Bibi's 'No-Judgment' Brainstorm Method

Alright, I'm going to show you some of the ways that I come up with ideas for linkable assets. And the first phase is just brainstorming. You can use any tool that you want, but what I think is really important in this phase is to not judge yourself. So just dump any idea that you have in a sheet or notebook and whether or not it's realistic, the idea, or you want to do it, or it's useful, that's something for the validation phase. If you start judging yourself in the brainstorm phase, it stops your creative flow and you won't be able to come up with a lot of ideas.

I'm going to show you a couple of different methods that I use to come up with ideas for linkable assets. One of the tools that I love to use for this is the Content Explorer from Ahrefs and I'm going to show you how. So you could start with your topic and then you can branch out to maybe related things or things that have to do with your audience. It could also be around correlated interests, for instance. These linkable assets are not there necessarily to rank you on a specific keyword or to give you conversions. They're only there to get links from prospects that are relevant for your niche or relevant to your audience or maybe links that are not directly relevant but that are really strong links that can help you strengthen your domain.

Okay, let's get started. So we could start with the direct topic of solar if we look at the solar panels. And for me it's important to use a couple of filters, otherwise it's such a big list and it doesn't really show me if the content gets any attention. So I'm going to use a couple of filters here. You can play around with these. You can use one or more. One thing that I like to do is the domain rating because I want to do a max domain rating. So if I do this, then I'm only going to see content down here that's up to a specific domain rating because some bigger sites always get a lot of attention anyway and it doesn't really matter what the content is.

So I have this max domain. Another thing that I can do is filter on the referring domains. So let's say I only want to see content that has a hundred links or maybe even more but let's start with that. I'm going to run the filter. And what I'm doing now is just basically going through this and seeing what gives me an idea, what gives me inspiration. It's not to make that same content but just something, some angle or some hook that seems interesting to me that I'm going to note down. One other filter you can do is the filter to exclude home pages and that way you can see not sites that get a lot of links because they're a good site or whatever but a piece of content that gets a lot of links because it's valuable content.

But I'm going to do that after. I'm just going to do really first quick glance. Best solar generator so a roundup could be interesting. I'm going to do the filter, exclude home pages, DIY solar oven s'mores. That's interesting. So what I would do now is that I would open this up and I'm going to go to a sheet that I made for all these notes, I've already put some ideas in here. So you could put in the type if you know what kind of content you want to make so maybe it's going to be a guide but we're not sure. You don't have to fill all of this in because you can also just dump the idea in or the topic and then leave it at that.

I'm going to say guide, the niches, cooking, parenting, and then it's something about a DIY solar oven and I'm going to put the Ahrefs link in here so just for later on if I want to revisit that and I'm going to put this in as an inspiration piece. So here I have all these inspiration articles. Like I said, it doesn't mean that I'm going to create the same article. It just means that it serves as inspiration maybe for something else or something better. So let's look at this, yeah, so it's an article about all these how you can make your own solar oven and make s'mores.

So this is not super directly related to solar panels. At the same time, it is the same science and if I were to create an article or some kind of guide around how to make your own solar oven or something else or how to teach kids about solar energy, it opens up the possibility of getting links from prospects that would be interested in that. So it could be parents, it could be foodies, it could be educational professionals or stuff like that, right? And that could help my site. And as you can see, this has also been repinned a lot. So this article does get a lot of attention.

Let's go down further so there are a calculator could work, I could note that down. How much solar would it take to power the US? I kind of like that. That's an interesting question as well, right? So I would open this one up and then put it in there as a inspiration piece, but it could be anything. It could also be power, how much solar power to power the Star Trek enterprise or something like that, right? We don't know yet. So I'm just going to put it down. I'm not going to fill in this, I could do that later because I don't want to get out of my creative flow.

I could also look at the site to see if there are any other articles around solar that are getting a lot of traction. And it was an article from 2018, so there might be some more current versions of this that could work. By the way, this also shows that you can use a word like this to find more ideas. So I'm just going to go away from my direct topic there. There's probably a lot more in here that could work, but I want to hop real quick on something else. So if I do the word how much, and then I'm going to change the filters as well just for fun.

I could keep this filter, but I'm going to do something else. I'm keeping the DR filter. I'm going to add social shares and then Pinterest. With Pinterest, it's great because it doesn't mean that you need to do Pinterest marketing, but Pinterest is basically a big library of blogs. And when something has been repinned a lot, it usually means it's a good article, it's a good blog post or a good calculator or whatever. So it can help you to use a filter on Pinterest shares. So we had how much? I'm going to put something, let me see, this is a hundred thousand.

Okay. I think that's a good show results. And again, I've done the no home pages here, this filter. You could also remove it and see if something else comes up. 19 DIY gifts that show how much you really care, till some cottage. So now I'm looking through these articles and a lot of them, topically, don't have anything to do with solar, but they do show me what kind of articles around the question, how much get a lot of attention. And then I can just note some of these down if I like them and in the validation phase, I can check if how I can apply that to my project, to the solar panels or to my audience.

So work from home jobs. I got an idea from this, not necessarily about this article, but I think people would like to know maybe how much it pays to be a solar panel installer. And if you had some, you could do like a stats piece. You could also be, of course, do a whole stats and trends piece around solar panel industry. When you do a stats and trends piece, it can get passive links from any journalist or other publishers that write about renewable energy or the industry. And if you done their homework for them, if you compiled all the data you can find online, verify data and put it into one piece, it saves that person a lot of homework.

And they'll refer to you as a source, even though it's not your data. You just did the compilation of it, right? So let me see. I can put this one in there. So like I said, I'm not going to use, not going to create an article probably that's the same as that, but it was my inspiration for the salary thing. And again, I can copy this data link as well. So let's go back and go down survey sites. Yeah, how many drops again? Oh, here's a solar oven. That's interesting that it's coming up. Maybe. Yeah, not sure why it's coming up again. Yeah. So I would go down there and see if there's anything else.

That could inspire me for an idea. But let's think about solar panels a little bit more. Sometimes you get stuck in your creative flow, like you don't know what other topic to put in or something that's related, right? So what I do then is that I go to AI. So for instance, I can go to OpenAI and I could also go to Bard. So here is Bard. And I'm going to ask some things that could help me break out of my stuckness in the creative flow. So what kind of problems do people try to solve with solar panels? This is just to learn a little bit more about the audience.

And I can use these issues that they have for ideas around linkable assets, reducing dependence on fossil fuels, lowering air pollution, conserving water, saving on electricity bills, increasing property value, government incentives, a lot of stuff there, right? Energy independence. I kind of like that one protecting the environment, living off grid. So this is something that's very popular. The same goes with the van life, which is of course related to solar power to the example side we're looking at. So I'm going to take this one, living off the grid, this topic, I'll go back to Content Explorer.

I'm just going to put in living off the grid. And sometimes you do need to change this word a little bit. Top 20 low cost DIY gardening projects made with PVC pipe. Yeah, not so much. I'm going to remove the interesting. And now I'm going to add another filter. Let's put page traffic. So what is there around living off the grid? That's getting a lot of page traffic. I'm going to go with 10,000 and see what happens there. Okay, so that's movies, fast and furious, small RV. So this gives me an idea to do maybe some content around RVs because it has to do with the, with the same audience, put this in inspiration and then small RV or RV could also be something and I'm not going to dwell on this too long.

I'm just going to note it down. First off, I'm going to remove the living and see if I just put in off grid, if I can find some more stuff. So what I'm trying to show you that there are a lot of different ways that you can come up with topics that could be the seeds for ideas to crystallize into a linkable assets. But it's very important that in this phase, you stay in your creative flow and you don't judge yourself too much. Once you have 40, 60, 80 ideas, then you can go into the validation phase where you look at them and really make a short list of the things you want to try out to help you with your link building.