How to Use Reddit to Find High-Traffic Blog Post Ideas

These days, Reddit is one of the most heavily trafficked websites in the world. With over a billion monthly active users and with subreddits and threads that cover nearly any topic you can imagine, it’s no stretch to assume that it’s a goldmine of ideas.

Using Reddit to come up with blog post ideas is a good option, but you really need to do it right. You can’t just spend your time on r/all and copy the top posts – that’s the realm of Buzzfeed and Upworthy – you need something narrower and more specific.

How can you use Reddit to generate your blog post ideas? More importantly, how do you qualify them to sort out the good ideas from the bad?

I have a process, and I’ll walk you through it. My hope is that you pick up a few of these strategies and incorporate them into a strategy of your own. You may not use ALL of these strategies, but I guarantee you’ll use some of them!

Why Use Reddit?

First of all, let’s go over why you should consider using Reddit in addition to your normal content idea-generation process.

In my view, Reddit is a look into the zeitgeist of internet thought. Topics come up, they trend, they get discussion, and they fade out as new topics come up. Reddit, being one of the largest churning hubs of discussion on the internet, is the central locus of this thought.

Reddit is a great option for topic ideation, but there is one major caveat: you need to be fast. It’s essentially a kind of trend-chasing, but instead of using a tool like Glimpse Trends to watch, you just watch what people are talking about.

The downside here is that by the time you see people talking about a topic, you do your research, you write your content, you publish your content, and it circulates, that original discussion may be long over. You really have to have a very quick turnaround time, often a week or less, to make the most of Reddit.

That’s not to say there aren’t evergreen ideas to be found on the site. Every subreddit has an FAQ or a list of topics they’re absolutely sick of people asking, because someone posts a new thread about them every couple of days. Those can be great options as well, but I’ll get to that more later.

Reddit can also be a source of immediate feedback. When you create your content, you can then post it to the relevant subreddits and see what public sentiment is for your work.

Note, though, that I said it can be. Some subreddits hate people posting their own blog posts like that because it’s basically advertising. You also have to have a thick skin; sometimes, the first few comments you get will be negative, and that can spiral into a lot of dunking on you. You might also just get a handful of immediate downvotes, your post is hidden from the default feed, and that’s it.

The Downsides to Using Reddit for Topic Ideas

Are there downsides to using Reddit for topic ideation? Of course. I can think of four major problems you need to be aware of.

#1: Subreddits can be echo chambers.

This is a big one, and it’s one that’s often overlooked.

Reddit, as huge as it is, isn’t one site. Not really. Subreddits are mostly distinct from one another. You don’t often find the same people across dozens or hundreds of subreddits the way you might on a forum.

The communities that develop can be insular, and a few “power users” can skew discussion their way.

It’s a fairly frequent occurrence for me to find a potential topic idea, do some research, and find that the relevant subreddit opinions go against common wisdom or opinions from other sites. Sometimes, that’s fine; boots on the ground have a different perspective than marketers. Sometimes, it’s just a couple of people pushing their own agendas or ideas, loudly enough and often enough it drowns out other thoughts.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Taking Reddit’s isolated perspective can give you a good jumping-off point for a discussion. The key is being aware that it happens, so you don’t take Reddit as gospel and assume the entire industry reflects their ideas.

#2: Reddit memes can skew ideas.

Memes, subreddit cultures, in-jokes, and other “local” flavor can skew the results you see on Reddit. I’ve definitely encountered cases where Reddit lists of popular tools, for example, leave off big-name high-quality entries simply because they personally don’t like it.

There’s also a ton of sarcasm, snark, and jokes or memes that, from an outside perspective, don’t look like jokes. Without a sarcmark or other indicator, outsiders can’t tell the difference.

Ideally, this won’t be a problem for you because you should be participating in the subreddits you’re mining for ideas, and you should have a good grasp of your topic and can identify when something is humorously off the mark. It does frequently trip up newbies and newcomers, though, so it’s worth mentioning.

#3: Not every topic is well-represented on Reddit.

We tend to think of Reddit as a site where you can go to see discussions on literally anything and everything. The trouble is, that’s not actually true. The largest topics have their own subreddits, but smaller and more niche topics won’t. Or, if they do, it’s limited to just a few users or a few posts.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve been researching something only to find maybe 2-3 mentions of it on Reddit as a whole. It’s not very useful in those cases!

Basically, Reddit can be good for some topic ideas, but if you limit yourself to just Reddit, you’ll have huge blind spots.

#4: Your competitors are probably also using Reddit.

One of the biggest issues with Reddit is just how big it is. Your competitors are almost definitely using it – some more than others, certainly – so the competition can be fierce.

In fact, I’ve had cases where my usual competitive research process turns up all of the ideas that Reddit-specific research does because those competitors have already done that research.

To me, that’s not a problem. Sometimes it means I can just not do Reddit research for those clients because the competitive research gets it all already. More often, it means I can pay close attention to Reddit research and, using my fairly fast turnaround on content production, hit the market with fresh topics before those competitors.

Like all of the drawbacks, it’s something worth knowing, but it’s not necessarily a reason not to use Reddit at all.

How to Harvest High Traffic Topic Ideas from Reddit

So, how do I mine Reddit for good topic ideas?

Step 1: Find and join relevant subreddits.

You have a blog you’re writing for, and that blog has a subject. There will be anywhere from half a dozen to hundreds of different subreddits that are focused on that topic. Something like content marketing – like my own site – can benefit from subreddits like r/WordPress, r/marketing, r/SEO, r/blogging, and more. A pet site has tons; r/dogs, r/dogtraining, r/dogcare, r/askvet, r/puppy101, and many more.

By joining a subreddit, the posts from that subreddit show up in your feed, so you can have one centralized feed of top content. I still recommend visiting directly from time to time, especially for the most active subreddits, which can bury good topics under the crush of easy viral topics.

Step 1a: Find and monitor competitor Reddit accounts.

While you’re at it, those competitors of yours? Check if they have Reddit accounts, and follow them.

You’ll want to:

• Look for Reddit users with their brand names.
• Look for Reddit users who are their main writers or CEOs.
• Look for Reddit users who aren’t directly tied but suspiciously consistently post links to their content.

By following these accounts, you may be able to see what kinds of topics they’re watching and get extra filtered ideas from their activity.

Step 2: Read and participate in the active subreddits.

Reddit, more than any other social network, really requires active participation. Unless you’re reading, voting, commenting, and being part of the community, things are likely to go bad for you. You might miss the in-jokes. You might lose out on the memes. You might not recognize the power users and their proclivities.

More importantly, most subreddits hate obvious advertising. When you want to post to ask questions or share links to your content, you’re more likely to be marked as spam or even banned if you don’t have a history of engaging with the subreddit beforehand. This does vary from sub to sub but always err on the side of caution.

Pro tip: You can take advantage of Cunningham’s Law very easily on Reddit. Posting a question might not get you answers; posting something wrong will get you corrections, which are answers to questions you didn’t ask. If you’re clever, you can mine a lot of engagement and ideas by posting like a newbie. I do recommend a non-branded, non-advertising, unaffiliated-looking Reddit account if you want to do this, though.

Step 3: Skim and filter threads for interesting topics.

Once you have a good idea of the subreddits you want to follow, you can start skimming off-topic ideas.

Checking top posts, checking hot posts, checking trending posts, these are all good ideas.

Also, don’t forget the evergreen information. Check subreddit flairs and see if they represent trends or ideas you can use. Check sidebar FAQs for information they’re tired of answering, and see if you can become an authority to help answer those questions as well.

Another thing to watch for is opportunities to answer questions people don’t know how to ask. Every industry has newbies, and every industry has those subtle problems that are hard to even identify as problems until they’re pointed out. The goal is to watch comments, irritated posts, and sentiment to find pain points and draw commonalities that allow you to take advantage of them.

Step 4: Experiment with asking questions.

If you think you can get away with it, you can often just ask Reddit directly for ideas.

Oh, you don’t want to just post, “I run a blog about dogs, anyone have ideas for what I can cover?” You probably aren’t going to get a lot of useful responses from that, and it’s very transparent.

Instead, consider something like, “I just got a new puppy; what should I watch out for?” If you frame it as if you’re a casual user asking for advice, you can get people chiming in with their experiences and you can leverage those into topic ideas.

This is also a technique I recommend having a secondary, unaffiliated account to use to do it. If you’ve posted a bunch of links to your blog before, and now you’re asking a newbie question, it’s pretty obvious what you’re doing.

Step 5: Qualify your topic ideas using research tools.

Up until now, basically all of these topic ideas are just going into a spreadsheet or a scratch pad. Once you think you have some nuggets of gold, you can start qualifying them. Take the topic idea, distill it down to keywords, and do research on those keywords. If you can find associated niche keywords with decent traffic values, great!

Sometimes, ideas just aren’t going to be winners. It might be an interesting topic, but if it’s already saturated or if it’s low on actual traffic, it’s not going to be worth covering. You can file those away for later in case they work for a mega post, pillar post, or resource later, but you don’t need to prioritize them.

Step 6: Refine a rapid content production process.

This step isn’t really about getting ideas from Reddit but rather figuring out how to take those ideas and turn them into content as quickly as possible.

Evergreen topics don’t need the rush job, but for quick-trending viral topics, you want to be the first on the scene. It can be hard to have a rapid turnaround time, but it’s well worth it once you get it down.

Let Topicfinder Help

I can’t very well write a whole blog post about identifying topic ideas without mentioning my product, can I?

Topicfinder is an app I created specifically to help me generate good topic ideas for my clients. It’s available to you because it works for me, and I wanted to share it.

One search from Topicfinder can find hundreds or thousands of topic ideas sourced from just about everywhere on the internet that is discussing your topic. That includes Reddit and your competitors who are using Reddit all in one place. It’s a one-stop shop for topic ideation.

I highly encourage you to check out the free trial to see what kinds of ideas it comes up with for you. I can pretty much guarantee it will be helpful!

Leave a Comment