A creative's guide on how to get more clients, faster using Reddit and other free tools (2/2)

From a handful of followers to more than 60k karma points, I break down how I got from zero to hundreds of patient, respectful and most importantly paying clients over the last few years.

Hello there! I’m Gabriele - in art Flygohr - a multidisciplinary visual artist that likes creativity, personal growth and productivity. This is my journal!

In this post I will talk about how I used Reddit to get hundreds of patient, paying clients that respect my work and allowed me to make a decent living out of my art - without needing UpWork, Fiverr or any other middlemen.

I tried to make it just one big post, but it was definitely too long for it to be comfortable, so I had to break it down in two parts and still leave out some stuff. Here’s a link to the first part, make sure to read it before starting this one. If you don’t want to miss new articles from me feel free to come back in a couple days or just subscribe, it’s free!

In this second part we’ll look at:

• How I set up my Airtable database

• My subsequent posting strategy

• My templates system

• And some additional tips at the end

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Introduction to Airtable 🎓

Airtable is completely free (apart from some advanced stuff that we don’t need) and it's an awesome tool I use every day.

It should be pretty straightforward to use, but if you are not familiar with it, please look their tutorials up on YouTube. They are great! Here are a few learning resources for Airtable:

• Their help center is just great, one of the best I’ve seen around for online tools

• Their 5 minutes ‘getting started’ guide video

• Their YouTube channel in general

• In addition, you can just search for Airtable tutorial on YouTube and get loads of helpful content beside theirs

Airtable key feature is allowing you to use different data types for your database's columns, for example dates, checkboxes, but most importantly dropdown lists, easy to use filtering and overall, more organizational capabilities than a regular spreadsheet. They also offer interfaces, automations and apps you can add to your databases! And I swear that this is not a sponsored post, I just love the product - I have like 80 databases that I use for different things.

Before moving forward with this guide, I’d suggest you spend half an hour or something fiddling around with Airtable. The next part shouldn’t be difficult, especially if you are ‘a bit of a nerd’, but you can easily get lost if you really don’t know anything about tables and spreadsheets.

Setting up the database 🤓

Without further ado, let’s get to my setup. In case you don’t want to set it up yourself, I made it for you. It might be tempting to just copy it and be done with it, but I encourage you to create your own as so to learn Airtable too. It can be a really powerful tool: I use to keep track of my content calendar across multiple social media, to automatically generate invoices for clients, to keep track of my projects, to power some applications and more.

For each subreddit I can post to (remember the homework from the first part of this guide?) I create a new record in Airtable with:

• The actual name of the subreddit as the main field

• The link to the actual posting window for the sub (hit 'create post' on your sub of choice, and copy the URL of the page after). This will save you a couple clicks every time you want to post there, so don’t put just the link to the subreddit main page here. Here’s how one such link should look for reference https://www.reddit.com/r/hireanartist/submit. In the example template I’m providing, I go a step further and I automate the URL generation as well by using a formula. Just click on the field name to see it

• A number for how many days apart I can post on the subreddit (check their rules, if they don't have any you can safely post there once per day), and then add 1. Why? Because sometimes you might be posting earlier, or later, and you might accidentally break the rules of the subreddit and get flagged. This way you can be 100% safe and avoid worrying about it every single time you need to post. I call this field 'frequency'. So, if in their rules they say you can post once per week, you just put 8 in this field

• A 'last posted' date field (with no timestamp, just the day)

• A 'days since last post' field with a formula that counts the day since the 'last posted' date to today. The formula I use is the following: DATETIME_DIFF({last posted}, TODAY(), 'days')*-1

• A ‘can I post’ field with an IF formula checking if the ‘days since last post’ is greater or equal than the ‘frequency’. Assuming you named your fields exactly like that, here’s the actual formula I use: IF({days since last post}>={frequency}, "yes", "no")

I have some additional fields but this works as it is and this post is getting complicated enough even without all the bells and whistles I added to my database. For that, again, leave a comment and I'll be happy to share all the nerdy details in a future article. I’m sharing the link to my database anyways for the most advanced users, but I don’t advise beginners to try to copy it as it can get pretty confusing with hidden fields and other shenanigans.

Finally, I set up a grouping right at the top. This is the most important part of my system. I want this database to show me the rows where the ‘can I post’ field is set to ‘yes’ at the top, and the others at the bottom. Why is it the most important? Because this is where your mind is freed of thinking about where to post, every single day. You no longer need to check your Reddit page, search for older posts, etc.

That's it. Now, every time I open the database, I know exactly where I can post. I just open the posting link, I copy and paste my templates for each post, hit the checkbox. That specific database entry moves to the bottom of the list and won’t resurface until I can post in that subreddit again.

If you’d like me to write a step by step guide on how to set up this Airtable specifically, with screenshots, links, and a template database ready to copy please let me know in the comment. I felt it was out of the scope of this one, since this was meant to be an overarching outline of how my system work and I didn’t want to get too technical. Additionally, what worked for me might not work for you. You might want to fiddle with your Airtable and add your own fields and stuff you need to keep track of. For example, when I shared this system with my girlfriend (she’s on Reddit too, doing art commissions) she edited the template adding images and removing some fields.

The templates 📝

To save time on the posting phase I have templates set up for:

• The titles

• The body / first comment texts

• The preview images

And you read that right, it’s plural as in multiple templates for titles, body text, and images.

Every time I post, I pick a random title, a random variation of the text, and a random image, and I add them to the post. As you can easily imagine, this is a huge time saver versus just coming up with what to post on the spot. I know many of you use one template already and switch it up every few months or so, but you really need to pay attention to how this look from the outside.

The key takeaway here is that you can't post the same exact thing over and over. You need to vary, using clearly different titles and images. Since it would be time consuming as hell to always have to sit down and come up with a different post 3, 5, 10 times per day, it's important you create a set of assets beforehand. List a few titles, a few variations of the main text and have a folder somewhere with a series of images you can pick from when posting. Cycling through 5 or 10 of those is the best strategy to avoid making your profile page look spammy and all the same.

Bonus positive effect: after a while, you get a feeling for what works and what not, and you can adjust accordingly. You get a feeling for how many upvotes, how many emails, how many customers you get depending on what and where you post. That simply can’t happen if you decide on a template arbitrarily and keep posting with it for days on end. You need multiples!

This is pretty straightforward, but let me help you with some additional tips.

• User flairs: some subreddits have 'tags' you can use to better categorize your posts. Most subreddits have them in a dropdown menu on the posting interface, but that's a fairly recent addition to the Reddit redesign. Some subreddits - and you should, too - still use the old notation [User flair] using square brackets. I'd advise you to use them too in your post title. Most common for our use case are [For Hire] and [OC] that stands for 'Original Content' and it's a big deal on Reddit. It can get you on the front page! Additionally, by using tags like this you demonstrate to the in-crowd that you know Reddit inside-out. Some subreddits still have their own custom flairs so you should always pay attention to the specific rules of the sub you are posting into

• Images: you might be tempted to use a full text post type for your post. But you don't really have to, especially if it's not mandatory in the sub you are trying to post into. The posts that work better than anything else are image posts. I leave the 'what images specifically' part to you, do some research and always use different images when posting. Not every time, but it's important to cycle through 5-10 different images so when people check your profile out they don't see a spammy row of posts that look the same. I understand that non-visual artist can have an hard time with images, for example writers, but you can use a free tool like Canva to come up with a ‘card’ design to outline your services

• The first comment strategy: but if you use an image post, how do you convey all the information regarding your service? Contact info, payment process, even prices? It might be tempting to put them on the image, but people are too lazy to type an URL or an email address by hand, they want to be able to click through it! On Reddit, it's common to add a comment below your post containing all of that useful text and links. It will be highlighted in the interface later since you are the Original Poster, and usually it will be the most upvoted comment anyways

• Hidden rules: some subreddits really hated the Reddit redesign. If you, looking at their sidebar, see no specific rules don’t assume there are none. Make sure to check on the old Reddit too, as they might have left them there and refused to update them on the redesign! Yes, Reddit can be viewed the old way too, by prefixing old. to the URL of the subreddit you are in. Pretty confusing right? You’ll get the hang of it in no time! For example, to check the old version of https://www.reddit.com/r/commissions/ you visit https://old.reddit.com/r/commissions/. This tip will save you some occasional deleted post or moderation warning 🥲

Speeding things up with AutoHotKey ⚡

AutoHotKey is an amazing tool to create shortcuts (but not only that, it’s extremely powerful). Unfortunately, it works for Windows only but there are alternatives for Linux and MacOS users too. This guide will focus on AutoHotKey, but you can easily figure out how the other tools work.

Here are a few resources to learn about AutoHotKey:

• Beginner tutorial

• Ultimate guide

• Additionally, you should check out YouTube for tutorials in the same way you did with Airtable. It’s a great learning resource and you’ll find examples that go beyond the scope of this guide

I used AutoHotKey to set up keyboard shortcuts that automatically picked a random title and random text for me, speeding up my workflow even more. For example, when I type .rdt (short for Reddit title) into a text field (usually where you set the title of your Reddit post) the text automatically expands into a random title like:

• [For Hire] Horror / Fantasy / Dark / Sci-fi | Character Art

• [For Hire] Artist available for CHARACTERS | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

• [For Hire] CHARACTER commissions are OPEN | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

• [For Hire] CHARACTER PORTRAITS | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

• [For Hire] CHARACTER PORTRAITS commissions | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

• [For Hire] Some slots available for CHARACTER PORTRAITS commissions | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

• [For Hire] Some slots available for CHARACTER ART | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

• [For Hire] Artist available for CHARACTER ART | Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror / Dark / Cyberpunk

And more. You get the idea. I have .rdb set up for the body text, and it does the same thing albeit in a more complicated way because I use markdown text to better style my comment.

Now, this bit is not mandatory for the system to work - but it allows you to free even more brain power to do other stuff. As an alternative, you can simply use a text file and you can randomly pick a line from it every time you need it, and paste it as the title of your post.

Leave a comment if you'd like a step by step guide for AutoHotKey as a follow-up article, because I'm running out of space here, this post is already twice as long than what I originally set up to write. This sections would deserve a guide of its own and many people have done a better job of explaining AutoHotKey than me. I encourage you to view this a system to implement in your daily routines: if you find yourself doing the same things over and over chances are they can be automated through shortcuts.

For now I’m leaving you with a simple template script you can use with AutoHotKey installed. Here’s the link, you can download it for just 0.99€ from my Gumroad page - the instructions for how to use it are there 😉 Sadly, if you use MacOS or Linux you’ll have to look for tutorials for your own native automation systems. But at least you got an idea of what you are looking for!

Some additional tips 💡

• Constantly look at the top posts in your niche to steal the best techniques. If you see someone gets more upvotes because he uses a certain design for the preview image, make one yourself and try if it works for you as well. A certain way of writing the title? Steal! Emojis in the body text? Steal! Ok, when I say 'steal' I actually mean 'take inspiration'. Don't blatantly copy and paste other's work, it will likely result in a ban

• Have a customized PayPal.me page (or whatever is it you are using to get payments). It makes all the difference and you can even pre-fill the amounts you need to be paid with some URL tricks

• Protect yourself, ask for half of the payment up front or upon the delivery of a preliminary draft of your work

• Never deliver the final assets without having received the full payment. Use watermarks, partial screenshots, descriptions.. but do not send the final assets over until the money is with you. Be careful out there.

• Do not underdeliver either. This needs to be avoided at all costs. If you find yourself unable to complete a job, be upfront with the client and offer refunds or alternatives. I know you have bills to pay, but so does your client

• Use the same Airtable database to build a form for people to request a quote or a service from you, streamlining even more your client acquisition process. Again, I don't really have the space to dive deep into this here, but let me know if you'd like me to and I'll follow-up as soon as I can

• Use Airtable automations. Check this guide on how to set them up. They can offer you some powerful enhancements for your workflow. Automatic posting, automatic emails, notifications, actions on your records, and much more

Key takeaways 🎯

Here’s a recap of what my system looks like:

1. I would open my database every day and it would tell me exactly where to post

2. I would quickly post everywhere by using the templates I had created beforehand

3. I would adjust my titles, images and body texts as I learned what worked and what didn't

4. I eventually set up a form to manage the incoming requests, and I would occasionally add or remove subreddits from my list

The key here is consistency. You won’t get instant results with this system. It will take you some days, most probably weeks, to get the first emails. You will need to experiment with different titles, images, and subreddits. You will need to optimize the system to your needs. This is just a helper, a way to save some time, in the way of getting your services in the eyes of the people that are most interested in them.

I hope you liked this in-depth explanation of my system. Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions or feedback, I'll be happy to get back to you. Also, if you found this helpful, would you mind sharing it with a few friends of yours? It would help a lot with this publication's growth!

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About me 👤

I am a self-taught digital artist from Italy. I am a multidisciplinary artist and a huge nerd. It means I can draw, paint, code, write, compose, sculpt and more. I also like books, RPGs, documentaries and I might be a productivity junkie.

You could say I started out as a homeless, alcoholic punk degenerate in the early 2010s. Now I have a few assistants, a studio and lots of work I love on my plate. Most importantly, I’m sober and I can afford takeaway food multiple times a week. This is my journal.

Every few days I dissect some of my most recent projects, activities and discoveries. I try to make it a 5 minutes read (well, apart from this one here.. this turned out pretty long). You can find lots of links and a bio on my main website, or you can follow me on Twitter where I post daily.