Why Boring Resources Make the Best Linkable Assets

Hi, welcome back. So I went off and did a little bit more brainstorming. And I'm going to show you some of the ways I found some ideas. I just remember we're not in a validation phase yet. So I know these ideas without thinking how I'm going to implement them if I want them to be on the side, if it's already on the side, stuff like that, right? So I'm just going to show you a little bit of my thought process. So one of the things I came up with was this one. It's either a video series or an article or a case study that can have video or text in it.

And it's about project management and ADHD. So what I thought would be funny is if you had a video where you have people with ADHD test out various project management tools and show them how they would use it. Because what I know from the people around me and maybe also a little bit of myself is that people with ADHD tend to be very creative in how they use tools because they have to work for them, right? So I think it would be very interesting also to show that a tool is useful for somebody that has ADHD because they are better equipped to manage a project, but also that there are different ways to use the tools and just make them your own in a way.

So I didn't put any inspiration in here, but I'm thinking along the lines of those videos where you have a lineup of people or something like that. And it's very minimal and just very kind of personable. So not a really highly edited screaming video, but just kind of like, yeah, really human and authentic. Another thing that I thought of was a roundup and just so when you're working, there are always these same types of problems that come up, you know, like a deadline or annoying team member or something else, right? And what I was thinking was to create videos or not create videos, but to have all these typical problems in the workplace and then connected to a specific video or a post or something else.

So how I came up with that idea was that I was looking into YouTube. I think I was looking for human resources, but I can show it to you with project management. So I did project management here because that's related, right? And then I use a filter and I did the view count filter. So this can give you some kind of indication of what kind of stuff gets a lot of views. There are very sophisticated ways to analyze YouTube and all that stuff, but for my creative flow, I just do kind of like a basic way. Then another thing was, oh yeah, so this was again a video about the next workforce, so Gen Z, and what their interpretation is of typical corporate speak.

So when I do outreach, I try to avoid corporate speak because I want to connect with a person in their inbox as a human, right? I don't want to sound too much like a business because then it becomes a very transactional conversation. What's in it for me, pay me for the link or all that stuff. So I'm trying to really connect with a person on a human level and also show them that I'm very interested in what they're interested in and all that stuff. So I thought it could be interesting to see how the next workforce interprets typical corporate speak.

A formal office talk often has a lot of hidden passive aggressiveness in it, so it could be a great way to help managers maybe be more aware of how something can come across. Of course it's up to them if they change it or not, but I thought it could be a cool idea. It would be something that a person would be more willing to link to, but also something that could pick up passive links. All right, so I had a lot of ideas. So this is what happens when I'm just in my flow. At some point I just had to stop, but that's why it's so important to not stop yourself with any judgment or start doing analysis.

You really have to be no holds barred and just put anything in there. Don't think about it. So I thought this could be cool. A lot of people are talking about automation, but they're not always aware what tasks should be automated and what tasks should not. So you could do some kind of checklist where people have to put in stuff or they go through a checklist and then they can choose if they want to try and automate that task or not. So this is based on something I saw on Ahrefs. You could do a listicle for greetings, right? So if somebody has their work anniversary, you could do a listicle of memes or greetings or wishes that they could put in a card or something like that.

So this is typically for human resources or for a manager. The notes that I made here was traffic and links. So if I look here, I saw this one from CultureMonkey. So here you can see that this article is getting a lot of traffic and it's not a super strong domain. So it's like 51, which is something I look for when I'm talking about link assets because really strong domains tend to get a lot of links anyway. This one didn't get a lot of backlinks, but it would still be something that would be fairly easy to build links to because it's not super commercial.

I could look at these links, see what kind of links they're getting. It does look like somebody builds links to it, stretching from the sites. Yeah. So I think it would be an interesting thing. But again, I'm not going too much into the analysis because you're going to stop my creative flow. Let me take a couple more examples. So one really good way to get links but also to get traffic are free templates and ClickUp already has free templates here. So the next step in the validation phase would probably be to check what do they already have? Can it be improved?

Would they need a lot more links to bump it up? Or would it just only be a couple of links? So one of the couple of the templates that I found was, for instance, let me see here, the feasibility study templates. Feasibility study template. So this I think looks at whether a project is possible or not. So if you look here in Ahrefs real quick, so it gets a good amount of traffic, some backlinks, I would have to look into it. And I could of course look into the keywords it's ranking for and then what other sites are ranking for this and what kind of links they're getting.

But free templates usually work really, really well because it's very helpful and people are actually searching for them. And also by the way, if you're doing your research or if you're doing your brainstorm and you just see a site that's clearly really focused on a specific topic that's relevant to you, then I would definitely put that domain, so this domain, put it into Ahrefs or whatever and then look at the top pages. Which page you're getting the most traffic or are getting the most links or are shared a lot on social, right? So that can give you more ideas and that way you can just keep going.

Let me see. So I found this one as well, get to know your team member questions. And this was based on a site that I found and of course you can look for other sites as well. Let me go down. Yeah, this is more of what I would call a boring resource linkable asset and I love boring resources because they're very neutral. It doesn't look like you're trying to sell something and they're very useful. People just really need resources. The one problem that you can have sometimes is that very authoritative sites are the source of all these facts, right?

And then it could be hard to get in there. So this was just a resource where you can look up how much PTO there is per state. That's a state demand. That could be something that a person would want to know. The same thing is this, same type of content as this. So the federal holidays for a specific year. I have a Canadian example here. So here you can see that this is Canada mostly. I think it's because it says statutory holidays. I should probably put in federal holidays. But if you would look at that and you can see that it gets a lot of traffic and also quite a bit of links so that could help as a linkable asset.

Again, because it's also not commercial. But yeah, you always have to try out a couple of things to see what works. Sometimes the most exciting idea doesn't work at all and the most boring, obvious idea works well. So for instance, if you look at, let me see, there was also something here, glossary. There are some terms that people look up like scope creep or something like that. And that could be a great linkable asset. It's very, very, very boring. But it's something that you can easily work into an article about project management and just link to the page because it wouldn't look like obvious link building.

It would still be relevant. And it could also pick up natural links at some point when it starts to become a really strong page. And as always, you have to make sure that your linkable assets are serving your money pages or commercial pages or whatever hub you want to, you know, strengthen. So they shouldn't be just, well, at least in the beginning, they can be standalone pages. But pretty soon, you know, when it starts getting up, getting links, you should link them to something else that you want to boost up. I'm just going to show you two more examples, no, three more examples.

So one other thing that you can do is if you have a couple of topics, is to put them into Bard and then ask Bard to come up with ideas. So one of the ideas I came up with, I think it was in the last one, it was a whiteboard time lapse art contest. So that could be something cool. And I have more ideas. Okay. So another idea that Bard had was to create a focus time optimizer. So it would be something that helps users schedule tasks based on their individual energy levels and attention span. So that could be really interesting for people with ADHD or whatever people, you know, anyone.

Another thing was the ADHD at work toolkit. So that would be a downloadable package that managers can use or team members themselves to, you know, work with the maximum productivity while having some challenges. And the last two examples that I wanted to show you was something that I could see was getting a lot of traffic. So this is the, the traffic wasn't for this exact idea, but it was about gaslighting. So if you can see here. So this was from the Newport Institute and it's about gaslighting abuse. But it seems that in the workplace, there's also gaslighting.

So I think that could be a great linkable asset. Of course, you do have to think about if you want to talk about that kind of stuff. But I put it in the sheet there anyway, because you know, this is the brainstorm phase, not the validation phase. And another thing that's along the same lines is Machiavellianism in the workplace, which I saw was also getting a lot of traffic. I think this one was, let me see. Yeah, I don't know if this was in the workplace, but the workplace was a specific area in this article. But yeah, I think it could be helpful to notice some kind of behavior as a manager or something.

Yeah, so all these are just examples. I could go on and on and on. And every new topic brings about more opportunities for linkable assets. So in the end, you have a really big list. And you should talk, you know, with your team or with your client to see which ones you want to try out first.