The majority of Reddit content focuses around funny images, memes and videos. However, Reddit also has a very strong culture around news, politics and people helping one another out.

Unlike most other social bookmarking sites, Reddit has a very strong sense of community. Reddit users call themselves “redditors” and share a strong bond around the site.

The site’s user base tends to be liberal and democratic group, though there are occasional posts by conservatives that gets voted to the top.

Using Reddit is easy. There are just a few main features to be aware of and once you get the hang of the interface, you can spend hours and hours and hours on the site without getting bored.

Upvoting and Downvoting

The site revolves around upvoting and downvoting. Anytime you see a post you see that you like, click the up button. Anytime you see a post you dislike, click the down button. The numbers between the buttons represents its current upvote to downvote ranking.

Sub-Reddits

Reddit is broken down into self-organized groups called sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are basically mini-reddits that have their own community, rules and topics.

Anytime you submit a post, it should be filed under the relevant sub-reddit. Anytime you want to find a specific kind of post, you easily find them by going to that sub-reddit.

To switch sub-reddits, click one of the listed sub-reddits in the top bar.

If you know the exact name of a sub-reddit, you can also find it by typing reddit.com/r/ followed by the name of the sub-reddit.

Browsing Posts

There are four different ways to sort posts on reddit: By what’s hot, what’s new, what’s controversial and the top voted. You can use each of these sorting methods for all of reddit overall, or any sub-reddit.

To switch sorting methods, just click on that method’s tab.

Here’s what each of them mean:

What’s Hot: This is basically a mix of newer posts and posts with high rankings. It updates very frequently, meaning you can check by several times a day and see new things.

New: These are the newest posts. Usually they don’t have many votes yet, so it tends to be a mixed bag of good posts and bad posts.

Controversial: Posts that have a lot of disagreeing opinions. Useful for sorting through news or other fact-based posts.

Top: The highest ranked posts for any given period.
Once you’re in a specific sorting method, you can choose what time period you want to see posts for. For example, in “Top,” you can see the highest ranked posts for this hour, for today, for the week, the month or all time.

Comments

Comments play a large role in the Reddit experience. People share their own stories related to the post, comment on the post and often have high level debates on the topic.

Comments can range from very informed to uninformed, from hilarious to serious.

To view any post’s comments, click the “Comments” button under any post.

Much like Reddit itself, comments can be sorted by hot, new, controversial, old or best (top.)

To post your own comments, just type your message in the comment box and click “save.”

Submitting a Post to Reddit

To submit a post to reddit, click “Submit a Link” on the right sidebar.

Choose whether you want to submit a link to somewhere else on the internet, or create a text post on Reddit.

If you’re submitting an internet post, fill out the post name, the URL and the sub-reddit it should be submitted to.

If you’re making a text post on Reddit, choose a title, enter the text and choose a sub-reddit.

Those are the basics of how to use Reddit. You’ve learned how to sort posts, how to use sub-reddits, how to use the commenting system, how to upvote and downvote and submit your own posts.

Bookmarking your favorite web pages has been something your web browser could do for some time now. Virtually every toolbar has a handy bookmark link that will easily store a user’s favorite pages right there on their computer. Typically, bookmarks are created for pages that a user visits often and doesn’t want to forget.

The problem with bookmarking on your personal computer was soon found, and thankfully solved. What was this nasty little problem? Simply put, when you bookmark a favorite page using the bookmark tool on your personal computer, and then you find yourself away from said computer in need of one of those pages, you cannot get to it. Using this method, bookmarks are stored only on a users personal computer. This is limiting, and nobody likes to be limited!

Alas, social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and digg were born in an effort to bring the public just what it wanted and needed: an easy and convenient way to organize, store and share bookmarked sites, videos and articles. In the process, a new business building tool was also born.

Here’s what bookmarking can do for your business: It can increase traffic to your website, help your search engine rankings, and also create an image of your company on the social media scene. On social bookmarking sites, postings are ranked by users, not editors. As I’ve said before, user created content and reviews are perceived as a sort of recommendation on the part of another average consumer, not a sales pitch from a large company.

Many businesses have blogs, which make great bookmarked pages. The key here is to make sure your blog has interesting and informative articles that keep readers wanting more. Because you are posting blogs to social bookmarking sites, you will want to keep in mind that people can share your bookmarks (this IS the whole idea!). The more your bookmarks are shared, the higher they will rank on the bookmarking site you are using. And judging from the buzz, if you rank high on these social media sites, your web traffic will increase significantly.

The only thing you need to do in order to make your bookmarks rank in search engines is to be sure to add the right tags and/or keywords to bookmarked pages. This is something that needs to be done consistently in order for your efforts to pay off. But this is most likely a practice you should be used to by now, as it’s the same in any SEO marketing effort.

The best thing about bookmarking is that all it requires from you is a little time. You’re most likely already writing articles and posting them to directories. You may even have some hubpages out there; or better yet, some videos. So what are you waiting for? Take those marketing efforts that you have already done and put them to the best use possible by posting them to an easy to use bookmarking site. Some consistent effort in this arena can steer you in the direction you want to go.