Reddit is a complicated social network. It is not easy figuring it out. Yet, once you do it is the perfect tool to get viral exposure to your submissions. However, first you must have a high enough Karma score. How do you gain it? Read on…

Reddit is a highly popular social bookmarking network, and as such it is a great tool for viral exposure. However, Reddit is full of people that will "down-vote" each submission they do not like, and if you get too many down-votes your karma points will be low and the number of submissions you are allowed

The best way to deal with this kind of stuff is to make sure that for each such "down-voted" submission you sent you will send several highly "up-voted" submissions. This will increase your Karma, improve your up-vote / down-vote ratio and will prevent you from being limited or banned.

However the main question every beginner Reddit asks is "How do I gain Karma points?" or "what submissions will get a lot of up-votes?" This article will try to answer those questions.

What NOT to do!

First let's starts from things you must not do if you want to increase your Karma points:

1. Do not post on "Self-post" subreddits. This is a technical thing, as "self-post" subreddits does not increase karma points no matter how many up-votes you get. So basically it is considered as a submissions that got no up-votes, and if you have several of those it can limit the number of submissions you are allowed to send.
2. Do not post controversial subjects or in controversial subreddits. This is self-explanatory! While some might like your post and up-vote it. Many other will not like it and will down-vote it. The final outcome will probably be a submission with very little number of up-vote which is not a good thing! Few examples (that I actually ran into): do not post a submission saying "Greek is guilty in its situation" into "Greek" subreddit, and do not post anything regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into "Israel" subreddit.
3. While your Karma is low – avoid the big and popular subreddits. This is a technical thing again. Since in the big subreddits your submissions have higher changes to get stuck in the spam filters (you will not see them in the "new" queue. Make sure to contact the subreddit's moderators if that happens). In addition, in popular subreddits there are a lot of submissions so it is harder to impress people and get a lot of up-votes.
4. Avoid abandon subreddits! Since anyone can open a subreddit, many subreddit were open just to be abandon! Make sure the other you are "counting on" is not one of them. Check what the last date someone submitted something to this subreddit.

Effective ways I do not like

If you will ask an old redditor what is the fastest way to get Karma points he will give you one of two very known and efficient ways that normally works. However, before I will tell you what are those ways please consider the following things:

1. Those are very known ways, so many will use them
   and will turn them into less efficient.
2. I personally never tried them (yet I know people that did and they worked for them).
3. They might not fit everyone.

Those ways are:

1. Posting pictures of naked women into the appropriate porn subreddits.
2. Posting articles against religions (especially Christians) and saying how ridiculous religions are in the "atheism" subreddit.

Other ways to get extra Karma Points:

1. Find small subreddits that you can provide link to thing they like and send those things to them (make sure first to follow the subreddit for a while and make sure you really understand the taste of the majority of the people).
2. If you are not a US citizen, nor do you live in a controversial country, than your country subreddit is a good place to start. It is probably small or medium in size, and you can post links to good articles from online local newspapers.
3. If you are a member of an online community (aside from Reddit), search the subreddit of this community, it will probably be a place that will accept you warmly and with a lot of up-votes, after all you are part of the community. A good example to that in "Zazzle" subreddit which is still small, yet it only contains people from Zazzle, so each Zazzle link will get only up-votes. If your online community does not have a subreddit – open one yourself and let you community member know about it and invite them to join. This way you can form the warm subreddit yourself!
4. The use of viral links from other social networks. You notice a link that everyone shares in Facebook? Everyone retweet a link? This might be a good thing to post to Reddit in other to increase your Karma. After all if it was so successful in some other network, there is no reason it will not do nicely on Reddit as well. However you must consider that:

     * Other people know this as well, so make sure no-one sent that link before.
     * You must send it to the right subreddit in order to get the right effect. Research the subreddits!

5. If you have cute pets or babies and you do not care to share their pictures online, this is a great way to earn Karma points (especially sending pictures of cut little cats into the "cat" subreddit).

For a complete and detailed guide on how to use Reddit please follow this link: Reddit full How to guide.