(Full Guide) Use AI To Generate 10,000+ Impression on Reddit Daily

Discover how we used AI-driven content to unlock massive growth on Reddit while significantly reducing marketing expenses.

The dream is getting all the customers you need through organic content. I'm mean seriously, it's peak business positioning. By never having to pay to acquire more customers, your business has a moat like no other.

The problem is, getting their is a long term investment that isn't straight forward. If growing a newsletter with X or LinkedIn content was easy, you wouldn't be reading this.

In this article, I'm not going to show you how to solve this challenge. I'm going to show you how to go around it completely.

The idea for this marketing strategy came to me when I was helping a client. Like many companies they were struggling to profitably acquire customers. They had a YouTube channel that was bringing in all their customers but it stopped growing. They hit a plateau. They were losing customers at the same rate they got new ones.

In their analytics, I saw Reddit was the 4th largest source of traffic even though they paid no attention to the channel.

Eventually, I thought up the idea of using AI to produce unique content for every relevant subreddit we could find.

The results were great:

• Over 4 million impressions on Reddit

• 70K Impressions Per Post on Average

• Hundreds of new user sign-ups

• Significant increase in website traffic

• Reduction of customer acquisition costs from $300–$400 to approximately $80–$100 per paying customer

Since working with them, I've improved the strategy to be about 3x more efficient than it was.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll delve into how we achieved these results, sharing each step of the process so you can replicate this strategy for your own marketing efforts.

Diagnosis of the Challenge

Before diving in, I want to go over the challenge this particular strategy solves, and what challenges we will face in the implementation.

The Retail Marketing Problem

Advertising is essentially paying retail prices for you customer acquisition. It's the most expensive way to get more customers. At a fundamental level, it is profitable if there's enough demand for your product to make up for paying retail prices for customers.

If your advertising is profitable out of the gate, you have Product Market Fit. Congrats. If not, demand is usually increased through branding.

Building owned media channels like social media accounts, newsletters, YouTube channel, etc... Is like manufacturing your own customer acquisition. Your per unit cost will be much cheaper than advertising. But the capital expenditures happen at the beginning of the process.

In other words, you are investing more capital on the front end, for cheaper customers later on.

Earned Media, on the other hand, is like bartering for your customers. Earned media is when you get your content, or content about you, on somebody else's owned media. You get the benefit of cheap customer acquisition of owning a channel, without the initial investment.

The catch is, you have to give the owner something they need (content that will also help their ends), and play by their rules.

Reddit is Different

From a marketing perspective, Reddit is more like earned media than social media.

A bunch of other people are building communities.

A bunch of other people are supplying the content in those communities.

Building your own profile simply does not matter. You don't own the media. Unlike other socials, your very first post can perform just as well as your 1,000th post.

Because the fundamentals of the platform are different from other socials, the rules are much closer to earned media than social media. You have to follow their rules. And top among those rules, on virtually every subreddit, is no self promotion.

This usually turns a lot of founders away. But the reality is, this is how ALL earned media works. You can't put your Call To Action at the bottom of the Forbes article you're getting. When Time magazine features Elon Musk, there is no link to buy a Tesla.

Earned Media is about the story. It's promotion, not advertising.

The Economics of Earned Media

How the difference of earned media shows up in the metrics is much higher impressions (more views) and much lower click through rate.

Where an Ad or even an email sent to your list may have a 1-2% click rate, earned media is closer to 0.2-0.5%.

The good thing about this is you get more branding for your money from the higher impressions (demand generation). But to get the volume of conversions you need, you'll need 2-4x the volume of content.

This is where the AI comes in. By using AI to the highest degree that's technically possible, we can get a 10-20x improvement in the cost of writing content. Which you'll need to make Reddit, or earned media in general, profitable.

But we're not talking about copying and pasting prompts into ChatGPT. The whole content production process needs to be automated to the fullest extent possible. And well.. It's not like AI content is all that great.

The Guiding Policy

The solution to all these challenges was building a mostly automated system that produces highly quality posts for each subreddit, aligns with the expectations of the community, while making our product part of the narrative of the post.

And so the strategy was built on the following pillars:

1. Leverage Existing Content: Utilize a piece of Pillar Content, like a YouTube video, to feed in the AI prompts so the AI doesn't make up random or generic information.

2. AI-Assisted Content Creation: Develop a system where AI generates drafts of subreddit-specific posts, significantly reducing the time required for content creation.

3. Human Editing for Quality Assurance: Employ human editors to refine AI-generated content, ensuring accuracy, clarity, and community alignment.

4. Subtle Brand Integration: Include understated references to the client's product, such as watermarked charts within posts, to pique interest without triggering community backlash.

Step by Step Campaign Build

In this section, we'll walk through the entire process step-by-step, providing a detailed guide on how to implement this strategy for your own marketing efforts.

Quick note: I built this whole system in AirTable with N8N running all the automation.

Subscribe to this newsletter and you'll get:

1. The AirTable Database Template

2. The N8N automation

3. 3 Prompts you can use for the campaign development

And It will save you about 80% of the time it takes you to build this campaign.

1. Identifying the Right Subreddits

Objective:

Find all the subreddits where your target persona is likely to be active.

Steps:

1. Generate a list of Key Words to search on Reddit to find the right subreddits

Generally I start with the persona's I'm targeting. Then, for each persona, I would generate a list of key words.

Example: Digital Marketers

• digital marketing

• marketing

• social media marketing

• email marketing

• facebook advertising

And just go through that process for each persona.

You can also use a simple prompt to get a list from ChatGPT

Get Prompt Here

1. Search Each KW in Reddit and Click over to Communities

Obviously you'll see a lot of options pop up here. Right out of the gate you can ignore the communities that are obviously not relevant.

Put these channels in the channel table in AirTable. Include basic info like member size and the link. Ultimately, you will build a database of channels that looks like this:

How do you know which subreddits are worth while? I do a quick evaluation on these 3 items

• Relevance - Is it about my topic?

• Size - Does it have enough members to matter?

• Content - Will I be creating the kind of content that performs well on this channel?

If you just getting started, start with 5-8 subreddits you want to target. For context, I'm currently generating content for about 60 myself.

2. Researching and Analyzing Top-Performing Content

Objective: Collect the highest performing content on each channel to base a content guidelines document off.

Steps:

On each Subreddit change the filter from "Hot" to "Top", and then a time filter will pop-up and you need to change that to "All Time"

This will show you the highest performing posts ever posted on that subreddit. These will shape the content we make for the subreddit. Look for posts that will make a good foundation for content guidelines.

For example, memes should be excluded. Grab the posts like look like content you can produce and will serve our other objectives.

Copy these posts in a Google Doc and separating them by subreddit.

3. Creating Channel Guides for Each Subreddit

Objective: Develop a guideline that encapsulates the style, tone, and content preferences of each subreddit.

Use the content as the basis of creating a subreddit content guidelines

Now that you have all this content saved, we need to study it and look for specific attributes to create a content guideline.

Here is the basic outline of the content guidelines we're looking to create.

Content Guidelines Outline:

1. Introduction

2. Who is Our Audience?

2a. Audience Demographics

2b. Audience Interests and Goals

3. What the Audience Looks for in Content

4. Key Elements for Successful Posts

5. Writing Style & Tone

6. What to Avoid

7. Conclusion

You can use AI to write all of these for you to save a bunch of time.

The prompt I use is included when you subscribe to the newsletter

Add the content guidelines to the content guidelines field of each channel in your AirTable.

Here is an example content guidelines for one of my channels

4. Crafting the AI Prompts

Objective: Create comprehensive prompts that instruct the AI on the specific of the post we want it to create.

If you were paying attention to the high performing posts you found on each channel, you found that different kinds of posts perform well on each channel.

Some of the high performing posts may have been tactical break downs of how the author accomplished a specific thing, others will have been big questions about the niche topic, others list style posts like "6 things I learned after 10 years in niche".

We differentiate between what kind of post we want the AI to create in the prompt. If you have the AirTable you'll see there is a prompt table where all these prompts are stored.

Put Collected Posts into different buckets based on post type

Now that you have a collection of posts, start to categorize them based on the kind of post they are. I recommend doing this in a new tab on your Google Doc.

The title of each post is usually the give away to determine what kind of post it is, so you can use that as your short cut.

I have tried to feed all the posts to ChatGPT and get it to do this part but it does a horrible job.

One post type at a time, create a prompt that will get the AI to produce a new piece of content like the ones in your post type bucket

I used ChatGPT to do this, and you can get the prompt I used by subscribing.

Add to AirTable

In AirTable, add these outputs as a record in the Prompts table. Put the content in the prompts field.

Add a channel relationships to the prompt where this kind of post performs well.

5. Automate The Content Production Process

Objective: Automate running all the prompts to produce a lot of content.

Now that we have all the assets, we need to build the automation in N8N.

Here is the basic logic of the automation:

1. Trigger manually or on timer

2. Get source content records in source content table with status "In Que"

3. Get all Prompts in prompt table (with status "Active")

4. For Each Prompt Record, Run content creation prompt

5. If you have a lot of channel, take this output and create new content record with it. Edit this before triggering the revising of the content based on the channel guidelines. This will save you a lot of editing time.

6. For each prompt, get all related channel records.

7. For each channel record run prompt to revise content based on content guidelines

8. Create content record in Content Table with this output.

That's essentially how the automation works. If you have used AirTable the same way I have outlined until now, you can download my N8N automation and it should work once you connect all your credentials.

Subscribe to download the N8N automation.

6. Human Editing and Revision of AI Content

Objective: Refine AI-generated drafts to produce polished, publishable posts.

At this point, AI has taken a ton of the work off our plate. But the content is generally not quite good enough to publish. So we need to take the time to edit each post.

Steps:

1. Review for Tone and Style:

   • Adjust language to sound natural and authentic.

   • Remove clichés and overly enthusiastic expressions that may seem unnatural.
     

2. Verify Facts and Figures:

   • Double-check all data, especially numerical information.

   • Correct any inaccuracies stemming from transcription errors or AI misunderstandings.
     

3. Align with Subreddit Norms:

   • Ensure the content adheres to community guidelines.

   • Adjust formatting and structure as needed.
     

4. Finalize the Post:

   • Proofread for grammar and clarity.

   • Confirm that the content provides genuine value.

In AirTable, you can create an interface where you can filter your content records on status or publication date to edit to streamline your editing.

7. Subtle Integration of Product Mentions

Objective: Weave our company into the narrative of each post.

This is where we finally tie the post back to the actual thing we want to promote. There's a couple reasons we save this until the end:

1. We really want to emphasize that leaving mentions of our company is an afterthought.
   
   This is linked to the performance of the post. If your post comes off as self-promotion, it won't get upvotes. If it doesn't get upvotes, it won't get impressions and you risk getting booted off all these channels.
   

2. If you try to have the AI weave in your product mentions, it will absolutely butcher it. It does a very bad job with subtlety.

Here are some tactical approaches to weaving your company into the post narrative. Think of this like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs back to your website for those that are seriously interested.

1. Include Relevant, Branded, Visuals:

   • If you can bring in screenshots that are relevant to the post, and also highlight the product, this is great.

2. Contextual, Non-Hyperlinked, Mentions:

   • If in the middle of the post it makes sense given the content to mention your project, do it. But don't add a link. Give the reader what they need to go to Google and find you that way.

3. Point to other pieces of content:

   • If you can mention an article, youtube video, etc... that's contextually relevant, and at that location mentions your product, you can link to it. But be careful about this.

Rule:

Instead of doing the same thing each time, do whatever is best for that specific post. It needs to feel as natural as possible.

Key Insights To Keep In Mind

These are just some additional notes on things I ran into while running this campaign

• Space out your scheduling. You will have a lot of posts that are similar but not the same. Rotate channels and the prompts to have as much diversity on your profile as possible.

• Optimize your profile. Another great way to get people back to your website is by optimizing your profile.

Conclusion

That's it!

Alright obviously this is not a campaign for the light-hearted. But once you get it going, it works like a charm.

Remember to grab all the free templates associated with the campaign.

If you have questions, feel free to email me.

If you'd like me to run this campaign for you, schedule a call!