Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
Before we can demonstrate our expertise we need to i) decide what we are talking about and ii) have a firm grasp of the topic itself.
Let’s get started:
Breaking Down Complex Topics
First up we need to decide what exactly we are going to teach. For every niche there genuinely countless topics. The key is knowing how to capture ideas. Here are a handful of methods I use.
First, review your competitors and look at their most popular educational content. If they have popular videos on a certain topic that means that there is audience demand.
Make your own version of their guides, with your own twist. For example here is Justin Fineberg’s TikTok account. Go follow it if you aren’t:
I can sort his content by popularity and get valuable insights.
His top vids are:
and so on.
Immediately if you know your niche you’ll start having ideas.
You don’t copy the videos - that’s i) crappy and ii) won’t work because it won’t be in voice.
Instead, in my case, I’d look at this and think “oh a guide on whether to be polite to AI” is a good video idea. That’s it. We’re just looking for inspiration here. Go ahead and do this with accounts on all platforms for a broad range of inspiration.
Second, the Reddit method. I’ve covered this in detail in a full Playbook.
Basically though find subreddits related to your niche and sort by top threads to find popular topics.
Third, questions.
Use Google AdWords or Answer the Public to find questions that people in your niche are asking.
As a rough and ready method you can also use Google autosuggest. Start typing in a phrase in your niche like “how to use AI for sales” and see what Google suggests as next words:
All amazing content ideas for guides.
Use question words like how, what, when, who, why to get Google to give you specific questions.
These are all starter ideas. Once you’ve started to make content and publish it people will start to directly ask you (the expert) their questions. Once this happens your content can cover these requested rather than researched topics
Once you have some topics let’s make sure you yourself “get” it.
We don’t want to talk about something we don’t understand. So let’s use AI to give us a crash course and test our knowledge.
Help me understand [topic]
ELI5 and then ask 5 questions to confirm my understanding
Add your topic and ChatGPT will “explain it like you’re 5” (ELI5) and then ask clarifying questions:
Use this as a sense check on topics where you yourself are not 100% clear. And of course ask more clarifying questions as needed.
If the topic is something recent (from the news) then make sure to tell your AI this so it know to check the latest information. For example if I ask about the recent EU ban on the rollout of Apple’s AI Apple Intelligence and explicitly tell the model to check the internet I get:
Again use the description and questions to make sure you understand the core concepts before we go onto teach and create guides.
Once we ourselves are happy with our knowledge let’s get our AI to begin constructing a teaching framework.
We’re going to use this framework in the next few Parts in different formats - text, video etc.
But for now we just want to prepare the information.
Use this prompt under the above or (if you skipped the clarifying questions step) with the topic itself.
Explain [topic] with the following framework
Surprising hook
What is the topic
Why is this important - give a story, historical, allegorical, anecdotal or personal
How to use or take advantage of this topic
The response starts with a hook, what, why and a story:
And then some actionable action points or how-tos:
Already this is shaping up into a great piece of expert content!
In the next Parts we’ll take this core “lesson” and from it create:
Allowing us to hit multiple platforms in multiple formats to spread our expertise far and wide.