Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
If you follow me on social you’ll probably notice I put out lot of content each week.
And that’s on top of the 1000-1500 word newsletters that I’m writing daily.
In this playbook I want to show you some of the systems and techniques I used to produce helpful content en-masse.
The basic shape of the week will be:
It all ties together.
One idea will lead to a long blog, multiple social posts, a video and images. All tied together, all aligned.
The focus will be very much on authentic personal brand - based on you. Low production requirements. Value over style.
This is the way to win in the creator economy.
We’ll cover:
Let’s get started.
First up we need to eliminate writer’s block. Sitting down and thinking “what shall I create” is a thing of the past.
I’m going to give you a prompt that can generate obscene amounts of ideas.
Will they all be good? Nope! You’ll need to select the best and tweak from there. But you’ll have a lot to work from!
This prompt is based of Dickie Bush’s content matrix. I recommend you go and learn anything and everything you can from him by the way. He’s one of the good ones. His blog + newsletter are the place to start.
Here’s the prompt:
Act as an expert content strategist and writer.
My audience is [audience details]
Their common problems are [list problems]
My business helps the audience to [how you solve problems]
Help me create a content matrix.
X axis = content types: Actionable How-To, Inspirational Advice, Example Breakdown, Contrarian take, Unique Observation, Present vs. Past, Listicle, Social proof about myself, Lessons learned, Benefits, Reasons Why, Common Mistakes
All relate to the topics in the Y Axis.
The Y axis contains my topics:
Generate a list of topics based on my audience, audience problems and how my business helps.
Generate the full context matrix, giving headlines in each cell. Make sure the content types are on the X axis and my topics in the Y axis.
Fill in the specifics of your business. I used the following for this example:
My audience is people starting their first business
Their common problems are what niche, no money, no time, stuck in 9-5, not sure first steps.
My business helps the audience to start a business by leveraging AI tools like chatgpt
First the prompt generates a list of Topics:
Then it takes the topics and the content types and creates a huge amount of potential content for us:
This is just a snippet of the whole because there are 10 topics and 12 content types for a total of 120 cells.
That’s 120 things you can talk about right there. No more “I don’t have any ideas”.
Copy/paste these ideas into Excel or Notion or your tool of choice.
We’ll be using them in the next Part to generate posts.
FYI if you use ChatGPT Plus ask it for a CSV file and it’ll give you a downloadable version. Cool huh?
An additional powerful method here is to link each of these content ideas to something that’s already popular - a news article, popular social media post or quotation for example.
For this we don’t use ChatGPT. We use Perplexity.
The basic version is free - I recommend checking it out as it’s a very powerful tool.
The idea here is that we can hook into existing popular topics and influencers as well as dropping our own thoughts on these content topics.
For example let’s say I want to cover the topic “Why the 9-5 Model Doesn't Prepare You for Entrepreneurship".
Sure I can give my own thoughts on this (we’ll cover this in the next Part) but I can also link to existing discourse on the topic.
Head to Perplexity (not ChatGPT!) and plug in this prompt:
Give me i) a popular blog article ii) a recent news piece iii) a popular social media post from a well known person in the space and iv) a famous quote on the content topic [paste content topic]
Perplexity will do the research for you.
For the content topic I gave it it throws back info from these 25 sources:
Notice there are lots of non-generic sources here - it’s not just boring news sites and wikipedia but instead personal blogs (Gillian Tracey, Kiley Peters), social media posts and even Reddit discussions.
Perplexity also answers the initial request directly in responses like this:
What this gives you is i) a list of resources to have a look at to see what other people are saying and ii) a summary of the main opinions out there.
When we are thinking about preparing content around a certain topic run this to give you the lay of the land and spark more creative ideas for what you could talk about.
This allows us to take each of the 120 ideas from the original content matrix and 10x them by tapping into the existing discourse.
In this Part we’ve looked at how to how infinite content ideas.
Writer’s block is no more. So no more excuses!
In the next Part we’ll build the foundation - the long form post.
Here’s a reminder of the week: