Promoting yourself on Reddit without getting banned
Reddit brings more free audience than anywhere else in this line of work, and it's also where people burn out fastest. The two are connected: it works precisely because it doesn't tolerate anyone treating it as an advertising board.
How Reddit thinks
It isn't a social platform where you post and your followers see it. It's a set of separate communities, each with its own rules, its own moderators and its own tolerance. What's fine in one gets you banned in another.
There is no single "Reddit rulebook" to learn once. There are the rules of each individual community, written in the sidebar, and they're the only thing that counts.
The first-three-days mistake
Almost everyone runs the same sequence: open an account, find the big communities, post the link everywhere. Result: banned within forty-eight hours, usually by all of them at once.
The reason is that a freshly created account posting only promotional links matches the spam profile exactly. No moderator needs to judge you: in many communities it's automatic.
What works instead
An account that existed beforehand. Before promoting anything, use Reddit the way a person would: comments, replies, taking part. It takes time, and there's no way to skip it.
Few communities, well chosen. Better to be a recognisable presence in three than a stranger in thirty. Moderators notice who comes back.
Reading the rules first, every time. Some communities want a specific tag in the title, some ban links outright and tolerate only a name in the profile, some have one day a week when promotion is allowed. This is written down, and not reading it is the most common reason for removal.
The link in your profile, not in the post. It's the rule that holds almost everywhere: anyone interested clicks your name. People who put the link in the post get removed and, the second time, banned.
The realistic maths
Reddit brings far more eyes than Instagram and far fewer ties. People arriving from there convert worse and stay less: it's an audience passing through, not an audience choosing you.
Which means it's useful as a first door, not as the only one. The combination that usually works is Reddit to be seen by many and Instagram to turn a share of them into people who actually follow you — two different trades, and both need doing.
In the Academy the two guides we keep open are exactly these, and that's no accident: they're the two platforms almost all unpaid traffic comes from.
If you get banned
Don't open another account to get back into the same community: that's what turns a temporary ban into a permanent one, and in some cases it catches your IP address.
Message the moderators, ask what you broke, and wait. Sometimes you're let back in, sometimes not. Either way the information you get — which rule you touched — is worth more than the lost account.