✋ Heyo SuperMarketers!

For years I have struggled with content marketing — finding the right idea, fleshing it out, editing, making it something I felt pride in putting out.

Content is the foundation for successful brands and creators today.

But it is hard, and takes a lot of time….especially coming up with the right ideas.

In this edition of SuperMarketers, we’re going to explore how you can use AI to help you generate ideas.

This can be a huge unlock of time, creativity, and growth.

The prompt in here is 🔥, will be a wellspring of ideas for a long time.

So let’s get right into it.

💡 Strategy: Create A Content Matrix for Endless Content Ideas (with AI)

Justin Welsh is a beast, in the best sense of the word.

Building a solopreneur empire in a few years, on the foundation of amazing content, consistency, and education.

His systems has reached over 100 million people in under 3 years 🤯 

And he’s generous with his sharing his process, and systems.

In particular, this Content Matrix system that helps him capture and create ideas.

It’s beautifully simple: a list of the content topics that he wants to write about, and the formats in which he shares them.

It looks like this:

🔍 Use Case: Content as a Form of Validation

Great content is an end goal in itself.

But here’s an interesting idea: what if content serves as a Minimum Viable Product — a way to validate demand for a software product?

The content marketing agency Animalz put out an interesting piece last week, noting that content is the new path to product validation.

Gareth Davies writes: “Traditionally, product teams build first and then bring in marketers. With “content-led product,” you reverse this process by starting with content and then using it to inform product development….teams use content to validate new markets and product ideas. The SEO results and reader interest in a topic inform what we build next.”

Content is faster to create than product.

Creating content helps verify if you can rank for the topic.

And investing early in content gives it the time needed to rank, if you do in fact build the product.

And once you’re live, you have an audience already primed with experiencing the problem, and looking for a solution.

Ultimately, content is the quick way to check if there is demand for a potential product.

💪 Prompt: The Content Matrix Prompt

Now let’s get to the good stuff — how to generate endless ideas with ChatGPT.

This prompt is from Nils Liedlich, shared on Linked In.

Nils leverages ChatGPT to build out the Welsh Content Matrix.

The link to his complete post is here.

Add your specifics for content topics, and content types. And boom, you have a content matrix.

You can go one step further with this, and use ChatGPT to help you create a content calendar, processes, research the posts, and more.

🔬Experiment: Create Variations of the Outputs

You can experiment with the prompt in several ways to generate a variety of outputs, here are a few ways that you can do so:

• Adjust the Specificity of Subtopics or Formats: Make your subtopics or content formats more general or more specific. For example, instead of a specific subtopic like "email marketing," you can use a more general one like "digital marketing."

• Change the Domain or Industry: Apply the content matrix to different domains or industries. For instance, if your original prompt is focused on marketing, try switching it to healthcare, technology, finance, etc.

• Include Trending Topics or Keywords: Incorporate trending topics, keywords, or hashtags related to your field. This can help in generating content that is timely and relevant to current events or popular discussions.

• Vary the Content Tone or Style: Experiment with the tone or style of the content. For example, you could specify that you want content ideas that are humorous, serious, educational, conversational, etc. Adjusting the tone can significantly alter the type of content ideas generated.

• Add Constraints or Specific Requirements: Introduce specific constraints or requirements in the prompt. For example, you could specify that you want content ideas that can be executed with a low budget, or content that is suitable for a particular audience demographic. Adding constraints can help tailor the content to your specific needs and limitations.

📖 Resources: Discover What People Are Actually Searching For

While the instantaneous AI content matrix is magical, there are great “old school” methods to help identify content ideas.

Specifically, seeing what people are searching for in Google. This is great because you are able to find the long tail searches, many of which can fall into the “How to” bucket of searches that you can create content for and answer directly.

Here are a few ways that you can uncover those queries. I searched for “how to use ChatGPT” as an example here:

1. Answer The Public - Answer the Public is a content ideation tool that uses search engine data to provide insights into the questions and people are searing for. You can enter a keyword, and find a ton of related questions, comparisons, and more, visualized in a cool interactive visual. This gives you very specific long tail queries to create content for.

   

2. Also Asked - Pulls the “People Also Ask” queries from the Google search results, and shows a series of questions related to the search query. A good way to find insights and concerns users have around a specific topic.

   

3. Detailed Chrome Extension - A free chrome extension that pulls all of the “People Also Asked” data, in just one click. It can go five levels deep. So similar output to what you get in Also Asked, but with the CSV you can build out your keyword list very efficiently.