By Charlie Patel
Being creative every day is exhausting.
Unfortunately, today’s businesses are under some serious pressure to constantly engage and delight their audience. Statistics show that websites publishing 16 or more blogs per month receive 3.5 times more traffic.
Combine that average of four blogs per week, with continually increasing demands for social media posts, videos, and email newsletters, and the burden gets so much bigger.
It’s no wonder that even the best marketing teams suffer from a creative block every now and again.
The good news?
There are more sources of inspiration out there than you’d think.
Take Reddit, for instance.
Reddit gives itself the title of “The Front Page of the Internet?”
About 1.58 billion people visit the site each month, so it’s a fair slogan.
As an eclectic mix of news reports, social commentary, and individual insights, there are few environments in the web more diverse than Reddit. With more than 130,000 sub-forums and niche communities to tap into, this isn’t just a place to waste time on the internet. Reddit could be the muse your digital marketing has been waiting for.
Read on to see why Reddit is the secret to your success.
Why All Marketers Need to be on Reddit
At first glance, Reddit can look like a disjointed train wreck of information.
Yikes…
However, as the third most popular website in the US, it must have something special to offer, right?
Underneath all the chaos, Reddit is a fully-customizable online experience, powered by an engaged and dynamic community of online users.
According to statistics from The Next Web, Reddit users spend about 15 minutes on the platform each day – that’s four minutes more than people spend on Facebook.
Add that to the fact that Reddit’s userbase is continually growing (an increase of 80 million between November 2017 and April 2018), and you’ve got the recipe for a truly powerful resource.
The size, depth, and engagement levels of Reddit ensure that businesses have an endless pool of potential ideas to fish in when they’re looking for ways to earn customer attention. Learn how to navigate Reddit, and you’ll discover content options that allow you to answer client questions, earn their trust, and acquire their hard-earned cash.
How to Steal Content Ideas from Reddit
So, how exactly do you use Reddit to supplement your creative process?
It’s not as difficult as it seems.
Reddit is like a massive library of conversations between your competitors, customers, and even your employees. All you need to do is figure out how to use their filing system.
These tips will help.
Step 1: Find the Right Audience
Reddit is built on a huge selection of smaller forums, called “Subreddits.”
These forums cover literally every topic and category you can think of. We’re not kidding – there’s a subreddit out there for everyone. You can take your chances with finding an audience and try to visit a subreddit by writing an URL like this: www.reddit.com/r/topic. Replace “topic,” with the thing you want to read about, such as music, content marketing, or social media.
Alternatively, you can just search for subreddits here:
Finding the right subreddit is crucial, as it will take you straight into the center of the conversation that people are having about your topic or industry. For instance, let’s say you search for social media. Reddit will bring up a list of communities you can join that talk about social media, or social media marketing:
To keep track of what’s going on in those subreddits, make sure you subscribe to them.
This will make it easier to keep track of what people are saying about your chosen topic.
Pro tip: It’s often best to go for something more specific when following subreddits if you can. As you can see above, r/socialmedia might have 95,000 members, but it’ll also be filled with posts that aren’t relevant to you if you’re really a company writing about social media marketing. Subscribing to r/SocialMediaMarketing will give you insights from fewer people, but the conversations will be more valuable.
See?
Step 2: Look for Pain Points
When customers search for content online, more often than not, they’re looking for an answer to a problem. They don’t want to see the same dime-a-dozen content hashed out by 10-20 different brands. To make sure you’re getting valuable insights from your Reddit audience, look for people sharing information about their pain points.
A great way to do this is to go into the search bar at the top of your subreddit and search for the beginning of a question. For instance:
- “How do you…”
- “Can someone help…”
- “Help me with…”
- “Any suggestions for…”
- “Tips on…”
These are the kinds of questions that will tell you what your customers want to know right now.
To get the best results, use quotes around multi-word phrases to ensure you get an exact match. Once you’ve arrived on your results page, you’ll see something like this:
Check out all of those awesome content ideas
Step 3: Try Ask Reddit
Want even more views than the ones you’ll get from your subreddits?
Don’t forget to check out r/AskReddit too.
Journalists and social media marketers have been mining this treasure trove for years.
Once again, you can search for your niche and make sure that you’re getting content that’s relevant to you. Because you’re on r/AskReddit, all of the results you find will be automatically in the form of questions.
Combined with the results you get from your subreddits, you should end up with a handful of items that you can convert into potential articles.
For instance, you might take the question “Should I delete a negative review…” and transform it into an article about “What to do about negative reviews on social media.”
Step 4: Don’t Be Afraid to Dig Deeper
Once you’ve started to narrow down your options for potential blogs, articles, podcasts, or videos, it’s time to dive a little deeper into the conversation.
This will help you to find out:
- What kind of strategies have people already tried?
- Which solutions don’t work?
- Which solutions do work?
- What other problems can be related to this one?
For instance, if you decide to follow up with a question about the value of Instagram ads, you can click through to a page like this one and highlight any key points in the conversation that you want to cover in your article.
If there aren’t a lot of responses yet, you could always offer your own suggestions and see how people respond to them. As long as you’re not trying to directly flog any services or products, people will usually take your answer seriously, and pull you into the conversation.
As well as looking at Reddit, don’t forget to do other research too. For instance:
- Search for the question on Google and see if anyone else has tried to answer it
- Check out blog posts from some of the leading people in the industry
- Search hashtags on other social media channels
- Visit other forum sites like Quora for additional insights
Step 5: Create Amazing Content
If you’ve done your Reddit research correctly, by this point, you should have plenty of questions, answers, and suggestions to throw together into a compelling article.
Remember, you’re not just copying and pasting what people have said on Reddit into your blog. If you want to blow your audience away, you’re going to need to make the most of your inspiration. You might decide to quote people on Reddit and include a snippet in your post with a screenshot. If you do – send that person a message so that they’ll share your article with their friends.
Once you’ve designed your blog post, think about creating graphics with quotes that you can share on social media. Remember, 32% of marketers consider visual images to be the most critical content for their business today.
Other ways to make the most out of your content include:
- Reaching out to experts for their insights into specific questions. This gives you a chance to boost the impact of your post by getting influencers to share it too.
- Converting your article into other forms of content, like a podcast, a social media post, or even a video.
- Looking at the same topic from a new angle: As well as answering the question of how to make money on Instagram, tell people how to avoid losing income, or how they can increase their earnings.
Once your content is ready, don’t forget to go back to Reddit to share it, as well as posting links on all your other promotional channels too.
Overcoming the Creative Block
No-one can be a creative mastermind 24 hours a day, 7 days of the week.
Even if you happen to be a marketing dynamo, there’s always going to be a day where you’re sat in front of your computer, searching for ideas.
The good news? Community sites like Reddit can help.
There are also plenty of other sites that you can visit to find content inspiration too. Such as:
1. Triberr Curate
If you’d rather not surf Reddit or any of the hundreds of other sites in your industry, then let Triberr centralize the content curation. Triberr Curate gives you an interface to source hundreds of RSS feeds, news sources, social content, and REDDIT!! Let me show you how easy it is to use Triberr to curate content from Reddit.
Step 1 – If you’re a Triberr user, Click on Curate on the navigation menu.
Step 2 – Click on Add Source button which will open a modal and select Reddit as the source.
Step 3 – Select your options. Note that you can source content from Reddit using 3 useful data types:
- User
- Example: https://www.reddit.com/u/reddit
- Subreddit
- Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience
- Keyword
- Example: marketing
Step 4 – Select your options. For example, I selected the source Tron (cryptocurrency), and use Triberr to see all the posts in that subreddit. This allows me to sift through hundreds of articles daily to determine what’s worth sharing without ever leaving Triberr.
Find new ideas by sifting through trending topics relevant to your keywords. Triberr saves you time and effort searching for the right content by monitoring dozens of online sources on your behalf.
2. Facebook Groups
Like Reddit, Facebook Groups are a goldmine when you’re searching for insights from your community. Group messages can include links to relevant content in your industry; questions directed experts, videos, and more. The same can be said for LinkedIn groups too!
3. Quora
Quora is a social network specifically dedicated to helping people answer their most pressing questions. Because of this, it’s an excellent place to find trending topics to cover in your blog. Search through Quora to find inquiries related to your industry – prioritizing the queries that show up frequently.
4. Medium
Medium is a publication site that allows for contributions from people all across the web. This domain is packed full of exciting commentary from brands and businesses – making it a fantastic place to track down potential content ideas. Don’t forget to check out the comments underneath the articles to see how people have responded.
5. Industry Forums
Finally, make sure that you take a look at what people are saying in dedicated industry forums too. There are plenty of message boards out there dedicated to niche groups like marketers, tech experts, social media marketers, and more. You’d be surprised how much information you can find on these free websites.
Ready to Get Inspired?
Constantly coming up with new ideas for your content isn’t easy.
These days, companies are under a huge amount of pressure to continually deliver new and valuable material, whether it’s in the form of videos, blog posts, or social media messages.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of inspiration out there to help keep your creative juices flowing.
Reddit is easily one of the most valuable resources in the marketing world today – but it’s still something that many professionals overlook.
Don’t miss your chance.
Track down your audience via subreddits, look for crucial pain points, visit r/AskReddit, and dive deep into every conversation. You’re sure to find something that you can transform into an incredible offering for your target audience.
