Exploit This Underhanded Tactic for Smoking Out Client Leads

I chatted before about my mastermind group and how much it has helped me along my creator journey.

I learn something new from every meeting.

One member of that group has gotten high-quality coaching leads on Reddit.

I’m surprised by this not because of my friend, but because I’ve had the impression that it’s futile to crack into the Reddit community with offers. Redditors on the whole have finely-tuned advertising detectors and can spot a pitch ten clicks away.

I’ll share what I’ve observed from his profile, and what I’m considering trying as well for my own community building.

It’s always been a matter of trust

Billy Joel fans will recognize this lyric.

It’s also the core of effective community-building on social platforms like Threads, Reddit, Substack, and beyond.

Trust isn’t built by starting with a sales pitch. I’m turned off by strangers getting in my face, or my DMs, and hard-selling to me, and I doubt I’m alone.

Trust is built by being present and helping others without expecting anything in return.

A servant’s heart, if you will.

I guess that’s a bit of a loaded statement, because you do expect something in return.

Just not now. Maybe not even next month.

But eventually.

It’s paying it forward, not “pay me now.”

So now about my friend’s Reddit activity

He’s actually not underhanded. Far from it.

He’s very warm and generous with what he knows.

How he uses Reddit seems a bit guerrilla, and that might come off as underhanded.

I’ll explain.

He’s commented 87 times in the last three months as of the time I counted.

I looked at any hint of explicit self-promotion he did, and broke it down into categories:

“Link in my bio” – 8 comments
“I’ll be around” – 9 comments
“I have a coaching business” – 3 comments
“Feel free to DM me” – 5 comments
“I can drop a link in your DM” – 1 comment
(actually putting a link in the comment) – 1 comment

So roughly a third of the time he mentioned something perhaps kind of promotional. Dropping the link was probably the most promotional.

Three comments were removed, I don’t know why.

The rest, he was just commenting, answering questions.

Now here’s the surprising part.

Reddit profiles show both posts and comments.

My friend has 87 comments in the past three months.

However, the total of his posts — ever — is zero.

Nada. Zip. Zilch.

That surprised me.

Every benefit that has come back to him from Reddit is a result of the following:

Helpful comments with very light mention of self-promotion
Links in his profile that he occasionally mentions
ZERO posting

For me personally, that takes a lot of pressure off. I don’t need yet another place to make content for, with its own rules, and variations for every single subreddit.

I just go in and help people?!

I can do that! I love to do that.

I’m just tickled that there are people who have systematized helping people as a way of building meaningful business relationships that result in leads and clients.

What a fulfilling, edifying way to build a community and build a business!

Amen, and amen.

What I stole from my friend (haha)

I stole a couple of ideas from him for my Reddit activities.

Here they are:

I added content links to my Reddit profile

I should have done this from the start, honestly, but I hadn’t yet.

Now I can soft-sell having people check out my profile like my friend does.

Even better would be linking to lead magnets of some kind, but I’m not there yet.

I respond to comment threads with minimal selling

I responded to a comment recently with a detailed answer to someone’s question (like my friend has done).

At the end, I originally put something like “You’re welcome to DM me if you want to go further.”

But I then thought better of that and simply changed the last sentence to “I’ll be around if you have more questions.”

This says “pay it forward” rather than “pay me now.” I’m convinced this will be a far more effective way to work on Reddit.

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Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash