There are approximately 330 million Reddit users. Users that are famous for hating marketers. A community that you cannot bullshit.
Are there people who had luck marketing on Reddit? If so, how did they do it? Is it worth it to brave the Reddit snark? What type of results can you expect?
The short version: to promote on Reddit, join relevant subreddits first, learn the rules, make your post useful without the link, and stay around after posting. Reddit marketing works when you behave like a participant, not a drive-by advertiser.
We’ve all seen plenty of these:
Four days and no upvotes? Why even bother?
Ouch, wouldn't want that.
Can we turn that into this?
That's more like it.
Unremarkable but repeatable. Honest pay for honest work.
How to promote on Reddit without looking like spam
The working Reddit marketing strategy is simple, but not easy:
- Choose subreddits where your content genuinely belongs.
- Participate before you promote anything.
- Study the top posts before writing your headline.
- Make the Reddit post useful even if nobody clicks your link.
- Add the link only where it helps the reader.
- Stay around and reply to comments.
If you can’t be active, Reddit isn’t for you
There is no magic trick here. To market on Reddit you have to join Reddit.
- Age your account. Register now if you don’t have one.
- Find 1-3 relevant and active communities that you will enjoy.
- Before doing any promotion accumulate karma points. Get at least 100 upvotes in those communities. Most won’t remember you, but this gets you familiar with that subreddit’s culture. It will also give your account some validity (more on that below).
- And remember: “It’s perfectly fine to be a Redditor with a website, it’s not okay to be a website with a Reddit account.”
Syften helps with the timing problem: it can watch subreddits and keywords so you find relevant threads while they are still active. Set up Reddit keyword alerts so useful posts and comments reach you while the conversation is still active. If you are choosing a tool, compare the best Reddit monitoring tools first.
Keep your history clean
What do Redditors do when they’re suspicious of someone’s intentions? They go through their history to get to know them better.
- If you want to attach your professional persona to your old Reddit account you have to go back in your history and delete anything dodgy.
- No more than one promotional content per page of Reddit history.
- Delete any promotional submissions that failed to get upvotes.
- Post a promotional post in the same subreddit no more than twice a month.
- After posting stay around and reply to comments.
Choose subreddits where your content belongs
Before posting, read the rules and inspect the top posts in the subreddit. Look for posts similar to yours and check whether they were welcomed, ignored, or removed. Small niche subreddits are often better than broad communities if the topic fits naturally.
Also search for previous self-promotional posts. If every link to a blog gets removed or mocked, that subreddit is probably the wrong place for your article. If useful posts with links get thoughtful comments, you have a pattern you can learn from.
Write the Reddit post before you think about the link
The Reddit post should still be useful if nobody clicks through. That usually means summarizing the useful parts, adding context for the subreddit, and making the link optional instead of mandatory. If the post is only a teaser, Redditors will treat it like an ad.
Write the headline for the subreddit, not for your blog. Study the posts that reached the top and notice whether people prefer case studies, direct questions, personal stories, technical details, or teardown-style posts. A headline that works on your site may look like clickbait on Reddit.
How to include a link without making the post depend on it
When you post make sure that nobody needs to visit your blog. But of course, make sure they know it exists. Treat other people like you’d like to be treated yourself. They’re just as intelligent as you are and will see through your intentions just as well as you see through the intentions of others.
Here are a few phrases you can start your post with:
- “Note: There are screenshots that accompany this content but I can’t post them here”. Nevertheless, include links to those screenshots in your Reddit post.
- “I suck at Markdown. You can read the article on my better-looking blog here”. But still do the best you can.
And to change that “oh, he wants me to click, better be careful” to “that was enlightening. Oh, there may be more?” you can use these at the bottom:
- “If you found this post through Google you can find an up-to-date version on my blog” or “As I do more research I’ll update this post on my blog”.
- The official guidelines of /r/SaaS, for example, say: “The only way a link is allowed is at the end of the post (“Originally posted here”)”.
And when writing replies it’s vital to be helpful. If you have a blog post that answers a particular question go ahead and paste the relevant paragraph. Only then add: “I’ve written more on that topic on my blog here”.
Cross-post slowly and honestly
If the same post belongs in more than one subreddit, do not spray it everywhere at once. Adjust the headline and context for each community, mention where it came from when that matters, and leave enough time between submissions that it does not look like a campaign blast.
Useful Reddit marketing tactics
Here are a few additional protips from an old growthhackers.com thread:
23% of my traffic comes from Reddit. The challenge is to keep providing value without seeming spammy. You can only do so many AMAs, case studies, etc.
The types of stuff that works well there is being personal and telling a good story + really giving value to the community. They love stories about how you got started, what tactics you’re using, and also drilling into the metrics/financials. There are a lot of “me too” types on Reddit, that just want to try & replicate the success of others.
What I learned, is essentially you gotta love Reddit to use Reddit for growth. If you hate it or feel like an outsider, then it will be hard to get in because you’ll stick out like a sore thumb.
You can’t just jump on Reddit one fine day and post your stuff. The community hates it if you use just the forums to promote your own agenda. Even a free eBook or free product will get downvoted if you haven’t built up karma.
We’re keeping an eye on reddit.com/r/sales (our product is a CRM for salespeople). We engage with helpful short comments and add a link to one of our blog posts that provides a more in-depth answer.
It’s a very plain and basic strategy: it doesn’t take a lot of time, and it doesn’t generate a lot of results, but it’s good enough to keep doing it, and it’s yet another way of gathering content ideas. (And it’s great when people use your content and succeed with it, I find that on Reddit they often get back and tell you about it.)
I’ve seen people saying they added a link to their blog only after the post gained 50 upvotes, or that they bought the initial 50 upvotes. To me, that feels dirty, but you should know that some report success with these approaches.
Exceptions to all of that
Forums are just people, and every person is different. Here are a few exceptions.
100 Growth Hacks
Some appreciate good marketing, provided it’s relevant to the community. Like this promotional post on /r/startups titled 100 Growth Hacks Learned from 5 Years as a SASS Startup. It got 200 upvotes and these replies:
It included just 50 of the 100 hacks, and this is the link they’re talking about:
MarketingExamples.com
Harry Dry from marketingexamples.com is very active on Reddit and most of his submissions are self-promotion:
And yet he boasts 21,000 mailing list subscribers.
Read more about what his marketing looks like.
How can they get away with that?
Remember the main lesson from How to Win Friends and Influence People: everybody wants to feel important.
On a programming subreddit, some will get the feeling of importance by asking questions and having someone fix their problems, while others can show how smart they are by giving a detailed solution. Links to your blog will taste foul there.
On a photography subreddit, some will feel good by having others look at their creations, while others will tell them how overexposed the photo is and how to improve the sharpness.
But in a marketer community, it’s possible to get that feeling by being the judge of other people’s efforts. “I see how you just growth-hacked me”.
While Harry’s method works well with marketers it doesn’t go well with copywriters:
So, do Redditors really hate marketers?
As we have seen, some Redditors are marketers. It really depends on the subreddit. That’s why it’s important to dedicate some time to experiencing the culture.
As long as you add value everything is fair game.
Tips and Tricks
- If you want to view several subreddits at once, you can add them one by one, separated in the URL by the plus sign. For example, if you want to see the entrepreneur, startups, and productivity subreddits, you would use this URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur+startups+productivity
- Use Later for Reddit to get an idea of when best to post.
Resources
- You Should Get Yourself Banned. A realistic view of rejection in community marketing.
- PersonalDiscount.io Case Study. An example of helping in relevant threads.
- Reddit Hates Blatant Marketing. Si Quan Ong’s detailed Reddit marketing guide.
- How to Do Content Marketing on Social News Sites. A broader guide to community promotion.
