Over time, the debate about promoting and submitting your own content has been tossed around the communities.

For those of you who are unsure what self-submission or self-promoting is, its simply submitting your own blog or your own site to social media sites like Digg, Mixx, Reddit, etc. Some people feel that this is bad etiquette and bad for the community. I take the opposite stance....to a point.

I mainly submit stories to Mixx as I've pretty much moved away from Digg and never really got into any of the other social media sites. I sometimes submit my own blog entries to Mixx, but only those I feel are of quality. If you look at all my submissions from my blog compared to all my entiries on my blog, you'll notice many were never submitted to Mixx or any other social site - with good reason. My blog is also by no means the only thing that I submit. If you look at my Mixx Profile, you can see my submissions are from a wide variety of sources and you'll only see the occasional post from DarkerNemesis.com in my submissions page. And I feel that this is what makes the difference. Submitting only your own stuff to any social media site is not really adding to the community, especially if the links aren't quality links. Also, scraping is by no means acceptable so make sure its ORIGINAL content.

So here's a quick run-down of what to remember if you're going to self-submit

1. Do it with restraint

2. Make sure if you do, the entries/links are of quality, no one wants to read utter crap or even worse, scraped content

3. Don't only submit your entries. The internet is filled with tons of funny, interesting, thought-provoking, and other great sites with great content, why not submit those as well? Also, submitting random stuff just to drown out your self-submissions with other material will be noticed, people want to see good content and not just filler.