How to go viral on Reddit with free tools
While I've had a few posts go viral on Reddit I've noticed for a while now that free tools tend to go EXTRA viral on Reddit.
However as a noncoder this has been a blocker for me.
Enter Anton Osika's GPT Engineer of which I managed to secure early access and it's probably the only AI coder that actually works out there.
So after giving it a few test runs I felt confident I could create a tool that could go viral, but what do I build?
CHECK TOP POSTS
The reason I was recently intrigued by free tools is I noticed that in the r/ukpersonalfinance sub, one of the top posts in the last year was this post about a Salary Calculator.
Based on the feedback, it was the most accurate Salary Calculator for the UK.
What fascinated me the most was this website now generates 40K traffic from organic Google search despite having a Domain Authority of 0 according to Ahrefs.
It ranks 4th on Google behind high domain authority sites like Money Saving Expert and Gov.uk! How is this possible?
I checked SimilarWeb and supposedly it still gets 4.5K Reddit traffic to this day.
The conclusion I got was that its evergreen Reddit traffic was enough to give it an SEO boost.
Taking inspiration from that and knowing "taxes" is a big topic in the sub, I went about thinking of another angle I could use to create my free tool.
COMING UP WITH ISLE OF MAN VS UK TAX CALCULATOR
I live in the Isle of Man and know that taxes here are crazy good.
I then checked on Google Keyword planner if there were decent search volume for "Isle of Man tax calculator" from the UK.
I was satisfied with what I found and proceeded to create my web app and then shared in the sub at 5pm on a Sunday.
RESULTS
Results from Reddit and Google Analytics:
- 320K views mostly from UK residents
- 200+ comments with some trolls but a few people showing interest
- 300+ shares means there were at least 300 people who thought to share this to a loved one
- 1,800 visits to my site (8 hours data only) - That would be equivalent to 160,000 visits in a month
I'd have to spend £1,800 in ads to get that kind of reach and we're still getting traffic as of writing 18 hours later.
CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS
Goal 1: My whole goal for this experiment was to see if this free tools playbook works and that was satisfied. I can now take this knowledge and apply to another project.
Goal 2: Get SEO Juice - this one is TBD!
Relevant Links:
Here's the calculator https://www.hotsavings.co.uk/free-tools/isle-of-man-vs-uk-tax-calculator
Link to the viral Reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/1evcwei/i_made_a_tool_to_calculate_isle_of_man_vs_uk_take/
This AI made my app https://gptengineer.app/
