You’re staring at a blank page, and it’s staring back at you.

Today I’m going to explain a really neat tool you can use with ChatGPT to help you with content creation.

My son does a lot of writing for his work, and last night we were driving home from a family event. We discussed a few “idea generation” models.

The tree model. You start with a single idea, and explore how it might branch out.

The funnel model. You dig into an idea to see how deep you can go, and how specific and precise you can get.

The word cloud model. You do free association. You think of everything you can that’s related, even peripherally, to some concept. Then you put it in a word cloud and see if anything emerges.

I had a conversation with ChatGPT about this and asked it for other, similar models. It gave me the following additional models.

Patchwork quilt breaks a concept into fragments that can be stitched together later.

Spiral revisits the central idea multiple times from multiple angles

Snowflake expands on the core idea incrementally

Venn Diagram explores overlaps

Map converts the concept into a journey and plots a path

Puzzle breaks a concept into pieces to see how they fit together.

The details of those models are important, it’s the next step that’s really cool.

I asked ChatGPT if we could create a single model that incorporates all these concepts, and then re-use it from time to time, like a program that I could run on an idea. And it said, “sure.”

I called it the “Content Exploration Model,” and now all I have to do is open chatGPT and ask it to run the Content Exploration Model on a word or concept.

You can do something similar. Let’s say you have a series of tasks that you want ChatGPT to do for you – in coming up with ideas for email subject lines, or finding the right keywords for an article, or – as I just did – expanding on a concept. You can work with ChatGPT to create that set of instructions and then save it to run later.

277: ChatGPT's Secret Weapon: Building a Reusable Content Exploration Tool