(This article was originally posted in Boost.re’s official blog)

Using Reddit to become a thought leader in your industry

Reddit is the new generation of forums. It has a huge traffic of passionate people, coming to get the latest news about their main interests.

This makes of Reddit a great platform for people looking to learn, share and improve themselves.

If you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer, marketer or simply want to land your dream job, becoming a thought leader can Boost your opportunities.

What is a thought leader?

A thought leader is an individual or firm that prospects, clients, referral sources, intermediaries and even competitors recognize as one of the foremost authorities in selected areas of specialization, resulting in it being the go-to individual or organization for said expertise.

Given that this recognition brings a lot of attention, a thought leader is also someone that significantly profits from being recognized as such.

Becoming a thought leader means that you are knowledgeable, that you know your industry inside out.

Nevertheless, it is not enough to know a lot, it is also necessary that others in your field recognize your knowledge. This means that somehow you need to let them know that you can be a trustworthy source of information/answers/strategies.

Don’t just sell. Help, lead and inspire.

So, how do you establish yourself as a Thought Leader? It’s not by doing the same thing your competitors are doing. If you can hit on an idea in your industry that others haven’t touched, you ’re already one step ahead of the competition.

Why you should care about Reddit?

Reddit is one of the biggest sites on the internet. They call themselves “The front page of the internet”.

According to Alexa, as per December 2015, Reddit is the 33th most important website in the world and the 9th in the USA.

Given that Reddit is community based, it is a great place to build a professional and personal network of fellows that share your passions.

Yet, it is highly underutilized, especially for marketers wanting to share valuable information with an engaged audience.

Reddit works like an aggregator site. Users submit links to other websites or text posts, which can then be voted and commented on. It is divided in subreddits that gather people around a common theme.

The main goal as a user is to share valuable content with the community, your performance is measured through karma points, that are granted to you when other users upvote your contributions (links, posts and comments).

Hence, you can adjust and measure your progress, as you increase your karma points from Reddit. Your goal would be to have as much karma as possible, all coming from your contributions to subreddits that really matter to you.

How do Subreddits work?

It is fairly simple. Reddit is structured in sub-groups, known as Subreddits, that are dedicated to a very specific topics.

Each sub-groups has its own rules and sometimes they are heavily controlled by its moderators.

Originally, Subreddits were intended as dedicated groups in which you could share links from other websites.

Given that a lot of the shares became spam, the rise of “text posts” became also popular, depending on the Subreddit theme.

At the same time, the most trusted source for images is imgur.com, hence, if you want to share pictures, infographics, etc… you might want to get to know imgur also.

Finding the Subreddits that best suit you

You can start by searching for the Subreddits related to your interests. Reddit has a decent search engine, although there are other websites that can help you with the task. For instance, metareddit is the most popular.

Metareddit’s screenshot

The best Subreddits, the ones that keep people engaged, are normally the ones with at least 5000 subscribers. Although, you can check its relevance by looking the frequency of posting and number of upvotes of the most popular stories.

Once you’ve found the best Subreddits for you, the only thing left to do is to integrate yourself into the conversation.

Start by commenting, sharing your experiences, opinions. Every feedback you get, is a new piece of learning for you.

The idea is to get to know you peers and of course, get them to know you, to know that you are a reliable source of information.

Don’t hesitate to engage in conversations, or to share information you find useful for yourself. The more karma you earn, the more you increase your chances to be visible and knowledgeable.

Reddit as a source of traffic for your blog

Maybe you have been trying Facebook, sharing your content and waiting to see people coming to your blog, and nothing is working?

Given that Reddit is such a popular website, it can also be a great source of traffic.

A lot of the content and news that goes viral nowadays, are first shared on Reddit (often even before Facebook and Twitter).

If you do a good job becoming a thought leader on Reddit, you can use this recognition to bring traffic to your website and somehow profit from it.

It might be because you just published a new e-book, or because you’re selling your product. In anyways, it could be a great way to acquire new customers.

Reddit can be that source of new users/customers, but be careful, it is not made to be a marketing machine in which you throw all your content and wait to see what happens.

It is better to create conversations, to share content that REALLY makes sense, not just to bring traffic back to your website.

There are amazing services out there that help you amplify the organic reach of your content on Reddit. One of the best is Boost.