3 methods I use for endless content ideas (without ChatGPT)

Summary

AI is great for a lot of things but it is bad at the actual job of generating ideas that come from your life. that’s why I never use ChatGPT for the source of an idea. here are the three methods I do use.

1. the self-interview method. sit down and interview yourself on your content pillars. “what do I actually believe about X? what have I learned in the last 90 days? what would I tell someone starting today?” the answers are the content.

2. the inspiration method. use TikTok and Instagram’s discovery sorters to find content in your niche that’s already working. don’t copy it. extract the structural insight, then run it through your own lens and your own experience.

3. the vanilla ice method. named after the “stop, collaborate, and listen” line. it’s a creative process loop I borrowed from James Clear: discover, collect, generate, combine, edit. you’re constantly capturing inputs and remixing them into outputs.

the goal isn’t to be more efficient. it’s to be more original. AI-generated content sounds like every other AI-generated content. yours doesn’t have to.

Transcript

why ChatGPT can’t source your ideas

If you have ever struggled to come up with ideas for your content, you’ve got to make it to the end of this episode because today I’m going to be talking about three different methods I have used over the years to generate new content ideas without having to rely so heavily on chat tpt. Now I know that’s what most people are doing today and I’ll talk about that as well, but I have been creating content for years.

I’m talking about thousands of hours of recorded audio podcasts. I’ve done millions of published words on blogs and now I’m probably getting to into the hundreds of hours of video content and I never run out of ideas and that is one question I get all the time from people is where do you come up with your ideas? Like where did you get that idea? Why did you decide to talk about that thing?

What is it about coming up with ideas that’s so hard for us as content creators sometimes or really business owners who also create content it can be difficult to talk about content or to know what your audience wants to hear about.

So I’m going to be going over those three methods. Now I do want to hit on the chat tpt thing real quick or just AI in general. Yes you can absolutely utilize AI or chat tpt to help you come up with different prompts for content.

If you’re going to do this I highly recommend you try to tailor it down as much as possible to you specifically giving them as many ideas about who you are what kind of ideas that you want to you know come up with all these kind of things and then let it come up with some ideas for your content.

But what I have found is that content doesn’t land as well as the content that’s super authentic about your experience and what came from your brain because you’re going to be a little bit more passionate about an idea that you came up with. If something hits you in the shower and you’re like yeah I want to go write about that I want to talk about that people can see that passion when you come to create content.

When you’re just like oh here are the 11 ways to do this thing that chat tpt told me to do it’s boring content. People can tell that you don’t care about it they can tell that you probably don’t have a lot of experience doing it. So while there’s nothing wrong with using chat tpt to augment your content creation process I think the idea generation alone should be yours.

method 1, the self interview

Then if you want to take that idea and go to chat tpt or ai and have it help you expand the idea or make it more engaging add hooks add closing ideas adding more you know stuff in general to the content.

I think augmenting with ai is a great use of the tool. The idea in and of itself I firmly believe that should be coming from you. You should create your own ideas and then if you want to augment that idea with ai go for it find out what the most viral hook would be do all of those things but try and generate the idea yourself and here are three different methods to do that.

So the first method I call the self-interview method and the prerequisite before you can do the self-interview method is you have to know what your pillars are. I highly recommend having five pillars for instance I talk about ops and systems productivity becoming a better human behind the scenes stuff I have my pillars that I like to talk about and those are the things that are going to be running around in my head when I’m trying to

come up with ideas. So you should think about what is your entire purpose for creating content after you have that purpose how you plan to help people then you can hit your five pillars. This is going to help you categorize your ideas and make sure that you’re hitting all these different pillars in your content. Okay now once you have one of those pillars now you can do the self-interview method and this is what I challenge people

to do all the time if I were to sit around or sit here and you were in this room and I asked you questions about any topic you most likely have an opinion and better yet if it’s about one of your content pillars something you are passionate about something you have experience in and I ask you a question about that thing you are going to answer that with some knowledge and you are going to have ideas

you’re going to have opinions the self-interview method is the strongest way to do that and then here is where you can augment with AI and ultimately still have your own ideas so you could say hey I am a strength and conditioning coach that’s extremely passionate about concurrent training and I want you to act like you’re a news reporter or we’re making a documentary and I want you to come up with 10 really good questions for you

know give my background 10 questions if you were to interview me now chat gpt can come up with those questions again they’re not coming up with any of the ideas it’s your idea it’s one of your content pillars and so now chat gpt could be like okay well here is a question I would ask that’s a piece of content that’s an entire episode that could be a podcast episode that could be a short form reel that

method 2, the inspiration sorter

could be a newsletter that could be anything because of chat gpt is like oh what’s the biggest thing people should know about concurrent training as a strength and conditioning coach I’m going to sit here and just immediately talk about that I’d probably talk about the interference effect and how it’s kind of bullshit and like I would just dive into all these things with my strong opinions my experience and I would go deep really fast and I’d

be passionate about it and I’d have the right idea the self-interview method is one of the best ways to create content because you already have the ideas you already have the experience you just need to get asked the question so even if no one’s in the room ask yourself the question first and then act like you’re responding it and it comes across and creating really good authentic content so that is the first method the second method

is what I call the inspiration method I just recently learned about this one myself now if you’re really struggling with ideas and the self-interview method is just really not clicking for you can download a google chrome extension that is called tiktok and instagram sorter now there are multiple ones of these this is the one I’ve actually tested so again that’s the tiktok and instagram sorter and what it does is you could go to an instagram page

of someone who’s creating similar content to you and you can go to their reels and you can actually sort them by the ones that got the most likes or the most views or the most engagement and you can see what’s winning on someone else’s page and I call this the inspiration method because I want people to go get inspired but I don’t want them to copy and that’s going a going around a lot these days people

are just copying word for word content or whatever obviously I don’t recommend that in any way shape or form not even from an ethical standpoint just a straight up that’s a bad way to build a personal brand is not being you trying to be someone else but if someone had like the five methods for you know getting out of knee pain you could be like oh wow I really like how they structured this content how they

were talking about it they had a really good hook here the visuals were good now you can go create something similar but not word for word so you’re like okay I’m going to talk about the five methods for you know nutrition macro programming and then I’m going to have a similar hook that they used and some similar visuals but it’s going to be in my domain so typically I don’t recommend copying anything anyone else doing as

method 3, the vanilla ice method

a direct competitor you can get inspired from so many different areas and that’s generally where I like to look for inspiration is not to someone who’s actually competing with me in content or in business I want to go get inspired by somebody else altogether someone outside of my industry somebody who’s not doing anything similar to me because they might be more creative or they look at things a different way so if I ever use this inspiration

which is not the inspiration method which is not my main way of creating content I’m typically looking for inspiration outside of my current niche or my current market all right the third method is called the vanilla ice method because of his popular song ice baby where he says stop collaborate and listen yeah you thought I was going to do the whole thing I’m not so ultimately just stop at any point in the day stop right now

what are you doing you’re listening to this podcast right now or stop after lunch what have you done so far in your workday stop at the end of your workday reflect back what have you done I guarantee you’re doing so many different things right now people would love to hear about if you are creating content or how you are productive or how you look and plan out your day whatever systems processes ideas things that you’re doing

on a daily basis all of those things are great places for you to get ideas for content even if it’s not necessarily one of your pillars people might just want to hear how you are doing certain things in a certain way it is a great place for content in general so just stop look what you’re doing look at your calendar what have you done what process are you going through because you might take a lot of

these things for granted you might not think about them very much but I guarantee you probably do 20 or 30 things every single day that someone else will find interesting and if you just document that process or show people how you do it will resonate with your target market especially if they are similar to who you are if they have the same problems that you have if you’re solving them for them you are going to make

some really awesome content by talking about the things that you’ve done okay so if you’re struggling with content those are three methods that you can dial in and utilize today all very simple very easy utilizing chat tpt to augment you but not replace your brain because we need to keep using our brains if we want to stay in the game as human beings with ai essentially taking over i want to end with just my thoughts on

the creative process behind all three

the creative process and something that james clear wrote uh several months ago that i think is just spot on for the creative process if you ever struggle with it like how do you be more creative how do you come up with more ideas the first step is discover read a lot observe the world notice so put into as much put as much into your brain as you possibly can listen to podcasts listen to books listen to

music listen to philosophy listen to all these different things and it will help you put with more good inputs to become more creative then the second thing is to collect immediately record anything that strikes you so have a way or process that you can jot down things quickly in your phone or in a quick in a notebook you have to capture ideas i know i can’t tell you how many times i had this idea i’m like

oh yeah i’ll remember that later and then i don’t i have to document it immediately for the idea to actually come all the way out to being produced content the third is generate so build on your ideas when you have that idea sit down flesh it out you know go through it a couple times what are the strengths and weaknesses of this idea was it actually a bad idea just go through and generate the idea all

the way what’s the main takeaway why would anyone care about the idea that you have answer these basic questions now the fourth thing is combine this is where you connect previously unconnected ideas and this is where listening to a lot of different podcasts or books you start to make connections with your own personal experience and things that you’re learning and this is where content becomes very unique and also really good when you’re starting to make those

connections and then the last thing is edit and then select the best version of this idea and then produce it that is the creative process if you can just take in as much good inputs as you can not negative inputs not the news not negative you know social media not negative friend groups or anything like that take in as much positive as you can sit around and think go through this process and you will not struggle

as much when you are trying to be creative all right that’s it for this one go create more content and generate as many ideas as you humanly can