Is it frowned upon to market your product on Reddit

There is Reddit advertising and there is marketing on Reddit. Advertising is an honest way to go about it, marketing requires a little more thought and there's a lot of room for trickery and possibly dishonesty(which can backfire terribly).

If what you offer is valuable and desired by any subset of Reddit users there is probably a sub where you can post it and receive positive attention by legitimately saying "hey I made this for you guys..." but you should be using a freemium business model doing that. Linking to something that costs money as the person who sells it is a great way to get your product mocked and downvoted then shunned.

Someone will always remember when you fucked up the marketing and those "hey guys, 6 months ago they tried to sell us this, what bullshit, OP is probably a shill...hey look OP's account is 6 months old, go fucking figure." posts will rise to the top of any future successful post that was poorly planned guerrilla marketing.

I've seen people create information mashups that explode in popularity, music tools, video apps, pretty much anything that is free and gives something to the community wins. They make their money on advertising and premium memberships, Reddit is a jumpstart for their product.

A third party with established account will have to post about any physical products and have some kind of believable narrative to succeed. There was a shirt that went viral right before Christmas. Someone posted it on /r/funny or /r/pics and the little mom & pop vendor blew up with orders. The OP was not affiliated with the company (for all we know) but an employee did update us on the situation with a post showing hundreds of those shirts saying "Thanks guys, due to Reddit we're all working overtime now." which was pretty smart marketing. They got a second bump in orders by showing the effect of Reddit on their order process regardless of whether or not the first post was them.

The long and short of it? Make something valuable, interesting, novel or otherwise post-worthy and if you're going to try to fool Reddit, don't fuck it up. If your product does go viral of its own accord, congrats! That's a fantastic accomplishment. Use that attention wisely and don't try to sell us when you comment on your own product. Like most customers, authenticity resonates with the hive mind.

/r/marketing Thread