Reddit Method Content Marketing

Specifically - using Reddit to find content ideas I know my audience will be interested in.

This week we’ll cover:

• Part 1: The Reddit Method of Content Marketing

• Part 2: Locating the best sources

• Part 3: Newsjacking

• Part 4: Evergreen

• Part 5: Wide ranging formats

Let’s get started:

The Reddit Method of Content Marketing

Last week I did an experiment. I posted back to back one video talking about the Reddit method. And one video using the Reddit method.

The video talking about the Reddit method has (at the time of writing) 3000 views. The video I made using the method has 53,000 views and is accelerating.

The next day I put out another video using the Reddit method. That’s at 35,000 views at the moment.

Videos using the method consistently 10x my normal videos. Let’s look at an example.

Example of Reddit Method in action

The best way to explain the Reddit method is to just show you.

Here is a post on Reddit that was popular:

It’s a video about VASA-1, Microsoft’s new photo to video Avatar tool.

Note at the very bottom that this post has 19,000 upvotes (similar to a Like, but Reddit) and 2,000+ comments.

This tells me that this is a topic that is of great interest. Specifically it is of interest to my potential audience and customers.

Because of this I used the post to create this Tiktok:

@iamkylebalmer

Hyper realistic AI video avatar made from a single photo. This is VASA-1 from @Microsoft . Is this the future of video calls?? #ai #chatg... See more

Very simple talking head and showing a snippet of the VASA-1 demo itself. Then giving some thoughts.

That’s basically it. Nothing fancy. Limited script up front and no editing afterwards. The whole thing took me maybe 10 minutes, if that.

Here are the analytics on the 3rd day:

53k views, 1.8k likes, 211 comments, 905 shares, 661 bookmarks, 95 follows.

And that steep slope on day 3 (the day I’m writing this) suggests to me that this is about to really take off. We’ll see.

That’s all well and good.

But the real advantage is that the Reddit Method let’s us do this consistently.

Because the topic has already proven itself to be popular on one highly specific platform (Reddit) chances are it’ll be popular on other platforms.

And Reddit tends to be at the cutting edge of trends. Very crudely the pathway of new content from expert to popular is:

Reddit > Twitter > TikTok > Instagram > Facebook

Obviously this depends on the niche and the topic but it’s a decent rule of thumb. By the time people are talking about it on Facebook it’s old news!

So the Reddit Method is basically about being at the source of the stream, learning what is new and trending and helping to disseminate it to other platforms in other formats.

This isn’t rocket science but very few people do it!

Here is an explainer video which has some more context:

@iamkylebalmer

How to get more content ideas? Posting daily can be a chore. Here’s an underused way to get content ideas that you KNOW will be popular #c... See more

In this week’s Playbook

The basics of the Reddit Method are as above.

Super simple! Be at the source and convert top topics into content for your platforms.

More than enough to get started and work out the details.

BUT if you want to skip that learning phase and start consistently building an audience at scale then over the rest of the week I’m going to go into detail about:

• locating the best sources to collect from

• knowing exactly what content is trending and popular without having to scroll through for hours

• top of funnel news-jacking content for audience growth (ie. beyond your current followers)

• evergreen quality content for audience nurturing and moving them towards sales

• how best to create short videos from top posts

• leveraging comments to write your script

• how to attribute and reference your sources

• driving leads from your content to email list or even purchases

• beyond video to text and image carousels

If you are a premium subscriber you have all that to look forward to and I’ll see you tomorrow!

If not then there are details below on how to join us for the full guides each and every week.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

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:

Locating the Best Sources

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.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

We talked specifically about filtering by Top to get the most popular content. The premise here is that content that is popular on a specific subreddit will also be popular when we take it to another platform.

I also touched on the Time scale filter: we could look at Top content from Today, This Week, This Month, This Year or All Time.

Today we look at short term content and using a method called newsjacking.

Let’s get started:

Newsjacking

If you’ve followed my work you’ll know I’ve covered newsjacking for short video before - in fact it has a whole Playbook here: short form video marketing.

We’ll be talking about pairing this method specifically with Reddit.

Newsjacking is when we hop on board something that is trending and leverage that existing attention to build an audience.

It’s a great top of funnel technique. It’s about broad, mass appal to a large number of audience members outside of your existing audience.

This sort of content will have the best chance to go “viral” (more on this shortly) but won’t necessarily build deep relationships with your audience. For that we’ll use another technique in the next Part.

Finding newsjacking content

The basic method here is simply to use Top and Today or This Week as your filter in the chosen subreddits. That’s the core.

Whether you use Today or This Week depends on how fast your niche moves. In my niche of AI for example everything moves very fast so I tend to use daily.

Try both Today and This Week in the various subreddits you have found to see what comes up with the best results for you.

If you are lucky you may also find posts like this:

This is a news summary post, complete with links to the original source. Very handy.

We are looking for the content with the most votes and comments. Remember that this means the topic is already popular with people interested in our niche.

Once you have found a potential post we’ll prepare content on the topic. We’ll be preparing a short video on the topic because i) it’s the most powerful format for building an audience ii) it’s fast and iii) it’s genuinely valuable to convert from a written Reddit post to video to get it to a new audience.

In the last Part of this guide I’ll talk about other formats: namely text for Twitter and LinkedIn posts.

Script for your content

Let’s generate a quick and dirty script for your content piece. Use this prompt to get started:

Act as a social media marketing script writer

Prepare a 30 second short video script about this topic I'll provide.

Start with a powerful attention grabbing hook in the first sentence
Summarise the basic information 

Here is the topic information:
[copy/paste core information]

Review these comments for the most popular/controversial and integrate them into the script in your own voice.
[comments]

Do not give stage directions or B-roll. Just the text of the script. 

Here’s how to use it this prompt. It has two main sections where we want to add information.

The first is the core content. This could be the post itself. Or it could be an article or other source that has been referenced.

For example in this post a link is given:

For this post I would go to the original article at The Verge and copy and paste the original article content into my prompt.

I can use that alone to create a script.

Or I can also feed in comments from Reddit to add some spice to my script.

For example here is a great relevant observation:

To add in the comments copy them all from Reddit and paste them at the bottom of your prompt. This will get ChatGPT to pull some top comments and adapt them into your script.

When put together here’s a basic script:

This script combines the core information from the original article along with some content from top comments. So we’re doubling down on what’s already popular - popular content, popular comments.

This script should just be a starting point. Personally I like to talk off the cuff so I’d want something a lot less wordy.

I’d use an additional prompt like:

Give me the bullet points so I can deliver the content easily

This gives me a more easy to scan script:

The best format will depend on your personal preferences and how you are recording and delivering so make sure you experiment.

Filming your content

As an expert in your niche my personal recommendation is that you just deliver the content, straight to camera, in as few cuts as possible.

This is a skill that can be learned. And the authenticity of going straight to camera without edits does very well on social media. Better than highly polished content which people trust less.

Apps like Tiktok and Instagram have great recording interfaces that allow you to record section by section. You hold the button to record, release it to stop. Then you can delete the take (if it was bad) or move to the next segment just by holding record and going again. The app will stitch everything together into a full video for you - it’s very useful if you aren’t confident doing one take.

Check the Playbook I mentioned above for more details as obviously video production is a large topic!

Greenscreen

For newsjacking in particular greenscreen is really handy.

The basic idea is you get the original article behind your talking head.

Here is an example:

@iamkylebalmer

China’s AI progress outstrips the West. And we’re not paying attention. Instead, as always, we are getting bogged down in unimportant shor... See more

Notice how I put the article, graphics and tweet behind me as I discuss the content. This adds some additional visual interest for engagement and makes it much easier to talk about things like graphs (rather than describing them!!).

Both Instagram and Tiktok have greenscreen Effects built in. More details in the Playbook I mentioned or simply google “greenscreen tiktok” or your platform of choice to get instructions.

You don’t want to go viral

The purpose of our newsjacking posts is to build an audience. To do this we need to get in front of new viewers. We want to go wide.

The Reddit Strategy helps us do that by helping us find trending topics in our niche and quickly converting them to video.

A word of warning here. Going viral can actually kill your account.

Sounds wild but hear me out.

Let’s imagine you see a piece of content that has wider appeal than your target audience (your potential customers) and you decide to use it.

You put together a quick video, go to bed and forget about it.

Next morning you hop on to see how everything is going. 1 million views. 10,000 new followers. OMG.

Amazing right? Absolutely - it’s a ride. My first video that went to 3M+ felt like a weird dream. I kept checking it and it kept going up. Totally bizarre.

Madison Square Gardens has a capacity of 20,000. So 3M views is the capacity of Madison Square Gardens x150. Nuts.

I won’t lie. It feels great!

But there’s a risk!

If your video topic is wider than your specific topic then you may end up with lots of audience members who are not into your niche. They were interested in the video yes but it was unrepresentative of your normal content.

Suddenly you end up with 10,000 extra followers who are not interested in your core content.

Why’s that bad? Well - the way many social media algorithms work is to show your content to your existing followers first and see how they like it. If they love the content the algo will go wider and start showing the content to more and more strangers.

The risk? You’ve got a whole bunch of followers who will not engage with your core content. They’ll murder it with low engagement and your reach will decrease.

For this reason do not heed the siren call of unrelated highly viral content like funny videos, cute cats and the like. Yes it’ll get views. Yes it’ll get follows. But it will also stop your account from doing what we’re here for: driving business!

Keep prompting,

Kyle

That’s all well and good for growth. But how do we then look after those who have entered our audience?

We can extend the Reddit Method to give us longer-term audience nurturing content ideas too.

Let’s get started:

Evergreen

In the previous Part we used newsjacking to build an audience.

The content was specifically of the moment, popular and ephemeral. What’s important today will probably not be important in a month from now. And the content about that topic will peter out.

That’s fine - the content piece played its part in generating attention and helping to build our audience.

That was top of funnel content. Designed to be broad, mass appeal (within our niche) and to get to as many people as possible.

Now we want to supplement this with middle of the funnel content. This will be more niche, require a higher level of buy in from our audience, maybe be longer and more detailed.

The purpose of this content is to nurture the audience. To provide value and show them that we know what we are talking about. We do this to ultimately bring them to a sale - remember we are running a business here!

Evergreen filters

For this next step we want evergreen content. It’s evergreen because it remains relevant. It’s not flash in the pan fad based content.

To find ideas for evergreen content with the Reddit Method we’ll adjust our filters.

We want to keep the Top filter.

But then set the time duration to This Year or All Time.

This is going to show you the top posts over time. Posts that (generally) kept giving value.

Here’s an example using r/marketing:

Filter is set to Top, All Time.

The post has 2k upvotes and 113 comments. The topic is definitely evergreen - sell benefits, not features. And it uses a timeless example - Jobs presenting the first iPod with its iconic zero-features tagline.

If you speak on the topic of marketing then this is a perfect starting place for a piece of content.

We’ll use an adapted version of the prompt from before:

Act as a social media marketing script writer

Prepare a 2 minute short video script about this topic I'll provide.

Start with a powerful attention grabbing hook in the first sentence
Summarise the basic information 

Here is the topic information:
[copy/paste core information]

Review these comments for the most popular/controversial and integrate them into the script in your own voice.
[comments]

Do not give stage directions or B-roll. Just the text of the script. Do not mention the commenters, simply use as script inspiration. Focus on the most popular comments.

Copy and past in the Reddit post (or the linked article) and the top comments as before.

Here’s what happened with the Steve Job post:

This is just the beginning. This prompt is set up to produce a longer, more detailed video so it goes on for some time.

That whole “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage” section is inspired by comments by the way - giving us a nice set of metaphors to explain our point. That’s the power of dropping comments in too - it stops us getting a generic ChatGPT script.

Again, I wouldn’t recommend having a sentence-by-sentence script so use a simple prompt to condense:

Convert this script into a set of bullet points that I can use to record a video with

Here’s a nice set of bullet points to use whilst filming:

Teacher mode

Generally your evergreen content will be evergreen because it provides lasting value.

Talking about who won Love Island this week has zero lasting value.

Instead focus on education. This is the key to evergreen content.

We’re talking

• how-tos

• guides

• how I did it

• case studies

• frameworks

• tutorials

One of my best performing vids is a framework. People love frameworks as a way to learn.

@iamkylebalmer

You’re using chatgpt wrong. Learn this basic framework to instantly upgrade your prompt engineering and productivity #ai #artificialintell... See more

As an expert in your niche can you come up with similar ways to educate your audience about your niche? If so focus your content here.

Series and playlists

One additional useful way to think when deciding your content is whether it can be condensed into series.

For example I do lots of videos show people how to use ChatGPT.

An easy win for me is to have a series/playlist called “ChatGPT Tips”. Here’s what that looks like - ChatGPT Tips Series.

If you can start to sort your evergreen content into similar “buckets” this will help new audience members to find it later.

Keep this in mind when finding ideas and producing content but don’t sweat it too much. As you produce more your audience will start to tell you what they are most interested in - use this to guide your series.

In the final Part we’re going to look at some alternative formats for your Reddit Method content to round out our strategy.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

However, sometimes it’s not the right format for the job. Let’s look at how we can round out our content with text posts.

Let’s get started:

Wide Ranging Formats

Short posts

Short posts are the bread and butter of Twitter/X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The best combo with the Reddit Method is to provide a summary and then drop the link of the article or webpage you surfaced using the Reddit Method.

Once we have created a video script based on the content use this follow up prompt to quickly produce a short post:

Convert this video script into a short post for twitter

Use a strong hook, add an intriguing/expert comment about why you think this is important and then link to the original source.

No emojis, no hashtags, do not refer explicitly to the framework, I've given you. Make it sound human.

Here’s a quick post off the back of a script we created earlier:

Notice how in the prompt I say to create the post for Twitter. This will ensure it’s short and punchy. ChatGPT isn’t good at word-counts so this gets us a better result!

For these posts you can directly add the link. But some platforms (Twitter in particular) deprioritise posts with links. So I’d recommend adding the text and a screenshot or image from the article as the first tweet. And then adding the link in a reply to the post.

Or, the smart method, embed your short video with the first post then link in the reply. We’ll use this multi-media approach in all the formats below.

Twitter thread

Next up is creating a Twitter thread.

If you are’t clear what that is here’s an example:

Click through to Twitter to see it all. Basically it’s a series of tweets - each “replying” to the last. This causes a long continuous post that is split into individual tweets. It’s easier to see in-app!

We’ll use a slightly different prompt under our script to produce a thread:

Convert this video script into a twitter thread

Use a strong hook, add an intriguing/expert comment about why you think this is important and then link to the original source.

No emojis, no hashtags, do not refer explicitly to the framework, I've given you. Make it sound human.

This changes the format to a thread:

Adjust as required to match your natural tone of voice.

As with the short post above we can embed our video into a thread too. In this case I tend to put it at the end of a thread as a “prefer to watch?” tweet with the short video uploaded into the tweet.

Having it in the first tweet means people won’t necessarily know it’s a thread and they won’t look for the rest of it. Experiment here and see what works best with your content and audience.

Long form post

We can also convert our script into a longer article.

This can live on our blog or on a social media site using a function like LinkedIn articles or Twitter long form posts.

Again we slightly tweak the format:

Convert this video script into a short article

Use a strong hook, add an intriguing/expert comment about why you think this is important and then link to the original source.

No emojis, no hashtags, do not refer explicitly to the framework, I've given you. Make it sound human.

This leads to the following article:

Make sure to rewrite and edit to your liking. You know the drill!

If adding to a blog also embed your short video at the top of the article. For bonus points embed a Youtube version for extra SEO juice.

Back to Reddit

One potential additional play is posting your content back to Reddit.

This works best with evergreen rather than newsjacking content as (generally) this will be more valuable material for people in the niche.

The basic idea is to upload your short videos as posts on suitable subreddits. This gives you access to additional traffic and you have a fair chance of it being popular because it was based on content that is proven to work on Reddit.

Before you do this make sure you find subreddits where this would actually be welcome. Check the rules of the subreddit. They are different in every community. Additionally some Admins are more permissive than others!

Basically be sensible and make sure that whatever you want to post is i) genuinely useful and ii) within the rules of the sub.

This is definitely more advanced but well worth testing as Reddit is generally an under-tapped audience source.

Pulling it all together

In this Playbook we’ve explored how to deploy an oft overlooked source of inspiration: Reddit.

We looked at two specific content forms - newsjacking and evergreen - both of which use slightly different Reddit filters to hone in on the best topics.

With the Reddit Method you’ll always have new topics to talk about. Just remember to head to the source of information (Reddit) and then bring that content to the rest of the world using more accessible formats like short video.

Before you go — please leave a review

Keep prompting,

Kyle