The Atheist Blogger

It is a universal truth: all bloggers are readership whores. We exist to get our blogs noticed and read by as many people as possible. I currently have several ways of spreading my articles on the internet, mostly through use of Digg, The Atheist Spot, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. I previously played about with StumbleUpon but found that submitting stuff is limited. If you don’t submit stuff from different websites, you get blocked out by the submission system until you do. For bloggers, this is useless.

Reddit is the next best thing as I have recently learned. I used to submit stuff to the general reddit website, and I got a few hits here are there. My reddit “karma” didn’t really go anywhere. A few days ago db0 published an article about increasing your readership (see what I mean? READERSHIP WHORES!!!) using the subreddit: atheism. Not being a regular reddit user, I had no idea what a subreddit was.

I do now. A subreddit is essentially a custom reddit based on a particular subject. The idea being that instead of submitting an article about star wars to the general reddit site, you can submit it to the subreddit “starwars” instead. People can subscribe to that subreddit, choosing only to get articles about Star Wars. Pretty neat. The “atheism” subreddit was created 7 months ago and has over 15,000 subscribers. THAT IS A LOT.

So I began submitting my articles to the atheism subreddit. My karma has almost tripled in the last 24 hours and is continually growing. My articles have been rated up more times than any of the ones I had previously submitted to the general reddit. To do a test, I submitted one of my first articles which was one of my most popular; the 101 Atheist Quotes one. In the last hour it has had a massive amount of hits, and it made me want to resubmit all of my previous articles. I’m not that much of a whore though.

What is great about the subreddit is that you can subscribe to its RSS feed and get a constantly updated list of new submissions. Of course, you get absolutely everything so that might pose a problem for amateur RSS users. Others (like myself) have RSS feeds set up in such a way that if I don’t check it every day I find myself with over 3000 unread articles. However this really isn’t advisable unless you spend more than 50% of the day on your computer.

So, to sum up:

The atheism subreddit is AWESOME. The Atheist Spot is equally awesome because it is dedicated totally to atheism and the developers are great guys who like to keep readership whores like myself well fed. Join both, submit to both, spread the word.