If you’re often lost when it comes to thinking of new ideas for your blog, YouTube channel or business, this article is for you. In today’s article, we’re going to dig into a free content tool you can use to come up with some new inspiration for whatever it is that you are building.
First, we’ll dig into what the tool is then we’ll explore two real-world examples before wrapping up with some key takeaways and setting you off to using this tool.
The Tool
The tool we’re going to use today is called Subreddit Stats. This is a great aggregator site that detailed specifically how different subreddits are doing. It’ll tell you things like how they’re growing, what the most popular posts are, as well as the key phrases that are often used within the subreddit.
Subreddit Stats can be a great tool to use when you’re thinking about what to add to your backlog for your content calendar, or if you’re just bored and thinking about what other pages you can create for your website.
Over the years, I’ve found Reddit to be one of the best places to find gold mines for content. The reason why is because everything is upvoted. And so because there is a voting system, people naturally will tell you what they’re most interested in. Furthermore it, by digging into the subreddits of particular topics that you are creating content on, you can learn more about the questions that people are often asking, and then think about how you can spin your own personal experience to create content that is unique for you.
Now that we’ve gone over the high-level overview of what this tool is. Let’s dig into two real-world examples of how we might use this tool to come up with endless content ideas.
Example 1: /r/pelotoncycle
Let’s say for example, we are a blog like pelobuddy.com or a YouTuber like Learn with Travis that talks about things related to cycling bikes. And we wanted to create more Peloton content.
Well, the easiest way we could do this is to go onto Subreddit Stats and put in peloton cycle. From here, the first thing you noticed from the tool is the rapid growth of the Peloton cycle subreddit, which should come as no surprise. In a recent video of mine, I shared some marketing lessons you can learn from Peloton. So in case you don’t know that story, be sure to check that out after this one. Aside from the overall growth of the subreddit though what we can do is we can sort through the top submissions by all time and think about different content ideas based off of what has previously been popular.
For example, as I look through Peloton cycle, I noticed that some of the top posts are it talking about different instructors and appreciation threads for those instructors. So this tells me that instructors are a big deal in the Peloton community and that creating content pieces around specific instructors could be a great series to do. To validate the sort of idea all you need to do is jump onto YouTube and then search for something like which Peloton instructor is best for you.
From here, I would notice that a few small-time creators have created content related to this sort of topic, and they get a ton of views relative to their subscribers. This is great because in the case where people are getting a ton of views, but their following is actually pretty small, it means that the topic is really popular. And one that you could talk about too. Since I know at this point that this topic has been popular on Reddit, as well as somewhat popular on YouTube, I can start to come up with a ton of different content ideas for different series. For example, I might come up with things like Jess Sims’ Greatest Classes Reviewed or other quick ideas might be Jess Sims Classes You Must Take, Jess Sims classes to avoid and An Honest Review of Jess Sims Peloton Classes.
Aside from these popular threads on the different Peloton instructors, I also noticed looking at the tool that a lot of people talk about transformation stories. They talk about how Peloton has changed their life. And this should come as no surprise because people love transformation. It’s the reason why fitness YouTube exists as a whole niche within itself. People love to see people go through different journeys, whether that’s bulking up, slimming down or whatever it is in becoming better versions of themselves.
As we look through some of these top ranked post on Subreddit Stats, we’ll notice that other people are sharing about how they use Peloton after a miscarriage to help them go through it. So knowing that this sort of transformation story is interesting, we can take the same approach, dig into YouTube and search for something like Peloton journey and lo and behold, what we would end up finding is that Peloton journeys are indeed popular content.
So again, because we validated this on Reddit and we validated on YouTube, we know that we can create some content ideas around here and that there would be more than enough space in the market for this sort of content. Another thing you might find helpful is to scroll down and to look through some of the most commonly used keywords in the subreddit.
In this case, you might think to yourself that people might enjoy content around post workouts, bootcamps, warm ups and different topics around mantras or motivation or what might de-motivate them from Peloton.
Example 2: /r/personalfinance
The second example we’ll dig into today is the subreddit on personal finance. Personal finance is growing in popularity to OG YouTubers like Graham Stephan and Nate O’Brien. When we dig into the personal finance subreddit, we see this trend emerge. In fact, you can see how over the last few years, personal finance has completely gone off the charts.
From 2015 to 2017, there was a 5X growth in the number of people in the subreddit. Taking the same approach of sorting the top submissions by all time, we can check out some of the content that has been most popular on this subreddit. The first thing we might notice is how people are sharing how service companies give them notoriously bad deals.
So a good content idea for you here would be to potentially share your own experience of negotiating with the service company and how you might’ve snide a great deal. Or you can take some of the tips from Reddit and apply them and then share your experience and your story on YouTube.
Another popular post was about how to create a budgeting spreadsheet. So in this case, what you might want to do is think about how to design this budgeting spreadsheet for yourself and share the things that you’ve considered with other people. Or if you’re not feeling all that creative, what you could also do is create a consolidated set of resources that shares up ton of different budgeting spreadsheets that people might find valuable.
As we continue to go through these top submissions, we’ll also notice how people share tips on how to stop eating out. This would be a great topic for a content idea because when we dig into Keywords Everywhere with this query, we’d find that 110 people a month on average search for this phrase and that the competition is .02, which is a very easy to rank for term.
The last example that I’ll pull here is a post talking about the why and how behind meal prep 101. This would be a great opportunity to create a series on different meal prep ideas, or recipe ideas, and even to go into another subreddit meal prep Sunday to see what other top posts are coming out of that subreddit.
The key thing to remember from this example, looking into personal finance is to think about what is popular with people, and then to think about how you can relate your own personal experiences to create unique content that still relates or talks about a popular topic that has been validated.
From the two examples today of Peloton cycle and personal finance, I hope you can see how easy it can be to think about some new content ideas without having to spend money on a content marketing tool. Ultimately, you’re only limited by your own will to do the work as well as you’re a creativity. So it’s important for you to find ways to spark inspiration for yourself to go and create.
First, think about what’s worked in the past and then think about your own unique experiences and what you can bring to the table. Then meld the two together to create something that’s uniquely you.
Big takeaways
There are two things that I want you to remember from today’s article:
- The first one is to check out subredditstats.com and try to come up with five content ideas today.
- Connect proven topics with your own personal experiences to create some unique fresh content.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to find content ideas with subreddit stats.