The 'Seed and Explore' Method for Endless Content Ideas

So let's do some content ideation for linkable assets for ClickUp. ClickUp already has many awesome content pieces, so it doesn't really need any new ones. But at the same time, it's always good to do a brainstorm session just to see if there's anything that's maybe overlooked and very obvious that could get a lot of links. Or that is really easy to build links to. So I'm going to show you a couple of ways that I do this content ideation. But more importantly, if you want to have a creative flow, you shouldn't judge your ideas in the first phase, in the brainstorm phase.

And sometimes you shouldn't even think about how you're going to implement it. You're just going to list a bunch of topics and ideas. And in a validation phase, you're going to give them a second look and select your best candidates. So sometimes I also like to start on the side first, especially if it has a lot of content and a lot of sections just to get the juices going, right? So I'm going to look at the products here or wait, let me see. So I can see tasks, whiteboards, goals, chat is kind of cool. And let me see automation. So these are all topics that I would immediately put into my ideation sheet here.

So goals, automation, automation tasks, chats, oops, chats. And then immediately from automation, I'm thinking AI, whiteboards, it's interesting. So I'm not thinking about these topics, how I'm going to apply them. I might use them as seeds to put in other tools or to search for other content to give me more ideas, right? But I'm just noting anything down that pops up to me because this is the creative flow phase. So let's look at what other things they have. Marketing, engineering, design, operations, project management, remote work, of course, is something a nonprofit could be interesting as well.

So I'm just going to put in here, non-profits and remote work. And of course, ClickUp has to do with human resources, which is always a good topic because a lot of sites that talk about human resources or have products in them or are focused on them, they love content, they love linking out. So this could always be a really good angle. And of course we have productivity. So this is just a way to start with some topics. So now that I have some seed topics, I'm going to put some of these in the content explorer and see what pops up. So if I do productivity, for instance, I'm going to put it in here.

And also don't be afraid of chaos. You don't need to do this creative flow in a very structured way, in my opinion. You can just hop on from one topic to the other as long as you keep on going. So I put in productivity and now I'm going to go and do some filters. So first I'm going to do domain rating. So this is going to be zero to let's say 60 because it's totally fine to see some big dog sites. But sometimes you want to see content that gets a lot of traction, not because it's from a big site, but because the content itself is really good. Let me see here.

I'm going to do another filter on referring domains. And let's say I want to see something that gets over 500 referring domains. And I'm going to use one more filter. And this is so these metrics, they're not wholly, you know, but it's a really quick and dirty way to filter through results. So you don't have to use them. But I got this one and I'm going to use one more filter here where I'm going to exclude home pages. I exclude home pages because I want to see actual content that's getting links, not home pages. Sometimes it can be totally fine if it's to a home page because, you know, the site itself is a linkable asset.

For instance, the site, how many people are in space right now.com, that home page is only a one page site. And that page itself is already a linkable asset. But in other cases, I really want to see content. So here's a productivity tool that got 816 referring domains. It might not mean that these are all good sites. It might actually also be spammy or whatever, but it can give you some sort of idea, right? So this is a website blocker, which I think is interesting. I think more people should use them. So I'm just going to put here in website blockers.

So this could be a roundup as a linkable assets for people. Let me see. What else? No, hello. "Please don't just say hello instead. So despite best intentions, you're actually just making the other person wait for you to phrase your question," which is lost. This is a weird site. nohello.net doesn't get a lot of traffic. There's a lot of domains. Go look this one up just to see what it is. Is it just one? Not sure what this site is, but it's somebody very wonderful. nohello.com. Oh, and it doesn't exist anymore. This is a little bit weird. I don't think that's going to work.

I could still note it down just to look into it. So it could be a roundup with maybe things not to say on a phone. Things, best salutations or best ratings on phone or something like that. Or maybe in customer chat or something like that. So it could be a list of all the things that a bot could say or maybe an actual employee, a customer service person in the customer chat. That could be a really nice warm opening, right? So this is something that could work. It's a little bit outside of the ClickUp sphere and in project management, but that's okay.

We're not going to judge that right now. We're just coming up with ideas. So I could move down further and come up with more ideas, but I can also just hop onto another topic. So let's say human resources. And instead of now looking at different domains, which is still good to do, I'm going to look at traffic. So now I want to see page traffic and let's say 10,000 just to start off big and no home pages. So this is another, "language objectives of human resource management software." Why is that getting so many so much traffic? I think it's because it might actually be a test question.

So I would probably look at that one. Yeah, it looks like it's a maybe something that people look up when they learn about human resource management. And maybe this corresponds to a textbook or something that they need to know for when they're studying. And so this is interesting. So I would probably look this up objectives of HR and then put in here, put the next inspiration article. And then here I would put in the Ahrefs link as well. And I'm going to revisit this later, but it might be something where you could make a big resource for all that will answer.

Most of the exam questions that you get when you have to study for your HR certification or something. So let me see exam answers or test answers or whatever. So I'm going to put it in here. Notice that I don't really fill out the rest of the sheet that will come back later when I start validating it and really looking into it. But if I do see a good example, I'm going to put it in here. Yeah, so this is another one that I saw earlier and I thought, oh, statutory holidays, that could be a good one. So in this case, I would note it down here as a topic, statutory holidays and I didn't see a whole lot of proof that it gets a lot of traction.

That said, though, if I put that into the context for instead of human resources, I can see what kind of content seems to do well. So this is page traffic, right? I could also change this to referring domains or to social shares, but I'm leaving it on this now. It's weird that it says here page traffic is smaller than one, but here it gets really bigger. So this is interesting. It seems like this is all Canada. So if Canada is part of your audience, you could do something like that, right? Getting quite a bit of traffic. But you could also just do it for the U.S. and see what happens.

In any case, I'm not going to dive into it a lot deeper right now because I'm still in brainstorm phase. I'm just going to hop from one idea to another. So at some point I have like 60 or 80 ideas and then I'm going to go through them and select a shortlist. So we have this one, statutory holidays. I'm just going to put in this and then we can look at it later. So I'm going to show you one other way. So there's this way where you can hop from different topics and use the filters in a content explorer, but you could also use AI. So if I go to Bard, one thing that really works well, linkable assets are tools or calculators.

So you could ask Bard to come up with ideas with calculators that are connected to productivity or connected to something else. And then it can come up with those ideas. So yeah, I like to use Bard or Content Explorer. Another thing that you can do is look at the trends. So you could look in Google trends or exploring topics or you could put something in like productivity trends 2024 and then check out one of the articles and start looking through those if there are workplace trends that can give you an idea for a linkable asset. So if I look here, global work stress.

So of course, stress is always a good one. So I'm just going to put in this topic here stress and use it as a seed later. Let me see if there's anything else. Engagement. All right. Leaders. Managers are getting squeezed. Hybrid work strategy. Hybrid culture. Yeah, seems kind of boring to me. That said, though, a stats and trends piece is always good. So if you look at these seed topics or go broader, go to a topic that's more top level, you can always do a stats and trends piece. And that can get a lot of passive links if your domain is strong enough, otherwise you have to run ads for it.

And it's easy to build links. So that's really important to know that you don't always have to do really exciting topics or linkable assets. You can also do something that's very obvious and very dry and that you wouldn't think would work, right? So if you look at human resources in Content Explorer, there's this site, for instance, and the page is getting a lot of traffic. It's a page that just says what is human resource management. Of course, you would have to check where the traffic is coming from and all that stuff. But it could be useful to make an article around this definition for something.

It's something that people really naturally link out to because it doesn't have any commercial gain. It's only there to give some insight about a specific term. So this could be glossary. Well, the type would be glossary. And it could be about what is human resource management. And I'm pretty sure that ClickUp already has this. But you would be surprised how many experts in specific niches do not have the most basic content. And it's not always necessary. But sometimes you miss an opportunity that way. Really easy to create linkable asset. All right.

I'm going to pause the video now and because I want to come up with more ideas and it's kind of hard to do that while talking. And in the second part of this video, I'll show you some of the ideas that I came up with and how I fill out the rest of the sheet. See you in a little bit.