I had a phenomenal response to my Firefox tips post yesterday thanks to submitting a link on the Technology board at Reddit. Yesterday was my first attempt at promoting this blog on Reddit and I’m amazed at what happened. I submitted a link to my Firefox tips post to Reddit around 2pm BST (British Summer Time) (9am EDT, 6am PDT) and over the next 24 hours, I’ve almost doubled my RSS feed subscribers adding about 350 to reach about 830 subscribers.

The link  stayed well up the first Reddit ‘What’s Hot’ page over the first 9 hours:

In hindsight, I’m actually in the wrong category on Reddit. Should probably have been in the category Software, but I was exposed to 145,000 subscribers on the Technology board.

Looking at my blog stats in Woopra, there was a huge increase to over 4000 visits and 10,000 page views yesterday. I originally published the Firefox post on my blog on Sept 2 and you can see a small effect there from previous RSS subscribers, Delicious and Twitter, but nothing compared to the Reddit effect on Sept 3.

Naturally, as the post was about Firefox, most visitors were Firefox 3 users, with Chrome the second most popular browser.

The plot below shows that Reddit and StumbleUpon were the best referrers by some considerable margin:

interestingly, with Twitter, Digg and FaceBook further behind:

I’ve never gone after bulk adding followers in Twitter but have just gone for organic growth – letting followers find me first, but clearly most of my 600 Twitter followers don’t seem to be interested in Firefox tips. I’ll keep a closer eye on referrers in future – quite easy to do with Woopra on my blog.

So, in summary, Reddit really drives traffic to your blog and it’s well worth registering and submitting a link to your blog posts there. I’ll try and get the correct category there next time, and doubtless I’ll reach a lower subscriber number with future posts – unless I start posting about technology. Still, it’s nice to have added a substantial number of new RSS feed subscribers.  I’ve just got to hold onto them now.

How do you promote your blog? Drop a comment below.