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Master Reddit: Validate Your Ideas and Get Your First Users [1/3]

I remember the first couple of posts that I published on Reddit. I was trying to spam. No sharing, no thinking. Hey, visit my website. Bye.

I am sure you’ve done it too. That’s ok. We are learning. I am still learning. But Reddit is not about this. It is about asking questions, sharing, being useful, and serve people.

When you cold-post without even saying hello, you get into trouble. Many people said that Reddit is a hard place, but the truth is, many of us were getting in the wrong way.

A Stranger Enters The Room

Imagine someone going into your house, sitting down on your couch, and expecting a coffee while yelling: BRING ME COFFEE!

What would you do? Call the police and tell this person to please go away.

please go away

Would you care that this person needed a two-hour walk to get to your house? No, right? It’s the same with your project. You worked hard. But.. It doesn’t matter, not to them.

The Right Way to Promote on Reddit

Learning how to use Reddit to promote your ideas is always a work in progress. I tried many things and studied Reddit for the last months to understand the best possible way to share my ideas, get traffic, and maybe even paying customers.

Here you will find many valuable lessons that can help you promote your project the right way and that I couldn't find anywhere else.

Let’s go!

Know This: It's Important

It doesn’t matter if you promote something in the past, and It worked. Or if you promoted something and it didn’t work.

There are no real rules on how to go about promoting. It always depends.

This is a guideline to avoid common errors and to give you a mindset to explore. There is a right way or thinking how to promote on Reddit, but it’s hard to have a set of steps to repeat.

Every time that you share something new. You almost have to start from zero.

If you want to share a project around well-being, a game, a youtube channel, or your newsletter: you need to learn again.

Every case is unique. When you join a new subreddit, you need to analyze it first and get familiar with it.

It’s about being creative. And I hope this article helps you to have a framework to get better at this.

Master Reddit

1 - Find Your Hobbies

If I had to start again from zero. I’d do things completely differently. I was experimenting, didn’t read anything about it, so I went the usual spammer route. In and out. Copy and paste. Link here, link there, buy my things, check my sites, bye.

The first lesson for you if you want to learn how to use Reddit:

Use Reddit.

It seems obvious. But almost no one who wants to share their product does this.

It doesn’t matter if you are promoting a newsletter, a blog, an info-product, or a SaaS. Get familiar with Reddit by using it. There are no shortcuts (sorry).

Respect the platform.

I’m sure that you have many things in your life that you absolutely love. And I am not talking about your project. If it's different, even better. Cover your tracks.

Find two or three subreddits related to your passion. It can be anything. You can probably find a subreddit for it, or ten: tennis, football, sports in general, cards, games, food, well-being. Whatever you like, find more than one subreddit and explore, play. And don’t promote anything.

Many people will double-check your posts and comments to check if you are a real user using the platform or just a spammer. Don’t think that you can outsmart them. Instead, be a real user. That’s the easiest, be real.

Let’s check a real example.

user

This is the perfect example of what you don’t have to do. What do you think of this user? What would you do if you see this user posting on a subreddit that you are enjoying?

Downvote and Report SPAM!

When people check who you are, and they do, if the only thing they see is the classic: "posted in 50 subreddits the same thing," they will downvote you and report you.

That user has hundreds of posts almost identical. I am surprised that she is still using the platform, but I guess she’s banned from many specific subreddit.

Still, there is something fundamental that we can learn from the spammers, but more to this later.

A quick example of what I did

I am still kind of new to this game, but I figure that as I love coffee and coffee is part of my life, I should use Reddit to share my passion for coffee and learn from others. For real, no faking it.

These are some posts that I share, and if you do the same with your topic, you can learn how the platform works without sharing any self-interested thing. Not surprisingly, I got 0 hate or trolls from my publications because they were real.

coffee01

coffee02

coffee03

When people check my profile, they will see that I shared stories, pictures, coffee-related things, and sometimes a couple of links and my projects here and there.

Most people would be fine with it.

But this is not about tricking people into “I use Reddit for real,” use it for real, and you don’t have to pretend.

Get your Karma

I don’t think Karma is super relevant. But I can tell you one thing. When I started promoting a project, one of the most common complaints was that I didn’t have any karma. I had an old account and no karma. That was weird.

People don’t like that.

Use your hobbies to get some karma, but do not obsess with that. It’s not that relevant. I am sure that you can get a lot of karma by sharing and asking questions related to the things you like very easily.

If you check my posts around Coffee, I had many comments, upvotes, etc.. that gave me a lot of karma. And my account now looks legit.

So, your first assignment and take away from this part 1 of Master Reddit is this:

Find your Hobbies and start sharing and learning how to use Reddit (and have fun doing it, that's good!)


Did you like this article? Please support my journey as a writer here so I can keep writing!

  1. 1

    Your advice resonated with me so well. You inspired me to explore Reddit, and for me, I'm thinking it is another community that you need to invest time in. Cannot just go post post post. Be around, be present, interact with people. Then one day, also be one of the community members and share/ask genuinely.

    It takes a hell lot of time, but it is what success takes. Thanks for reminding all of us this. Super important!

    1. 2

      Thanks, Kevon! I'm happy that you like it! This article went under the radar, but I'm preparing the rest of the content!

      Let me know how it goes and if it works for you!

      1. 1

        Yup i still don't understand the algo of IH haha... probably similar to PH where some key people need to react to a post.

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