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Alex Cordova

Alex is a seasoned tech writer and WordPress enthusiast with over a decade of experience in the industry, helping businesses grow through SEO and content marketing. When not writing or diving into research, you'll find him experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.

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How to Use Quora and Reddit to Discover Unique Content

You're probably familiar with Quora and Reddit, but have you ever used them to come up with blogging ideas? Here's how we do it, step by step.

Finding new content ideas is one of the biggest challenges in growing your site’s blog. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) data can provide a lot of guidance here, but it often doesn’t tell the full story about what people are asking, what they want to know, and what they’re looking for. For that, you can turn to Quora and Reddit.

These two social media platforms can provide you with priceless insights into what people are talking about worldwide and in incredibly specific niches. With Reddit alone, you’ve got thousands of communities focusing on specific hobbies and interests, and Quora has people asking every question under the sun (and getting answers).

In this article, we’ll go over a practical guide on how to use Quora and Reddit as, basically, content aggregators, and how to mine them for unique content ideas. Let’s get to it!

Understanding Quora and Reddit as Content Platforms

Before we jump into the “how”, let’s break down what makes each of these platforms unique and how they work (in case you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of decades).

Quora: The Q&A Powerhouse

Quora is all about questions and answers. You ask a question and, in most cases, you get multiple answers, a lot of times from subject matter experts:

Quora

In our experience, you can use Quora to ask questions about basically anything. Questions don’t go unanswered often since the platform rewards people for answering. These rewards can be simple badges or even monetary if the users are subscribed to the Quora Partner Program. That means there’s an incentive to answer even the most obscure questions, which is great if you can’t find the information you need anywhere else.

Reddit: Community-Driven Forums

Think about Reddit as a collection of forums. Your feed is made up of some subreddits that every user follows by default and the ones you subscribe to:

Reddit

Reddit automatically shows you the most popular threads, but you can also choose to navigate this wealth of information by the date of publication, what topics are gaining the most traction at the moment, and which ones are most controversial (which can be a lot of fun).

Subscribing (or “following”) subreddits in niches or topics you’re interested in can be a fantastic way to keep up with news and developments. More importantly, you get to see what people think in each thread, which can often be a goldmine of information. Some entrepreneurs even swear by using Reddit to come up with new product ideas.

How to Find Unique Content on Quora

Knowing what people, in general, are asking about can be a superpower in content marketing and blogging. If you know what information people are looking for, you can create content that fills that need.

There are several ways you can go about this when using Quora and start aggregating content ideas. For starters, when you sign up for the platform, it will ask you for information about your interests. This will determine what questions you’ll see in your feed initially:

Selecting topics on Quora

Once you access your account, you’ll see a page that looks like this. Your main feed is at the center of the screen and you can jump to questions in the categories you selected using the menu to the left:

The Quora feed

The most upvoted questions (and answers) will naturally appear at the top of the feed, similar to the system Reddit uses. With the basics out of the way, here’s the process we use to find content ideas using Quora:

  • Look for questions with high engagement. Popular questions can often lead you down interesting rabbit holes. Popular questions are often a sign of a lot of people sharing the same doubts. Look for questions that your audience might be interested in figuring out the answers to and plan content around them.
  • Explore topics and categories and use the search function. Quora has a search function, so go ahead and use it like a search engine. Type queries related to your blog’s niche and see what comes up. While you’re at it, spend some time browsing categories and topics that your audience might be interested in to see what they’re asking about.
  • Look for the most popular answers. Quora includes an Answer tab at the top of your feed when you’re browsing topics. This can be a smart way to find the answers that users are happiest with. That, in turn, can lead you to interesting questions.
  • Look for unanswered questions. Sometimes, you’ll find great ideas for content when looking at unanswered questions. These questions might’ve slipped through the cracks or there might not be subject matter experts around to answer them. If you know the answers, you can write about them in your blog.
  • Use the Quora Digest feature. The Quora Digest is a curated newsletter of the most popular questions for the topics you follow. Instead of browsing Quora actively, you can configure the digest to send daily, weekly, or when Quora thinks there are questions you might be interested in.

At the end of the day, Quora is a social media platform. Using it to do topic research might sound boring, but, in our experience, you’ll easily run across a lot of questions that you’ll find interesting. If you don’t, consider fine-tuning the topics and categories that you’re following.

How to Discover Unique Content on Reddit

If you don’t frequent Reddit, it can be easy to overlook how massive the social network is. Reddit has over 73 million active users per day and it’s one of the most popular platforms around the world.

Numbers aside, Reddit is where a lot of former forum users have migrated to over the years. Small niche forums are almost nonexistent anymore and they’ve been largely replaced by subreddits.

That makes Reddit one of the absolute best places to look for news and discussions across very specific fields. If you think of any interest or topic, chances are there’s an active subreddit for it.

Browsing all of that information can be daunting, so here’s how we recommend approaching Reddit to find topic ideas:

  • Search for niche communities (but don’t limit yourself to them). Look for communities that focus on the topics you typically discuss in your blog and see what people are talking about. However, don’t limit yourself only to a handful of subreddits. Sometimes, you’ll find great ideas in the default, popular subreddits too.
  • Participate in the discussions. Actually participating in discussions can give you a lot of insight into what your potential audience cares about and what they think. If your blog doesn’t get a lot of comments, this can be a smart way to engage in discussions.
  • Check hot and rising topics. By default, Reddit will show you the most popular threads in a given period of time (under “best”). Take the time to explore the rising and hot categories too, as these can sometimes show you interesting discussions that don’t quite make it to the front page.
  • Explore the comments. The comments are the best part of Reddit (or the worst, depending on who you ask). In any random post, you can often find insightful responses from subject matter experts or enthusiasts. If a thread looks interesting, take the time to actually read the comments, and don’t just focus on the headlines for topic ideas.
  • Identify subject-matter experts. If you spend time in any online community, you’ll often start to see some people contribute more often than others and with much more informed answers. Identify these people in the subreddits you’re mining for ideas and check what they’re interested in and what they’re talking about.
  • Leverage Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussions. Reddit AMA discussions tend to involve famous people or experts in their fields. They’re not as common as they used to be, but you can still find amazing conversations with unlikely people and see what others are asking them.

A lot of this advice boils down to spending time in the communities you and your audience are interested in. Do that organically, pay attention to what people are talking about, and you’re bound to come up with some compelling and unique blogging ideas.

Identifying and Evaluating Content Ideas

Using Quora and Reddit to brainstorm is only the first step. Before you get to work on new content for your blog, you need to validate the ideas to see if it makes sense to pursue them.

Typically, we filter ideas for our blog using the following criteria or questions:

  • Is it a recurring theme?
  • How do people react to discussions about this?
  • Is it an original idea?

Ideally, you want to focus on topic ideas that people keep bringing up repeatedly. For example, if you’re part of a hosting subreddit and people keep talking about the same pain points with their services or asking the same questions, maybe there’s an idea worth pursuing there.

One quick example in the hosting space is that users tend to run into a lot of errors with their email services:

A hosting subreddit

That’s the first step. To follow it up, you’ll want to look at actual discussions to see how passionate people are about the topic. Lots of responses across similar discussions can point to a lot of interest in a specific topic.

Finally, you’ll want to check if the idea you’re considering is “original”. It’s hard to come up with truly original content for the web (everything under the sun has been written about). But the real questions are whether you’ve published similar content before and whether you can do it better than competitors and include new insights.

If there’s a topic in Quora or Reddit that people keep talking about, the discussions are vibrant, and it’s something new, jump on it.

Repurposing and Creating Your Content

Once you have some ideas you want to explore in your blog (thanks Quora and Reddit!), you’ll need to think about how to approach them. You can’t simply copy and paste Reddit discussions and turn them into videos, like people do for Instagram. For blog posts, you’ll need to repurpose the content.

That work typically involves a combination of the following:

  • Combine insights and provide your unique take. Take the time to analyze what discussions and questions you can combine into articles. When doing this, it’s important that you use your expertise to add unique insights or takes. Otherwise, readers will notice you’re simply recycling content from social media.
  • Use engaging formats for your blog content. A big part of any blog post’s success comes down to formatting. People like reading content that’s easy to peruse and with lots of visuals. Think listicles, how-to articles, case studies, and interviews. Follow best practices for blog post formatting and your readers will thank you for it.
  • Consider using questions as headlines or titles. It can be a good idea to use the questions you see on Quora or Reddit as titles since they can point to specific issues people are looking for information on. However, you’ll also want to take SEO into consideration.
  • Use real-life examples from user discussions. If at all possible, consider reaching out directly to users on Quora and Reddit to get their opinions and insights on the topics you want to write about. You’d be surprised at how many experts will be happy to help you with information.

Writing blog content can be challenging, but coming up with the right ideas is half the battle. From there on, you can focus on making the content you publish as engaging, useful, and original as possible.

Best Practices for Using Quora and Reddit Effectively

Before we wrap things up, let’s quickly recap some of the best practices for using Quora and Reddit effectively, which we’ve discussed throughout the article:

  • Set up notifications for both social media platforms. so you can stay up to date with discussions and new submissions without having to spend half the day browsing (which a lot of us do anyway).
  • Subscribe to relevant topics on Quora and subreddits on Reddit.
  • Participate in discussions. This can help you bring up specific questions or angles you might want to explore in your blog posts.
  • Follow the rules of both platforms.
  • Don’t explicitly reuse content on your blog to avoid legal issues.
  • Don’t focus on self-promotion, but on contributing to the community. No one likes spammers and this can be a quick way to get banned from either Quora or Reddit.

That’s it! If you keep these simple guidelines in mind, you’ll be able to get the most out of both social media platforms and use them to come up with unique content ideas.

Conclusion

Your top blogging competitors are probably already using social media platforms to come up with new ideas. However, instead of focusing on platforms like Instagram or Facebook, we believe there are a lot more interesting discussions happening on places like Quora and Reddit.

There’s a lot of noise on any social media platform. But if you can keep up with the breakneck pace of new posts and questions, both platforms can be a goldmine of information and a direct line into how your audience thinks and what they care about.

Do you have any questions about how to use Reddit and Quora to come up with new content ideas? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

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