It’s good to keep some basic facts about Reddit in mind before you start trying to promote your product or service on it. Reddit is – or likes to think of itself – as a community made up of thousands of different subreddits, each of which has their own name, focus, “crowd” (Reddit members are almost always subscribed to various subreddits, and thus overlap in some of them.)
Reddit’s traffic overwhelmingly comes from the USA and the wider English-speaking world – even in the subreddits of European countries such as Italy or Germany, a good part of the subscribers will be English speakers. We have another article that talks about posting times on Reddit.
Reddit’s system is designed in a way that favors submissions that receive more upvotes than downvotes in a short amount of time. Seems logical, right? If no one has upvoted your submissions or commented on them within a few hours, you can consider that submission dead and its chances of rapidly gaining popularity and exposure slim to none.
Reddit’s algorithm does not favor hours-old posts with little engagement, or with more downvotes than upvotes.
This applies to sorting by “hot” submissions, which is the default sorting style and the only one that most visitors to Reddit will ever use. There are other ways to view submissions (namely, by sorting by “controversial” posts), that show you submissions that have more even ratios of upvotes to downvotes.
You should aim to provide relevant, useful content that is original and not a rehash of the first few results of a Google search. Easier said than done, of course, but your target audience will appreciate it.
It’s crucial that you don’t even hint at or suggest your own personal gain in the submission – there are some posts that manage to combine obvious self-promotion with a good reception from Redditors, but they are the exception and not the norm.
Redditors hate being advertised to, especially if they feel that the promotion is being done in an underhanded way.
