultures, but if you don’t move in the right circles, you’d never know.

Reddit is, in fact, a huge subculture.

Per the Reddit web site, during the month of October 2012, they had nearly 47 MILLION unique visitors, from 170 countries, viewing nearly 4 BILLION different pages. NOW do I have your attention?

“But how does that help me?” you ask. Well, lemme tell you. Basically, Reddit is a community where members post web pages and other members vote on them. Like StumbleUpon, Reddit members are a targeted audience – the people in the subcommunities actually want to see pages containing information that interests them. Check out the number of subscribers in each of these categories:

BOOKS – 177,627 (Subscribers) (for readers)

WRITING – 55,347 (for writers)

STORIES – 710

FREEBIES – 53,635

KINDLE – 9,529

FUNNY – 2,770,498

HUMOR – 177,044

Convinced this platform is worth your while? Then how about signing up for an account? It’s free. And fast. Just go to http://www.reddit.com/ and click on register in the upper right hand corner. “I’m going to have to set up a pretty profile and give them all sorts of info, aren’t I?” Um no, actually, you’re not. Reddit is really about content sharing, and not about social networking.

Now, Reddit will allow you to join subcommunities (subReddits), build your own, and do a myriad of other activities that are way beyond my usage. I use Reddit only to share my blog posts and other web pages I find interesting. Doing that is super easy.

Web sites and blogs (like Indies Unlimited) make it easy to post articles to Reddit with share buttons at the bottom of their posts. Many of them have an additional “share” button or drop-down arrow that needs to be clicked to bring up additional sharing platforms like Reddit. You can see how we do it here on Indies Unlimited in the screen to the right. Click on the drop-down arrow – then click on the Reddit logo. A new screen will open, bringing you and your link to the Reddit site.

The cool thing about Reddit is that it fills in most of the information for you. The only things you’ll have to fill in are the subreddit category and the captcha. Yeah, the latter’s a pain in the neck.

One idiosyncrasy of Reddit’s is that you can’t just go ballistic and start adding a ton of links at once. They have a time limit, and they’re serious about it. If you try to submit too many links in succession, they’ll tell you that you have to wait. Now click the tiny little submit button at the bottom left hand side of the screen that I managed to cut off of the screen capture.

The only thing you should put a little effort into happens on the next page. Type in a quick comment which may entice members of the group to click on your link. Then click “Save.”

Now, hopefully, other members will read your post and vote it “up” to the top of the subject heading. That hasn’t happened to me, yet, but I have noticed that Indies Unlimited gets a lot of traffic from Reddit – especially on the days we’re posting free eBook features to their Freebies category.

So, there you have it. A quick, easy way to share an article to a targeted audience. Not bad, eh?

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