Reddit for creators, and how not to get banned in your first week

Reddit is the only free promotion that has ever done anything measurable for me, and it is also the platform I have been banned from the most. Those two facts are related.

Nearly everyone starts the same way. You make an account, you find a subreddit that looks right, you post a photo with a link to your page, and within about four minutes it has vanished. No message, no explanation, just gone. Then you do it again somewhere else and get a permanent ban from a community you had never heard of that morning.

None of that is bad luck. You walked into a room with rules written on the wall and did not read the wall.

Why it is worth the bother

Posts stay findable. Something that did well for me eighteen months ago still sends people to my page, which is not true of anything I have posted anywhere else. People arrive already looking for the thing you make, rather than being interrupted by it. And it costs nothing but time.

The trade is that Reddit is not one place. It is thousands of small places that happen to share a login.

The rule underneath all the other rules

Every subreddit is its own little country with its own border control. Moderators set their own rules, and they set them differently. Karma minimums, account age, whether you may post a link at all, how often, what flair you must use, whether you need verifying first.

Reddit’s site wide guidance exists, but it is not what gets you banned. Local rules are what get you banned, and they are written in the sidebar of every community, which almost nobody reads.

The gates you will hit

Account age. Plenty of communities will not accept posts from accounts younger than a week, and some want a month. There is no way round this except waiting, so make the account before you need it.

Karma. Automated moderation bins posts from accounts below a threshold. It varies a lot, and as a rough shape people tend to suggest something like a hundred comment karma and fifty post karma before promotion-heavy subs will let you through. Treat that as a ballpark, not a spec.

Verification. Many adult communities want proof you are the person in the photos before you may post at all. More on that below, because it is the part with a trap in it.

Link rules. A lot of the bigger communities ban outbound links entirely, to stop their feed turning into an advert board. Some do not allow subscription creators at all. Neither of those is personal.

The ninety ten thing

Reddit’s own guidance is that self promotion should be a small slice of what you do, around one post in ten. Whether you hit that exactly matters less than whether you look like a person who uses Reddit or a billboard that learned to type.

The practical version: comment on things because you have something to say. Post things that stand on their own without a link. Then, occasionally, promote. It is slower and it works, which is an annoying combination.

Verification, and the bit nobody warns you about

Verification usually means photographing yourself holding a handwritten sign with your username, the date, and sometimes the subreddit name on it. Requirements differ everywhere. Some communities accept body only or faceless verification, plenty do not.

Here is the part that matters. You are about to send photographs of yourself to strangers, taken in your home, to satisfy a rule. Two things go wrong constantly.

Plain wall, nothing else in shot, and check the file. It takes an extra minute and it is the difference between a mildly awkward photo and a genuine problem.

What to actually post

Titles do most of the work. Reddit is a text first place wearing a photo app costume, and a good title will carry an average photo much further than a great photo carries a lazy one.

Write like you are talking to the specific community rather than broadcasting. Something that works in one place will land like a brick in another, and the only way to learn that is to read the top posts of the week before you write anything. If you want a proper read on writing that sells rather than just gets seen, there is a guide to captions worth an hour.

Post at sensible hours for where your audience actually is. Do not repost the identical thing everywhere on the same afternoon. Reply to comments on your own posts, because Reddit rewards threads that are alive.

A realistic first fortnight

1. Make the account now, even if you are not ready to post. Age is the one gate you cannot rush.
2. Spend a week just commenting. Be a person. This builds the karma the filters want.
3. Read the sidebar rules of five communities you want to be in. Actually read them.
4. Get verified where it is required, carefully, per the warning above.
5. Post without a link first and see what lands.
6. Then start promoting, occasionally, in the places that allow it.

When your Reddit posts turn up elsewhere

Worth knowing, since it is the flip side of using it: things posted publicly on Reddit get scraped and reposted constantly. That is a separate problem with a separate answer, and if a Reddit post of yours ends up somewhere it should not, there is a walkthrough for removing content from Reddit and the wider safety guide covers the order to do things in.

The short version

Read the sidebar. Make the account early. Comment more than you post. Check your verification photos twice, once for what is in the room and once for what is in the file. Then be patient, because the thing about Reddit working slowly is that it keeps working after you stop.

Nothing here is a guarantee. Moderators change rules whenever they like and owe none of us an explanation, which is their right and occasionally infuriating.