Selfish vs. selfless: self-promotion in communities

This is pretty much my exact experience.

Last week I 'launched' a product on Reddit. I messaged the mods telling them what I had planned on posting (which included a little bit of self-promotion for people to buy the product from the first batch). They approved and I made the post.

The post was basically a telling of the story of why I wanted to build the product and photos of the scrappy prototypes for feedback. This is something that is the norm for that particular community - to share progress and the things you've made. The discussion in the comments was great. People were happy to share their ideas.

And it did quite well (relative to the size of the community). I made a sale and got a fair amount of interest to buy. Like Arvid said, it's about being a peer - part of the group.

I have launched other products on Reddit before. And the only time it failed catastrophically was when I spent hours writing marketing style copy. I thought it was clever. But it just makes it super easy to filter out. It might as well have been a banner ad.

If you really understand what's in it for the audience, it's possible to be well received. It's often obvious what you want out of it. Your positioning needs to be focused on what's in it for them.

When I was a moderator, my razor was "is this for the benefit of the community?"

You can benefit from self-promotion, but not at the expense of the community. There should be a benefit for the other members: useful information, an interesting discussion, etc. In other words, be a genuine participant.

I've also been on the other side of this. My monetised content often got a pass because it was genuinely useful, and often posted as an answer to another user's question. I can honestly say that it was the best qualified answer, despite the occasional affiliate link in my content.

It also helps that I participate in those communities with and without self-promotion. For every link to a website I run, there are a dozen regular comments, helpful ones.

However, some members and moderators are not having it. Their razor is "does this benefit the submitter?" Anything that does is spam. Anything that does repeatedly - even with the blessing of the mods and a very favourable reception - is an attack on the community. Some users got so nasty about it that they turned to harassment.

I just ask the mods, then look at votes and comments. If either isn't receptive, I do not self-promote there. If they are, I ignore the haters and stay in the discussion.

Cool post! I've also been thinking about this for a while and agree with your advice. Have also been on both sides of the fence and often feel "out of place" sharing my project.

However, I try to ask myself, can a really contribute value in this conversation first - which is probably what motivates anyone to leave a comment. And if yes, I try explaining by adding an example using my project. This way I try to block myself from just promoting into any conversation in an unnatural way.

That's an amazing read