LobsterSundew , this is an amazing resource, and I bookmarked your reddit.
There are a lot of traps to fall into, but with less polished campaigns, poorly designed reward tiers can cause the funding to just stagnate, seemingly inexplicably to the project managers. You deal with this in part 4 of your article:
"One of the most important tips for planning rewards, from my experience, is to aim to set up a structure that can up-sell a backer to the next level higher than what they may have been initially targeting. To sell that higher reward, the discomfort endured to increase the pledge just one level higher needs to be smaller than the expected gain from enduring that discomfort."
Even large, well-established companies can botch this, like in the ultimately-ultra-successful White Wolf: Exalted project. Initially, they didn't have *any* physical rewards below $120, which for a project for a bloody pen-and-paper RPG is unthinkable.
They kept adding high-end rewards for the design team like higher salaries, trips to cons, etc.! What they did right, however, was responding relatively quickly to feedback and massively restructuring their rewards. It's still a mess and despite earning 10x their goal, they easily cost themselves several hundred thousand dollars. Compare to the brilliantly managed Reaper Miniatures which had half the initial goal of White Wolf but made 5x the funding.