On the 13th of December at 3am I decided to do a Reddit AMA. An AMA if you’re not familiar is a chance for users on the social platform Reddit to ask questions & get answers from people in unusual professions, celebrities, sports stars, politicians etc.
I had been told earlier this year to do one for Ship Your Enemies Glitter however I thought the timing was off & wanted to first finish Where’s MH370? a project I had been working on for 8 months in order to give it a shout out. Basically, it’s a search and find activity book where readers have to find missing pieces of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 in 12 full color, illustrated scenes. To show you how powerful Reddit AMA’s are in terms of marketing, I’ve included below a few statistics from the AMA.
Sales & Traffic Stats
- Number of Reddit upvotes: 4,184
- Number of Reddit comments: 2,549
- Unique Visitors: 36,133
- Number of books sold: 626
- Total sales: $9,390.00 AUD
- Twitter followers gained: 509
- Tweet impressions: 760,000
Random Thoughts:
- Use RedditLater to see when the best time to submit an AMA is. In my case it was 3am on a Sunday night.
- Reddit loves controversy and will upvote any comment/story that is negative about you, your past, your business etc. For instance, in my AMA some anonymous user accused me of not paying for freelance work that they apparently did for me. Despite the user offering zero proof whatsoever, even going as far as not revealing anything about themselves, not PMing or emailing me, the comment received over 500 upvotes. The claims are obvious bullshit. I guess the moral here is if you have done shady shit in the past, it will probably resurface here so don’t be a dick.
- If you’re there to promote something, do it in your opening post & that’s it. Don’t spam it in the comments section or you’ll end up like Woody Harrelson’s infamous AMA.
- Don’t promise to buy a Redditor a new computer if his comment gets 50 upvotes. The Reddit community will upvote that shit.
- Try and answer as many questions as possible. The whole idea of an AMA is for people to ask you anything, so don’t be afraid to answer the ridiculous ones that have nothing to do with you or what you’re trying to push such as “Who do you think would win in a fight? A bear or a shark.” or “Will you have my babies?”.
- To give with the above, be sure you’re ready to dedicate a few hours to answering questions. There’s nothing worse than having thousands of comments & questions with only 3-5 answered.
- Have fun with it. Fuck, I was drinking beers & making friends with strangers – it was a fun day.
