How to Get Karma on Reddit: 5 Strategies for Beginners

What is karma on Reddit?

Karma is Reddit's way of measuring the quality of a user's contributions to the Reddit community. It's also a way for moderators to prevent bot accounts from flooding the site with spam. As you increase your karma, you'll earn respect and privileges throughout Reddit.

While it may not seem like a big deal to have internet points, having a high karma score can be incredibly helpful if you're trying to promote your content on Reddit. While there are many places to market content online, Reddit, the self-proclaimed Front Page of Internet, receives more than 400 million visits each month, and is ranked among top 20 most visited websites around the world. A higher karma score means that your posts are more likely to be seen by this massive audience.

Redditors can earn karma by posting interesting and quality content, or by helping others find information they're looking for. There are four ways to earn karma on Reddit:

1. Receiving upvotes on posts
2. Receiving upvotes on comments
3. Receiving awards from other users
4. Giving awards to other users

Sounds easy right? Just get more karma and clout will follow. Unfortunately, new Reddit users soon realize that it's a bit more complicated than that. To prevent spam and other unwanted content, moderators of the subreddits will automatically take down your posts if you don't have enough karma. However, for you to post in subreddits to gain karma. It's a Catch-22! So, this leaves us with a big question: How do I get karma on Reddit?

In this article, we'll go over five karma-building strategies so you can get the most out of your Reddit experience.

Strategy #1: Find and Participate in Subreddits Related to Your Niche

One of the best ways to get karma is to find subreddits related to your niche or special interests and regularly contribute quality content. For example, some people love basketball. By commenting and posting in r/NBA, it'll be easy to have some awesome discussions about basketball and meaningfully help make the r/NBA community a better place. By becoming an active member of a subreddit, you'll not only earn karma but also build relationships with other users.

Once you've built up a sufficient amount of karma on Reddit, you can then start promoting your content to larger and larger subreddits. Generally, the smaller the subreddit, the easier they will be on the karma requirements since they get less traffic. While you won't get as many upvotes posting in a subreddit with 16,000 members as you would in one with 1,600,000 members, at least you will be allowed to post your content and begin earning karma.

Since comments also count for karma, you don't even need to be producing much original content in order to get karma. You can simply comment on posts and let the karma roll in. If you know the community you're going to be promoting content in, it makes sense to get started there. It will also help you build a stronger reputation as a trusted Redditor.

There are several ways to find subreddits to post in. The first is to guess the name subreddit. Odds are that if you want to promote copywriting services, then r/copywriting is the place to go. The second is to simply search them by name. Be sure to switch to the community search tab on the Reddit search page to get the best possible results:

If you want to find even more subreddits once you've found one that interests you, check out the other subreddits that people who post in are also posting in. For example, if you want to promote your content in r/nba, you can see that many top posts also post in r/nbamemes and r/nbadiscussion.

This process can be especially time consuming since you have to go to a bunch of user profiles to find the subreddits they're posting in. Software tools for Reddit such as Promoddit's subreddit finder can help you find the subreddits you're interested in automatically:

Strategy #2: Contribute to Real Communities, Not Karma Farms

Try to avoid posting in subreddits just for the sake of getting karma. It'll be obvious that you're only there to self-promote, and you'll be downvoted into oblivion. Moderators take their job very seriously and don't want spam in their subreddits.

Some subreddits are dedicated to having users upvote each other's content. These are called karma farms, and moderators can see right through it. If they see you are frequently posting in karma farms, they may flag or ban your account as likely spam. Some karma subreddits to avoid are r/freeKarma4U, r/upvote, r/GetKarma_Here, r/KarmaFarming4Pros, r/karma4free, r/FreeKarma4All, and r/needkarma.

Not only will these subreddits not help you get a lot karma, posting in them will also make it harder for you to get karma in the future as Redditors will begin to think of you as a spammer. It's always best to contribute to real communities where people are actually interested in posting content, discussion, and debate.

If you feel you must post in a karma farm, be sure to delete the post as soon as it's not getting upvotes. You keep your karma from a post even after it's been deleted.

Strategy #3: Optimize Your Content for Visibility

Reddit is very visual. In order to get exposure for your own content, make sure your photos and videos are high quality and attention grabbing. People are much more likely to upvote and award content that is well presented and relevant. When promoting your content on Reddit, try not to be too self-promotional since it can backfire. Instead, as you're first starting out, it can be helpful to find popular Redditors in your niche and see what sort of content they are posting. By reverse engineering their success, you can learn what types of content perform well on each subreddit. Take a look at the top posts for the month to see what really excelled.

If you're creating images and videos for maximum karma, be sure to keep an eye out for details like:

• The lighting and color grading of the content
• Any background noise and visual clutter
• The framing of the content (i.e. the black bars around the video)
• Any resolution issues caused by exporting or hosting the content

Even a little bit of polish can make your content stand out. We recommend editing images using professional software such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. If you're new to image editing, try out the Photoshop Express mobile app for a quick and easy way to edit images. These tools cost as little as $10/month and can help you put the finishing touches on your content.

To make sure that your posts are visible, double check that your content is being hosted by an approved host for the subreddits you want to post in. Some subreddits will only let you post images and videos hosted at select sites such as Imgur Flickr, Vimeo, or (Giphy)[https://giphy.com] in order to prevent spam.

Confusingly, sometimes subreddits have opposite policies regarding what sites they allow. For example, r/Catloaf (for cats that look like loaves) doens't allow videos hosted at YouTube to be posted. On the other hand, if you want to post to r/aww, YouTube is one of the only sites that are allowed.

There's no easy way to tell if your content is hosted at an approved site until you submit the post. For example, if you post a YouTube link to a subreddit which doesn't allow YouTube (like r/Catloaf or r/Catpics), you'll just get your post taken down immediately:

Instead of submitting and hoping, Promoddit can help you get it right the first time. It has a database that's frequently updated with the content host requirements as well many other key details for visibility. Finding out is just a click away:

Strategy #4: Post At The Right Time

Timing is everything when it comes to Reddit. Just like any other social media platform, there are optimal times to post in order to get the most views and engagement. The best time to post on Reddit differs depending on the community you are posting in. For example, r/antiwork is especially busy on Monday. No wonder!

Some additional aspects to consider when posting on Reddit is the cooldown period between posting again to the same subreddit. A lot of moderators will ban you if you post too many times in a short timeframe. This is critical to keep in mind so that you can continue to post in the subreddit without being banned as a spammer. The limits vary from subreddit to subreddit but 24 hours between posts to the same subreddit is a safe bet.

Another thing to consider when timing your posts is to make sure you aren't submitting the same pictures to similar subreddits in a short amount of time. This constraint exists because Redditors usually follow similar subreddits in their specific niches. For example, animal lovers on Reddit are likely to follow multiple subreddits related to animals such as r/cats, r/Catpics, r/kitten, and r/Catloaf. If a Redditor sees the same content repeatedly in the similar subreddits, they are unlikely to upvote it after the first time seeing it.

These are just some of the factors that go into making an optimal schedule. Don't worry if it sounds like a ton of work to get right. Promoddit automatically schedules your posts so that you never post too often to the same subreddit. It can even make sure you space your posts out within similar subreddits to better grow your karma:

Promoddit also takes into account the subreddit's own timing trends to make sure you're posting at the right time. The best part is that you never have to think about when to post. Just add your content and Promoddit does the rest.

Strategy #5: Automate Your Reddit Posting

If you're a content creator, your time is best spent making quality content that will organically attract karma. Optimizing your posts on Reddit can become quite complex, especially when you're manually uploading or scheduling content. That's why you should always use a tool like Promoddit to help you get the most out of your content.

Consistency is key when it comes to growing your karma. If you're regularly posting on Reddit, you'll be able to get more karma faster than if you'd submitted posts one at a time. Features like the ability to send easily the same content to different subreddits, the ability to effortlessly schedule posts, and the ability to get direct access to subreddit rules and guidelines from the post manager will make it easier to get stay on top of your posts without losing mind. Posting consistently is a breeze using Promoddit's scheduler:

Now Over to You

Karma is a valuable currency that can greatly impact your success on Reddit. By following these strategies and using a specialized tool like Promoddit, you can start earning karma and sharing your content more effectively. Reddit is a great tool for growing your online presence, but it takes time and effort to build up a good karma score and reach your audience. Get started today and see the results for yourself!