AI Marketing Agent
Train it on your brand, point it at the right subreddits, and let it earn an audience — drafting in your voice, posting only with your nod.
Reddit marketing works precisely because it can’t be faked at scale — communities smell spam instantly. So this build is deliberately not a posting bot. It is a listening engine plus a ghostwriter: the agent monitors conversations where your product belongs, drafts replies in your trained voice, and posts only after you approve. That human gate is what keeps it effective and allowed.
Hermes’ cron produces the daily monitoring digests, its Telegram gateway is the approval inbox, and its learning loop tracks the one metric Reddit actually punishes you for ignoring — your ratio of helpful contributions to promotional ones — patching its own brand-voice skill as real engagement data comes in.
Start Here: One Prompt
Copy this prompt and send it to the agent on your Pocketcorp. It sets up everything in this guide and reports back when it’s done. The steps below explain what your agent is doing — and how to check its work.
Set up my Reddit marketing engine — a listener and ghostwriter,
never an auto-poster. Nothing gets posted without my approval.
1. Interview me about the product, audience and how I talk. Write a
brand-voice skill with a banned-phrases list and the rule: lead
with the answer, mention the product only when it IS the answer,
always with “(disclosure: I build this)”.
2. Reddit access: I’ll create a script-type app at
reddit.com/prefs/apps and give you the credentials. Configure
reddit-mcp-server with safe mode on. Until the key is approved,
monitor read-only without it.
3. Ask me for the subreddits and search keywords that matter. Cron
daily 8:00: scan the last 24h for threads where we can genuinely
help, rank by fit, send the top 5 to Telegram with one-line
summaries. Pace requests — 3 seconds between calls.
4. Every reply is draft → my approval → post. Never skip the gate.
5. Track every post and comment in an engagement log: subreddit,
helpful vs promotional, permalink. If the 30-day ratio drops below 9
helpful : 1 promotional, refuse promotional drafts and offer a
helpful alternative. Never post identical content twice.
6. Cron Mondays: draft the week’s original content in my voice and
queue each piece through the same approval gate.The Stack
Send the prompt — it learns how you talk
Paste the prompt and the agent interviews you: what’s the product, who’s the audience, how do you talk? Your answers become a brand-voice file it loads before writing a single public word — under 1,500 words, with examples. The banned-phrases section does more work than everything else combined:
---
name: brand-voice
description: How we sound — load before writing anything public
---
## Voice
Plain-spoken engineer who happens to sell something. Explain,
then recommend. Self-deprecating > self-promoting.
## Audience
Indie hackers & small agency owners. They hate being sold to
and love being taught.
## Banned
"game-changer", "revolutionize", "seamless", "unleash", emoji
chains, "Great question!", any sentence that could open an ad.
## Reddit rules of engagement
- Lead with the answer. Mention our product ONLY when it is
genuinely the answer, with a disclosure: "(disclosure: I build this)".
- If a comment would work as an ad, rewrite it or skip the thread.
## Examples
GOOD: "We hit this exact wall last year. What fixed it was X —
rough edges: A and B. (I build Y, which does this, but honestly
for your volume the free route above is enough.)"
BAD: "You should check out Y! It seamlessly solves this 🚀"Get Reddit access
One account task is yours: create a free app at reddit.com/prefs/apps — choose the “script” type — and paste the client ID and secret to your agent when it asks. It wires them in with safe mode on:
mcp_servers:
reddit:
command: "npx"
args: ["-y", "reddit-mcp-server"]
env:
REDDIT_CLIENT_ID: "${REDDIT_CLIENT_ID}"
REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET: "${REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET}"
REDDIT_USERNAME: "${REDDIT_USERNAME}"
REDDIT_PASSWORD: "${REDDIT_PASSWORD}"
REDDIT_SAFE_MODE: "standard"Since late 2025 Reddit pre-approves all API keys (allow 2–4 weeks). You can start monitoring immediately anyway: read-only public endpoints need no key, so the agent watches your subreddits over Reddit’s public JSON feeds until the key clears.
Monitor the conversations
A daily digest turns Reddit from a doomscroll into a briefing. The agent schedules it for you:
/cron add "0 8 * * *" "Scan r/indiehackers, r/smallbusiness,
r/Entrepreneur and keyword searches (our niche terms) for threads
from the last 24h where we could genuinely help. Rank by fit.
Send me the top 5 with one-line summaries. Gentle pace — 3s
between requests."Reddit bans burst traffic, not volume — rapid-fire requests and identical content across subreddits are the shadowban triggers. The pacing instruction in the cron prompt is load-bearing.
Draft, approve, post
The approval gate is one Telegram exchange per contribution:
🎯 r/smallbusiness: “Drowning in invoice chaos, any affordable fixes?” (43 comments, 3h old). Draft: “The pattern that saved us: snap every receipt the moment you get it, into one inbox — the tool matters less than the habit. We went from shoebox-panic to 10 min/month. (Disclosure: I build a tool in this space, but honestly a shared drive folder + a naming convention gets you 80%.)”
ship it
Posted ✓ — helpful:promo ratio now 11:1 this month. I’ll flag replies worth answering.
Respect the ratio — automatically
Reddit’s unwritten law is written in enough subreddit rules to be canonical: roughly nine genuine contributions per one promotional mention. Tell the agent to track it in an engagement log next to its skill and to refuse promotional drafts when the ratio slips:
- Track every post/comment in the engagement log: subreddit, type (helpful/promotional), permalink
- Block promotional drafts if the 30-day ratio drops below 9:1 — offer a helpful alternative instead
- Respect per-subreddit rules: minimum account age (~30 days) and karma (~100) before mentioning the product at all
- Never post identical content to two subreddits
The weekly content engine
Beyond replies, schedule a Monday planning run: the agent drafts the week’s original content — a build-log post, a lessons-learned writeup, an answer-roundup — in your voice, and queues each for your approval through the same Telegram gate. Growth compounds from consistency, and consistency is what cron is for.
When you outgrow Reddit: Postiz (open-source, 28+ platforms) speaks MCP and lets the same approval loop feed your other channels.
What you end up with
An always-on marketer that listens to every conversation that matters, drafts like you on your best day, keeps its promotional ratio honest, and never posts a word you haven’t approved.
