I wrote a simple guide on promoting/marketing your project on Reddit and how to avoid common mistakes.
https://www.albertjo.xyz/blog/how-to-promote-advertise-your-software-project-on-reddit
Hey everyone! I spent a good chunk of July marketing Cryo - Cold Shower, an iOS app I built. I was able to get a lot of app downloads and impressions by promoting Cryo on different Subreddits by reading threads here. I see other creators make mistakes that can be easily avoided so I wrote a quick guide.
TL;DR: 1. Find target Subreddits 2. Understand the Subreddit's culture and tailor your post 3. Avoid spammy/overtly-promotional behavior
Trending on Indie Hackers
This is exactly what I've been looking for! Have you come upon the challenge of your post being removed systematically? even when it was purely informational?
This was a juicy read! A lot of super helpful points.
Thanks for sharing 🙏
Nobody is talking about (probably) the most important part: how do you take you Reddit post from zero (or a single) upvote to many. Do you do any “seeding” (getting a few friends to upvote you so you stand out), for example? It’s not just about posting but giving your post a chance to succeed.
If you post at the right time of the day, it won't have to worry. if it's a big subreddit, you can delete and repost without anyone noticing. Reddit is good at catching upvote manipulation.
For a few bucks on Upwork, you can hire someone to upvote your posts from very high karma accounts.
This is definitely a taboo and dirty topic but you're spot on. The first few upvotes are the most critical in getting traction for your post. Asking friends to upvote is a good strategy but definitely gotta be subtle. I would be wary of switching to alt accounts and upvoting yourself because I think that Reddit might have a system of detecting upvotes from the same address and de-dup them.
Remember /u/Unidan? He was a celebrity ecologist who was beloved by the Reddit community in the mid-2010s. He used the alt-account upvote strategy to great success (although he got banned after people found out).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan
I'd love to hear more on this aspect too. I've very wary of "seeding" my posts on reddit because the mods are so suspicious. From what I can tell, if your karma is 3,000 or more, the mods are less likely to assume you're doing anything shady. So that's something to think about too.
Thanks for the tips, @albert_jo - this is giving me the confidence to hop on Reddit and start engaging & posting (carefully) about my app!
For sure, Reddit's an amazing indie marketing tool
Yeah, I use subreddits almost exclusively for growing my newsletter. For those trying this, here's a handy tool I found that analyzes the best times/days to post on specific subreddits.
Great advice — thank you for sharing. I've yet to "crack the code" on Reddit virality. Oddly, my best comments or posts are typically trying to be funny but it can be hard to replicate when you're not naturally funny 😆
4.Profit 😎
Hell yea 🍾
Great post 💪
Great insights, I was looking for something like this
Thank you!!! That's truly informative.
Bookmarked, thanks Albert!
Thanks Albert for writing this up! Did you find you it mattered whether you had any tenure in the community? In other words, does it come across as disingenuous to have a very young reddit account with no prior subreddit engagement when posting?
In my opinion, it does come across as disingenuous if you have a new Reddit account without much engagement. Many Redditors do tend to look at your profile to make a judgment as to whether or not your account is spammy based on karma and comments/submissions!
I just saw your post on r/Apple! Looks awesome!
This is super useful. Reddit can be a great marketing tool if we know how to use it. My WBE friend Marc was able to get 40k visits from reddit.
He wrote a post about it too: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/40-000-visitors-in-24-hours-from-reddit-04a1fa0ef5