@WitherStorm (View Post)
The main objective is to get your save to have as many up-votes as possible in a short period of time. If you are able to achieve that, your save will get to the front page, making it more noticeable by other users and depending on how good your save is, it could either stay on the front page for an entire week, which is the maximum, or it could gradually go down the front page until it disappears from there. Here are a few detailed tips to attract more users for the first step, which is getting up-votes in a short period of time.

Only make original and unique saves if possible: Original saves tend to receive more attention than ones that were made countless of times before. Bombs and normal photon lasers have been made so many times before, that's why there is a low chance for new ones to get to the front page. An ARAY copy machine is another example, cracker64's ARAY copy machine was very successful because it was probably an original concept when @cracker64 first made it, but if you make a similar one, there is a low chance for it to receive a lot of attention.

Make your saves attractive: Some people (like me) are picky and only view saves that look attractive from the thumbnails. This tip doesn't need much explanation, I will just give an example. Which save would you rather view?

This is an extreme example, the second save is the most down-voted save according to @Lockheedmartin in his contest. The title is also important, the "no wifi" part made that save even more interesting.

Gain popularity: This is a hard one, you achieve this over time, you just have to make many FP-worthy saves for more people to recognise you. The author's username is listed below each save, so it does play a role in attracting users. Having a distinguishable and unique username and profile picture also helps. Making a small logo to put on all your saves helps as well. Here is an example:

Although both of them are similar in terms of ugliness (sorry, this example is too good to not be mentioned), the second one got to the front page with no effort, this is also an extreme example, @jacob2's level of popularity is unreachable.

Upload when more people are active: I would upload mine on Friday or Saturday (around the weekends) at night, but the timing differs depending on your time zone, I compare my time zone to the time zones of the United States and European countries to figure out the best time to upload. It's obvious why this is important, there is a bigger chance to get up-votes when there are more people viewing your save.

Some minor tips:

• Use deco more often to prettify your saves and make people more likely to up-vote them.
• Follow the rules and don't do things like asking for votes, it will give you the opposite effect.
• Be interactive and helpful, this will raise your popularity.
• Update your saves every 3 hours to bump it to the most recent saves section if it is not receiving the attention it deserves.
• Delete and re-upload your save entirely and try again later if the previous tip doesn't work.
• If that doesn't work either, try making something else.
• You can tell whether your save is failing or not by looking at the views count, if it is a big number and there aren't many up-votes, then the save is probably bad.

About the trends thing, yes, makings saves that follow recent trends can get you to the front page sometimes, I can recall a few of them, like the recent diseases trend using this save:

There was also the cow saves trend, but it's dead now. I'm sure exploiting the sponges bug to make movable objects was a trend at some point, but it's fixed now, you can't make them anymore.

I also have a few more tips in the Tips section of my reference, check them out if you want.

Good luck with making awesome saves!