How to Promote Effectively on Reddit Without Getting Banned
Reddit is a great platform to promote your product for two main reasons:
- The platform is organised into subreddits?A 'subreddit' is basically Reddit's term for a 'community' which makes it easy to target specific niches.
- The feedback culture is raw and unfiltered - exactly what you need early in the product development process.
But there is a caveat: Reddit is very sensitive to promotion. If you make it too obvious, you'll get called out, downvoted, and shadow banned faster than you can blink.
To help you navigate this minefield, I'll share my learnings of how to promote on Reddit effectively without getting banned.
Read the Room
Each subreddit has its own culture, preferences, and rules. So each subreddit is different. Before you post, make sure that you do the following:
- Familiarize yourself with the preferred content format — some communities like case studies, others favor blog posts or videos.
- Review the Subreddit’s top-performing posts and consider whether your contribution would fit and add value.
- Follow the rules of the Subreddit carefully they are usually enforced strictly.
Here's an example of a promotion post in r/indiehackers that checks all the boxes. It fits nicely into the format of other popular posts, it adds value to the community, and it follows the rules of the subreddit.
Warm Up Your Account
New accounts are under extra scrutiny. So before you start promoting anything, warm up your account.
Here are a few things you can do to warm up your account:
- Participate in conversations and contribute helpful answers in relevant communities.
- Build up your karma?Reddit karma is a score that reflects how much other users appreciate your contributions to the platform. by getting the first upvotes on your comments.
Established accounts with a history of valuable contributions receive significantly more tolerance when self-promoting.
Indirect Promotion
Your odds of effectively promoting something are much higher if you move the conversation to your own website.
For example, in the post below, I shared a blog about local development with Supabase.
The post gained a lot of traction because it provided genuine value to the community. This lead to many people naturally clicking through to my blog, where I have more freedom to promote without the scrutiny of Reddit.
Organic Mentions
Another effective method to self promote on Reddit is by making use of organic mentions in comments. Organic mentions are a way to present your product as a natural solution to the problem you're discussing.
It's important to keep the emphasis on the community benefit, not their personal gain. In addition, I would argue that writing out your link in plain text - without using a hyperlink - is the more subtle approach.
Sell Your Story
You can use your own story or milestones as a proxy to promote your product.
Two effecive methods that I've seen work well are:
- Sharing a recent success and including a link to your product in your Reddit bio. When people see something is gaining traction, they naturally become curious and want to check it out.
- Sharing an interesting feature or milestone that showcases your product in a non-intrusive way.
Here are two examples that I recently came across:
Be Authentic
Being transparent and authentic really helps build a connection with the readers. If you manage to build that trust, the Reddit community will be more receptive to your self promotion. The post below is an excellent example of how this is done.
Conclusion
Promoting on Reddit can be a great tool to get your product in front of the right people. But you need to be careful not to come across as a sleazy, spammy self promoter. By following the points outlined above, you're more likely to get a positive response from the community. You can read more about how to craft great content in my post on the 5 pillars of great content or check out some effective marketing examples here.
