Going viral on Reddit wasn’t an overnight success for me—it was the result of countless trials and errors. In this article, I’ll share the valuable lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Go Where the People Are

The most important lesson is to go to the places where people are at the times they are there. This is WAY more important than what your content is.

To borrow an analogy from Alex Hormozi, imagine you are a hot dog seller. Would you have a better business having the best hot dogs in the world in a small rural town or not bad hot dogs on a busy city street corner? Put another way, would you rather have 1% of 100,000 or 100% of 100? Location is key. This isn’t to say content isn’t important—it’s critical and I’ll talk more about it below—but location is even more important.

Location comes in a couple of different flavors:

1. Reddit Channels with a Lot of Followers: One way to improve your chance to go viral is to post on a Reddit channel that has a lot of followers. For instance, r/AskReddit has 47 million followers with as many as 20,000 on at any moment. That’s a great place to get noticed.
2. Influencers with a Lot of Followers: Because influencers have a lot of people already following them, replying to their posts can generate a lot of views and likes. It’s a bit frustrating when an off-hand comment to an influencer gets more views and likes than the carefully crafted post you made, but that’s how it goes. Better yet, if you can come up with a good excuse to post your good content in reply to the influencer, you can strike gold. If you can get an influencer to repost your post, it’s pure rocket fuel.
3. A Hot Thread: Even influencers and popular Reddit topics have some posts that do well and many that don’t. Jumping on a hot thread is a great way to get noticed.
4. At a Time When the Followers Are On: The best time to post varies from platform to platform and topic to topic, but posting when people are active can really help boost the number who view it.
5. Ride the coattails. Some of my most viral posts on Reddit are where my initial post gets a really awesome reply and that reply drives the hits from that point forward.

These all are really saying the same thing: post where you have the best chance of getting views.

Content Matters

As I mentioned in my last post, I thought I had the perfect AI for Reddit’s makeup feed. It gave great answers (far better than ChatGPT). Very long, detailed, and often exactly on topic. Instead of it being a big hit, these posts were roundly rejected and often downvoted into oblivion.

Only once I really took the time to see what the people on that feed usually did with replies and adjusted my stance did I start to see some success. Answers needed to be short, to the point, and empathic. A reply to a post that told the user exactly what to do but left them feeling ugly or unheard was quickly downvoted. In contrast, a reply saying someone looked great always did okay. Without more content, they never did stellar, but they often got a few upvotes.

The best-performing posts for me have been those that ask a question and give an example. This allows people to give their advice as well. The following is one of my best performing:

The comments are especially rich as there are now 235 new tips that others have shared to add to my knowledge base.

Go for Slugging Average, Not Batting Average

In baseball, batting average is how often a player hits the ball. Slugging average is how many bases they average, with a home run being equal to four singles. In short, measure how hard you hit the ball, not just how often.

Alex Hormozi has another analogy. He says business is like baseball; most of the time you strike out. Hitting the ball even 1/3rd of your times at bat is considered all-star material. Given that the average batter faces 4 pitches per at bat, this means that a successful result one time in 12 is considered a stellar performance.

The same holds true with social media posts. Most posts, even the good ones, will get little attention. Of my last 100 posts on Reddit, the highest number of upvotes is currently about 1,000, and growing. The average is 15 upvotes, but the median is 1 upvote—my own. In fact, 54 of the 100 only got a single upvote even though many, if not most, of those received a hearty thank you as I answered another poster’s specific question.

This is also a pattern I see in other influencers’ work. I took 10 YouTube top influencers and charted their videos by number of views per video:

As you can see, a large number of the videos of top YouTube influencers have a lot fewer views than their most successful videos, often by 100X or more. This same distribution, called a Pareto distribution, is common for all influencers. So, don’t expect to go out and hit a home run every swing, know that most of the time you’ll strike out. But the occasional home runs will be worth it.

Alex Hormozi points out that there’s one really big difference between business and baseball: every once in a while, you make a hit that’s so good it doesn’t just score a run, or even a grand slam. It’s such a good hit that it scores hundreds of runs. That’s when you have a viral post.

Although the rules for maximizing likes and upvotes are clear, I still do a lot of posts that are unlikely to go viral because of their timing or location. If my goal was simply to have the most upvotes possible, I would stick to replying early to hot posts and posting only in frequented feeds. But a lot of people have a lot of good questions that matter to them that often go completely unanswered. Since I can help them with my AI-enhanced answers, I do. And many of them thank me when they read the suggestion and again after they try it and find it works.

The Hits Aren’t Always What You’d Expect

Poor content always fails, but great content only succeeds occasionally.

I have several posts that I thought would do very well, but which failed to catch on. Many people loved my article about how I managed to be a top contributor to a makeup feed on Reddit despite not knowing anything about makeup and I really thought that article had the potential to explode. After all, it’s an attention-getting concept and the story itself is all about failing again and again until I stumbled upon success. I was confident enough about the content and quality of the article I even put a few advertising dollars to up its view rate. All of that to little avail.

One problem is that it’s not where people can easily see it. It also might not be in the format people expect and may not be as high quality as I imagine it being. I will keep exploring and trying to find out.

Other posts designed to go big, such as the one asking people for their secret tips, did go big. There may be a good reason some exploded and others fizzled, but I have yet to discover it.

Conclusion

If there’s one key point, it’s: Location, location, location. Make sure your post is where people can see it. Good content, suited to the venue, is a big plus as well. Lastly, don’t get dissuaded when not every post goes viral. Even for the big influencers, the average post has one one-hundredth of the views that the biggest hits do.