This is the section of this document that you will use most. In fact, you will likely want to double check each of these rules every time you consider hitting the ‘submit’ button. It is a process that, at first, will likely take fifteen minutes but that you can make habitual and later do very quickly.
You can easily drive five million people with a well placed post. This is not a volume game like it can be on 📝Facebook or 📝twitter , the more thought and planning you put into the process the higher the likelihood that you will see success with your posts and this compounds over time.
The typical 📝Redditor might post something once a month, but we will be posting daily. Keep in mind that most prolific redditor—📝GallowBoob—posts about ten times per day and drives five to fifteen million pageviews per day. The quality of the content and relevance to the subreddit will dictate this success. If you are not overwhelmingly confident that your post fits, don’t submit it.
Do
- research the sub — there are three primary keys to gaining massive traction on reddit, a) having content that is of extreme interest to the people in the subreddit, b) speaking their language to frame it for them, c) avoiding high traffic subs (lots of post competition). The formula for success is in the research of content and placement, not speed to post.
- scout the sub’s language — before posted read the post titles in a subs 'hot' section to get a feel for the language of the community and see what kind of content they direct to.
- scout the sub’s content — see what kind of content the ‘hot’ posts are linking to and to determine if a) your content is relevant and b) how you can frame it to be more relevant
- scout the sub’s competition — with it’s democratically voted structure you will need to compete with the other content, make sure there is nothing guaranteed to trump yours
- read the sub’s rules — on the right side of each subreddit you will see the governing rules and they are all completely different so pay attention or pay the price.
- leverage the story — redditors love stories and they love things taken to extreme lengths. You will see as much within the communities so leverage them when you can.
- bare your soul — redditors are, at their core, deeply invested in the members of their community. If you bare your soul, they will be more inclined to support you. By investing into highly intelligent questions, sharing unique/interesting experiences, and generally giving more value than the content you’re linking to you can greatly leverage this.
- ask for feedback in slack — the primary purpose of this group is to provide feedback and enable you to get incrementally better over time. You can do this in two ways by tagging me (@brian.swichkow) and linking me to the post or b) letting me know that you have made several posts and link me to your profile to review them.
Don't
- ignore the rules — as stated above, each subreddit has rules, if you ignore them your posts will be deleted and you can be permanently banned from the subreddit. If you do not follow the rules, you will not see success with your efforts — simple as that.
- ignore the comments — reddit’s algorithm is fairly rudimentary, but it rewards posts (with more exposure) who have comments and upvotes immediately after posting. When someone comments you are usually afforded the opportunity to reply and carry their joke. If you do this, others are likely to jump in and the algorithm sees the post as ‘hot’.
- fight with people who comment — comments are a place to provide more value to those seeing the content. Whether it be information or entertainment — give value.
- post the same content multiple times — you must mix your content. Do not post the same content more than twice in a row (to two different subs) and even do that extremely rarely. THe same goes for posting content from the same source. And never post back to back in the same sub, if nothing else you’re just competing with yourself.
- post in crowded subs — subs like /r/pics, /r/funny, and /r/aww have millions of subscribers and dominate the top of /r/all, but they are also where most of the content is generated and hard to compete with. It’s easier to gain traction in smaller subs (~10K+)
- **create multiple accounts **— this is not about having a bot network that upvotes each other’s content, it’s about creating value. Stick with one account and commit to it.
You cannot cheat the system, but understanding it and it’s yours to leverage.
Redditors have high standards as—by comparison to the rest of the internet—they've “seen it all”.
These are the people who see the stuff circulated on facebook and twitter months before it even gets there. Reddit is where most of the content widely circulated on the internet starts so don’t think that you can get away with underinvesting in the activity.