You’ve had an outline of the Reddit Method. We’ll be using it to get content ideas directly from the source.

In this Part we’re going to get started on Reddit and locate the sources we’ll be using moving forward.

Let’s get started:

Reddit is a big place.

For those of you who are unfamiliar it’s often called the “frontpage of the internet”. It’s basically the be-all-and-end-all of content curation and discovery.

You do not need to be an avid user of Reddit to use this method. You don’t even need to register for account if you don’t want to - although doing so will more easily allow you to bookmark content for later use.

Getting started with Reddit

If you are an avid Redditor you can probably skip this part. I’ll doff my fedora farewell to you sir. (btw I love Reddit but I’m still going to drag us redditors for sure…)

For the rest of you let’s head over to https://www.reddit.com/ or download the official Reddit app. I personally use the app.

Initially it’ll look like chaos.

Here’s what I see when not logged in:

You’ll see a similar quite random list of articles and posts.

What we are interested in are specific subreddits. Can you see in the screenshot above how at the top of each post is r/AskUK, r/unitedkingdom and r/todayilearned?

These are subreddits. Think of subreddits as mini-communities. Or, in some cases, quite large communities!

Reddit is special because there’s a subreddit for pretty much anything you can think of.

And these subreddits are filled with die-hard fans of the topic. This is the key to the Reddit Method.

Our first step therefore is finding the right subreddits.

Finding your tribe

Our task is to get a list of the top subreddits for our niche.

Then I’ll show you how to find the best content inside each subreddit.

First let’s start by just putting the name of our topic or niche into the search bar.

For example let’s say my niche is helping people set up online businesses. I’ll plug “online business” into the search bar and get these results:

On the left are individual posts. Ignore these. We are interested in the right hand side where it says “communities”. On mobile there will be a communities tab instead.

Click to see more communities to get a long list.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

I’ve got Entrepreneur (3.4M), Small Business (1.6M) and further down Business (2M), Startups (1.6M) and more. Big communities.

Bigger subreddits are generally better for the method we’ll be following. However if you find a small focused subreddit this could be an absolute goldmine.

For example there’s a subreddit called r/businessideas where people post their ideas specifically asking for the idea to be roasted. Want to make business idea roast videos? Then this is a perfect subreddit, even if it’s smaller.

Your first job is to join all these subreddits. Or, if you don’t want an account for some reason make a note of them.

Once you are in the subreddits also look at their side navigation bars. They will likely have suggestions for other similar subreddits. Go and visit these too.

I’d recommend joining indiscriminately for now. You can leave the less useful subreddits later as needed.

Reviewing posts

Let’s jump into a subreddit and have a look around.

For this example I headed to r/Entrepreneur and scrolled down 10 or so posts until I found this:

This has 78 upvotes (which are similar to Likes) and 102 comments. Considering it was posted just 19 hours ago this is a decent amount.

Immediately I see this as a topic that I (or anyone who talks about online business) could shoot a video about - “how to deal with burnout when running a small business”.

If you click into the post you’ll see people are discussing back and forth about the topic. I can dive into the comments and get an idea of what people are saying, what sparks conversation, what causes controversy.

For example the top comment on that post is this:

The final paragraph of this is so powerful - “no one cares about your burnout”.

There’s an amazing content hook for you right here - “feeling burned out and feel like no one cares?”. I’m sure content on this could do very well.

This is one way to get content inspiration. Just scrolling through and seeing:

• what posts are popular (lots of upvotes/comments)

• what the top comments are within the post

That’ll be enough to get your creative gears running. And we know that this topic is likely to do well on other platforms (Tiktok, X, LinkedIn etc.) because it’s doing well here on Reddit. So it’s inspiration plus proof.

However, this is still quite time consuming!

Panning for gold

We need a method to surface the best content.

What exactly is the best content will depend on our objectives - I’ll cover this in the next two Parts. Basically I’ll look at short term content for audience growth and then long term content for building credibility.

Both start in the same place though - filtering a subreddit.

At the top left of every subreddit page (on the app too) you’ll see this dropdown:

By default it’s sorted by Hot.

What we want to do first is sort by Top.

In the same r/Entrepreneur subreddit I now see this:

That burnout post from above is now #2. I’m not having to search around for it. It’s been surfaced to the top for me by the filter.

Notice that next to the filter there is also a Time Period drop down - Today, This Week, This Month, This Year, All time.

This is the second step of our filtering process.

We can look for specific types of content using this.

For example in the AI subreddits that I use if I want to find popular breaking news I’d set to Top, Today or This Week.

This will be the core of tomorrow’ Part: newsjacking.

If instead I want to find evergreen, high value content I could set to This Year or All Time. This will surface the most popular content over much longer periods of time for me - more likely to be topics that have much more evergreen appeal than what’s “hot” this week.

I’ll cover this in Part 4 specifically.

Right now simply collect up your list of sources and take some time to get to know what sort of topics are discussed where.

Always look for the most popular content as a general rule of thumb because this is likely to be the content your audience is also going to love.