How I grew my discord to 1000 members in under a month using Reddit comments

A lot of people here focus on twitter or linkedin marketing for organic growth. And although it's definitely useful, the main issue is that you rely greatly on growing your own personal audience first and your posts doing well, which can take significant time and effort.

Sure, you can comment, but very few people will see them since the main focus of these social media sites is the post. And it's even worse on sites where posts are expected to be even more sophisticated like instagram, youtube, or tiktok.

Worse yet, your posts are likely to be buried under countless others, and SEO likely won't be in your favor.

So how does one gain traction without grinding to an audience first?

You ride the coattails of others with comments.

And the best place to do this?

Reddit.

Here's how I grew my pre-launch discord for Evoke to 1000 members in a month through almost exclusively Reddit comments, and how you can leverage Reddit too.

Here's a couple of things to consider before you start:

1. Redditors are very direct and are not afraid to tell you their opinion. If you're dishonest or self promote without offering value or being relevant to the discussion first, then you'll get downvoted

2. Posts are overrated, and a self promotional post can be disruptive to the user experience, which is why most mods will remove them. And even if they are allowed, most users will ignore them.

However, comments blend in much more with each other even if they are self promotional, and are much less disruptive. Plus, there are so many comments made every day that no one is going to check if they're low quality or not.

3. Don't sleep on replies.
   Most of my comments are actually replies to other comments, since if you reply to a comment near the top, then your comment is guaranteed to stay at the top.

4. Don't be afraid to step on some toes.
   You will inevitably get comments that will get downvoted. Learn from them.

Reddit is a great place because there's greater expectation of anonymity. It's the reason why people are more open to expressing their opinion, and more reason for you to stop worrying about offending someone.

Plus, people are always curious to see a hidden downvoted comment; it stands out.

How to craft the perfect promotional comment

1. Finding the perfect place
Obviously, you'll want to find a subreddit related to your niche, moreover, you'll want to select posts by "hot".

Then you'll want to find recent posts. Usually not older than 3 days. However, this changes depending on subreddit size.

The bigger the subreddit, the more recent posts you need to get traction, since they get buried much more easily.

If you've arrived a little late to the party, reply to a large comment rather than leaving your own to prevent getting buried.

2. Crafting the perfect comment
Begin with replying with relevant info, much like how you would reply if you weren't self promoting.

To give some context, these were made on r/ChatGPT, where there were an influx of posts angry about ChatGPT's filters.

Here's an example:

Curious what sort of content you were generating. I personally use the API for things that are in the grey area, but don’t trigger a content warning. I also know a guy who generates 100% adult (dating) content, and hasn’t gotten this message. So you must be doing some pretty shady stuff lol.

And my response:

Some of the NSFW filtering is pretty ridiculous. Like I can understand sexual content, but it flat out refuses prompts like "who would win in a fight Thanos vs Superman" and it returns your classic "rather than focusing on violence..." prompt.
From my own experience ChatGPT giving you orange text saying "this may violate our content policies" is usually pretty harmless and does not result in the warning email. I am guessing it's because they're still testing the system.
However, I know some ppl that got warning emails after tripping up the red messages or getting raunchier results back from the GPT-3 API/playground rather than ChatGPT.
I personally almost exclusively use ChatGPT for boring corporate stuff so it doesn't really bother me but I feel everyone's pain lol
And if anyone is curious, we plan to get some open source LLMs like GPT-J and NEOX on our website accessible through API in the near future that's censorship free.
We're currently finishing a stable diffusion API atm, but we'll start work on LLMs right after. Feel free to join the discord or check out our website

As you can see, a large portion of the comment is actually addressing the commenter's reply and adding my own opinions + genuine experience.

Then the last parts are self promo. And even then, it's tied in with the comment rather than being abrupt.

You want to be more suggestive "if you're interested/curious" or "feel free to" rather than direct and salesy.

3. Reddit comment SEO?
Have you ever searched a question on Google and have the first result come up as a reddit post? And more importantly, it's a comment in the post that was highlighted?

Reddit actually has really good domain authority and SEO.

You can leverage this.

One of the first results on Google for "Midjourney API" (at the moment):

Does midjourney have an API

And my reply to another comment in the thread:

Yep, and there are midjourney models for SD now as well like MJ v4 or Njiji journey
Currently developing a stable diffusion API, and will include a midjourney model if users demand it. Just bear in mind it's mostly for devs making AI apps though. Got a discord and website here

So how do I leverage Reddit SEO?

Firstly, like with all SEO, make your comment relevant and helpful. Secondly, focus on low volume long tail keywords. Since stable diffusion + AI art is pretty new, "stable diffusion API" and "midjourney API", although not long tail, are easier to rank for.

4. A numbers game
Post post post. Become a commenting machine. If you're not good at self promo or shy about it, practice by just posting a relevant comment without self promo.

Making comments is much easier than posting, so do it frequently. Hell, make it a habit like you would post

5. You don't need to hit it big
Fact. Most of my comments do not get any upvotes.

But even then, using link tracking, I still get clicks and discord joins from these comments.

And if you take a look, you'll notice my SEO midjourney comment has no upvotes

That's the magic of reddit comments. You can get no engagement on the platform and still have plenty of visibility.

Really hope my post helped everyone out here.

Lmk if you have any other suggestions for marketing on reddit organically.

Hope to make more posts like this in the future and share them on my twitter as well.