The Best Practices for Reddit Marketing (...and how to not get Banned!)

Reddit can be the best marketing channel you'll ever touch.

It can also delete you in five minutes. Post removed. Account flagged. Brand dragged. Subreddit ban. Sometimes all in the same day.

I care about this because I credit Reddit for powering my first startup to succeed, and I think Reddit can do a whole lot for your brand too.

My first company was an e-commerce brand called SPOTMYUV. When we launched the brand - sunscreen stickers that change colour when you need to reappl -, none of our normal marketing worked. We tried ads. We tried keyword bidding. The problem was simple: we were bidding on words that weren’t searched and phrases that didn’t exist because we were creating a new product category.

So I did the most unscalable thing possible. I refreshed Reddit every five minutes between tasks. For two weeks. I was looking for the exact thread where I could help in a way that didn't feel forced.

Eventually we hit the goldmine. Someone bought the product from a thread I commented on, tried it, posted a review, and I showed up in that review thread too. That day we got 10,000 new orders.

That's when I became obsessed with what I call comment marketing. It's also why I went on to build Advite. I wanted a tool that could find those moments without me living inside Reddit all day. Something that I wanted to exist.

This article is the playbook I wish I had back then. It's written for bootstrapped founders. You're low on time. You're low on budget. You still need traction.

And you need to stay unbanned.

This was me, hard at work, building SPOTMYUV. Wait, why am I doing a software company now?

Why Reddit is worth it (especially if you're bootstrapped)

Reddit is huge. Not "marketer huge." Actual huge.

As of Q2 2024, Reddit reported 91.2 million daily active users. That's not a niche forum anymore.

Reddit is also fragmented in the best way. There are 2.2 million subreddits, and roughly 130,000 active communities. That means there's probably a place where people talk about your exact problem using the exact words your customers use.

Then there's the trust piece.

Nielsen found 88% of people trust recommendations from people they know. Reddit isn't "people you know," but it behaves like that socially. It's why people search "best ______ reddit" before buying anything.

If you're bootstrapped, this is your advantage. Big companies can buy attention. You can earn it.

But you only earn it if you show up correctly.

How people actually get banned on Reddit

Most bans aren't about one link. They're about intent.

Reddit has an immune system. It's mods, users, automod filters, and a culture that can smell self-promotion from a mile away. If your behaviour looks like extraction, you get treated like spam.

Founders fall into this trap fast because your product is your whole life. You join Reddit and you accidentally become a one-dimensional being here to plug your brand.

People feel that instantly.

And here's the simplest diagnostic I know: If it feels forced, it's because it is.

Start with the simplest structure that keeps you safe: two accounts

This is the highest ROI move you can make before you write a single "marketing" comment.

Your personal account stays personal

This is you being a real person. Comment on things you actually care about. For me that's chess, metal music, and Toronto community stuff. I'm also building Founder Poker Toronto, so I'm always around founders in real life too. The point is: you need a place online where you're not performing.

I tell people this all the time: it's your nine to five, and it's your five to nine → Your after-work Redditing matters just as much (if not more) than your work-related Redditing.

If your comment history is only startup content, you look like you're running a campaign. That's not a vibe Reddit rewards.

Before you do any professional outreach, I recommend you post 10 to 15 normal comments in non-business subreddits. Memes. Music. Pop culture. Whatever you genuinely like. It builds account history and it teaches you tone.

Your brand account stays boring (on purpose)

Brand accounts work when they act like support, not sales.

Use the brand account for things like answering direct questions about your product, clarifying misinformation, and handling issues when someone tags you or mentions you. The brand account should rarely post new threads. It should show up when it's needed.

This split also protects you. If your brand account takes heat, your personal account doesn't get dragged into it.

Choose battles you can win

Reddit is not a universal growth hack. It works when people already talk about the problem you solve.

It's a bad fit for commoditized products. People don't debate brands of milk and eggs in long threads. They debate price and convenience, and that conversation usually doesn't happen on Reddit.

It's also a bad fit for categories that aren't discussed online. Some B2B works. Some doesn't. If you're in aerospace or defense, you're not going to find decision-makers casually comparing vendors in public threads.

So do a quick reality check first. Search your category on Reddit. Look for real pain. Look for people asking for recommendations. Look for complaints. If you don't see any of that, don't force it.

Josip Vulic, CTO, and Derek Jouppi, CEO, hard at work building Advite so your Reddit Marketing is simpler.

Read the room before you speak

Every subreddit has rules. Read them like your distribution depends on it. Because it does.

Then go one step deeper. Read the top posts from the last month and pay attention to the vibe. Are people writing long, detailed answers? Are they sarcastic? Are they strict about self-promo? Do they have weekly recommendation threads? Do they ban links?

You can usually predict moderation by reading how the community upvotes.

When founders get banned, it's often because they posted something that would've obviously failed the "top posts" test.

Finding high-signal threads without doomscrolling

When I was marketing SPOTMYUV, I brute-forced it. Refresh, refresh, refresh. That worked once. It also cost me two weeks of my life.

The smarter way is to define what "a good thread" looks like, and then build a system to catch those threads early.

Here's the key idea: relevance on Reddit is rarely a keyword.

Not every mention of "sunscreen" mattered to me. I cared about parents talking about sunscreen for kids. That intersection is where conversions live. Keyword tools struggle with that.

This is also where AI helps. I've said it before and I'll say it again: AI has made the internet even noisier, but AI has also made the noise even easier to filter out. Instruction-based matching beats Boolean soup.

If you're starting from zero, do it manually. Use Google with `site:reddit.com` and your problem phrase. Sort by new in the subreddits you care about. Check a couple times a day.

If you want to scale it, use monitoring. That's why I built Advite. It creates AI assistants called Monitors that read one platform for one goal for one product. They poll every 15 minutes and deliver an inbox that looks like an inbox of leads. You can rate results and it improves.

Use Advite or don't. The principle matters more than the tool: stop hunting volume. Start hunting moments.

The comment rules that keep you unbanned (and make you money)

This is where most founders screw up, even the smart ones.

Lead with help. Earn the right to mention your product

When someone posts "What tool should I use?" your first job is to answer like a peer. Not like a pitch deck.

Read the post twice. Figure out what they're actually asking. A lot of Reddit questions are really fear in disguise. They're worried about wasting money. They're worried about getting scammed. They're worried they're missing something obvious.

Write to that.

If your product fits, mention it near the end. Keep it short. If it doesn't fit, don't wedge it in. People can smell the wedge.

Disclose affiliation every time

If you're the founder, say you're the founder. This is non-negotiable.

Here's a pattern that stays clean:

> Full disclosure: I'm the founder of X. If you want the neutral answer, here's how I'd evaluate any option in this category. If you decide to check us out, cool. If not, also cool.

That tone reads as unbelievably high signal because it's transparent and calm.

If you try to cosplay as a customer, you'll eventually get caught. When you do, it's not just a ban. It's a reputation hit.

Keep your tone "aggressively neutral"

Founders love dunking on competitors because it feels good for 30 seconds.

It also kills trust.

Your best move is to be aggressively neutral. Admit trade-offs. Tell the truth about who a competitor is good for. Then explain who you're good for.

I use a Goldilocks style when I talk about competitors. If a rival is the better budget option, I'll say it. That does two things. It filters out the wrong buyer and it makes the right buyer trust me.

Write comments AI can't write

This is the filter I use before I hit "reply":

If AI can write the comment, then it's not a comment worth writing.

Generic advice is everywhere now. It's cheap. It's also forgettable.

What can't be faked is first-party insight. Your own experience. Your own lessons. The stuff you learned because you shipped a product and took punches.

That's why my SPOTMYUV story worked. It wasn't a clever slogan. It was a real founder showing up in a real thread with something useful at the exact right moment.

If you don't have a dramatic story, that's fine. You still have something AI doesn't: the edge cases you've seen, the common mistakes your users make, and the honest pros and cons of different approaches.

Treat links like a privilege

Most founders get banned because they try to "close the loop" with a link.

Slow down.

Some subreddits hate links. Some allow them. Either way, don't make the link the value. Make the comment the value.

A safe default is to write the full answer in the comment, then offer the link if someone asks. If you must include a link, keep it to one and make it directly relevant to the question. Avoid tracking links. Avoid affiliate links. Avoid anything that screams "campaign."

Don't automate the engagement

Use automation to find threads. Great.

Don't automate your replies.

The fastest way to get labelled spam is to post templated responses, even if you "personalize" them. Mods see patterns. Users see patterns. Once you're marked, it's hard to recover.

Also, the incentives changed. "Spray and pray" is obsolete. AI search tools increasingly summarize the top one to three comments. Low-engagement filler becomes invisible.

One strong comment beats 50 weak ones. Every time.

Timing matters more than people admit

If you show up after the thread is dead, your comment won't get seen. That's not morality. That's mechanics.

You want to catch threads early, when the author is still online and the community is still reading. That's another reason monitoring matters. It keeps you from living on /new manually.

That’s why you’ll want a tool like Advite to make sure you’re the first person to know when a new thread for your brand is posted.

Your inbox can be as full of leads as Advite’s inbox for Advite is!

Brand monitoring: the boring reason you still need Reddit

A lot of founders treat Reddit like a growth channel. It's also a risk channel.

If a complaint starts trending and you miss it, you lose the chance to fix it early. Reddit users notice when a brand is present.

Reddit's own research says 83% of users view a brand more favorably if it addresses negative feedback. It also says 72% think worse of brands that ignore it.

That doesn't mean you argue. It means you show up like an adult. You acknowledge. You ask for details. You fix what you can. You follow up.

That behaviour compounds.

How to handle mods without making it worse

If your post gets removed, don't go to war.

Read the removal reason. Read the rules again. Then message the mods with humility and clarity. Keep it short. Ask what would make the post acceptable, or accept that it won't be.

Mods are running a community for free. Treat them like you'd treat the person holding the keys to your distribution. Because that's what they are.

If you get banned, don't create a new account to dodge it. That's how you turn a small problem into a permanent one.

A simple 30-minutes-a-day routine that works

Set up a free trial of Advite. 7-days, no charge.

Check the alerts you get briefly each day, mainly looking for new threads that match your product's "moment." Recommendation requests. Pain posts. People comparing options. Real problems with urgency.

Write one high-quality comment. One. Make it helpful, specific, and calm. Disclose if you're affiliated. Then leave.

Come back later and reply to anyone who responded. That's where trust gets built. A lot of founders comment and vanish. Reddit punishes that.

And keep your personal account alive. Drop a few normal comments each week in non-business communities so your profile continues to look like a human, not a campaign.

Measuring Reddit without losing your mind

Attribution is a leaky bucket.

Someone reads your comment, opens a new tab, forgets, comes back a week later on their phone, and buys. You won't track that perfectly. You also shouldn't try to "solve" it in a way that kills privacy.

So measure what you can see. Are people replying with real questions? Are they asking for your link? Are they DMing you after you've earned it? Are customers telling you "I found you on Reddit"?

That's enough to know if you're on the right track.

The real secret to not getting banned

Reddit doesn't hate founders.

Reddit hates the feeling of being used.

Show up like a person. Stay aggressively neutral. Share first-party insight. Follow the rules. Keep the links under control. Don't automate your personality.

Do that, and you get something rare: you get to influence the conversation and influence the story in the exact place people go when they want the truth.

And once you've seen one comment turn into real traction, you won't look at "marketing" the same way again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Reddit marketing too risky for a bootstrapped startup?

It is only risky if you act like a marketer. Reddit has an 'immune system' that aggressively targets self-promotion. To stay safe, separate your identity into two accounts (one personal, one brand) and only engage when you can offer genuine help. If your comment feels like a pitch, you will get flagged.

Is the audience actually large enough for niche B2B products?

Absolutely. With 91.2 million daily active users and over 130,000 active communities, your customers are almost certainly there. The platform's fragmentation is your advantage. It allows you to bypass the noise and find the exact threads where decision-makers are discussing the problem you solve.

Should I ignore negative comments to avoid drama?

Never. Silence looks like guilt. Data shows that 83% of users view a brand more favorably if they address negative feedback. Show up like an adult: acknowledge the issue, be 'aggressively neutral,' and fix it. This turns a reputation risk into a trust-building moment.

Can I use AI to scale my comment volume?

If AI can write the comment, it is not worth posting. Generic advice is cheap and easily ignored. To get traction, you need first-party insight - the specific lessons, failures, and edge cases only a founder knows. One high-signal comment based on real experience beats 50 automated 'spray and pray' replies every time.

How do I track ROI if I cannot use tracking links?

Accept that attribution will be a 'leaky bucket.' Since many subreddits ban tracking parameters, and users often switch devices before buying, you won't get perfect data. Instead, look for qualitative signals: an uptick in DMs, specific questions about your solution, and customers explicitly telling you, 'I found you on Reddit.'