Self-promote on Reddit without getting banned

We are happy to share our experience on important aspects of starting self-promoting posts on Reddit. What do you need for it? What are the steps? We aim to identify the challenges affecting and easily face them.

Reddit is a large community made up of thousands of smaller communities, making it great for Growth. Despite the potentially high traffic, many blog-post writers avoid it when they faced different problems just from the beginning.

Become an active user

The first thing you need to pay attention to is your account — it is weighty to be an active user. Reddit features a basic unit to measure a reflection of how much your contributions signify to the community — your Karma.

We need karma to start self-promote!

It is hard to find a subreddit for self-promotion with 0 karma points; maybe only some unpopular subreddits will allow it.

The main resource for gaining karma points is Upvotes that users generate on your activity. So you should take part in public life on the topic you are aiming for.

Here are a few pertinent tips:

• over a few days, monitor your subreddits and note when the most people are online; you could post during those times.

• start posting interesting facts, mems, don’t shy away from leaving comments and questions; let users know about you

• don’t troll or spam; that will often result in downvotes, defeating your positive karma on Reddit

In turn, the users will leave you the necessary resource — upvotes.

Why is it so important?

Reddit has stringent rules regarding new accounts, so when you try to create an advertising post on a new account with 0 Karma, the post will be permanently blocked and considered spam.

How many Karma needs to post self-promotion? The exact amount of positive karma on your account required isn’t high — basically about 25 karma points (depending on the subreddit), but it’s kept from the public to avoid spam.

Subreddit rules page

Reddit may have relaxed its position on self-promotion, but almost every subreddit has its own rules regarding self-promotion posts.

The rules page will be visible to all visitors who can view specific subreddit. The vast majority including rules about Self-promotion which describe the main condition:

• Your content is high-quality:

  Your resource should be technically accurate, polished, and pedagogically sound. Your resource should not “feel spammy”

• Your post body contains more than just a link:

  Explain what your resource is teaching and how it improves on the status quo. Don’t just drop a link and move on.

• You respect Reddit's global policies regarding self-promotion.

Allowed topics rule

There is one thing we should pay attention to if we try to self-promote. This rule gives us a direct understanding of what content users want from us. A good example might be posting programming learning content in the r/programming subreddit. Have you wondered if there might be a better place for such content? Yep, there is r/learnprogramming, where such content fits perfectly.

Well, how the community responds to marketing?

Reddit hates blatant marketing — much has been said about this. There is a lot of discussion about unhealthy criticism among the Reddit community. This may be the key—no need to make another advertising post and just leave your promotion link. Let people know what you have to offer.

I also can’t help but warn you there are problems that, for the most part, we cannot influence

Resources shadow-banned on Reddit

There are cases when self-promotion posts with links to some resources are not promoted on Reddit (despite good stats and activity on account). For example, Dev.to (social network for software developers), on the resource itself, there is a discussion where people report zero activity under posts that contains a link to dev.to post.

Filters for non-spam reasons

Worse, too, are filters for non-spam reasons that show the same message, so some users asked why Reddit or mods think their post is spam. When in reality, it was just filtered and awaiting review by the mods when they have time to check the queue and/or logs.

Anyway, self-promotion on Reddit is a great approach to make your posts more popular. The above steps will help you start sharing your posts on Reddit and opening them for a huge community.

Good luck!

Oleh is a Software Engineer at JetThoughts. Follow him on LinkedIn or GitHub.

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