How to build an outline from a one-line topic

If you record, write a set of guiding questions first. It keeps you on point and stops you from repeating yourself: without it, you easily say an idea, forget it 20 minutes later, and say it all again. Give your topic and post type to AI with the prompt for writing guiding questions.

The number of questions depends on the post type. A Know post has about 16, focused on explaining so the customer understands. A Trust post has 26, focused on each step of the job. A Love post has 36, focused on strategy, process and meaning. You do not have to answer them all. Just answer honestly what you truly understand.

With a set of questions, read each one aloud and answer them in turn. With no AI and no internet, you can still start any time: write down or record your answers to three questions:

• What is it? Name it and define it in your own words.
• How does it work? How it runs, and how you do it.
• Why does it matter? Why it is important to you, and why your customers should care.

Answer from what you already know, with no looking anything up yet. This is also a test: if you cannot answer, you do not understand the topic deeply enough to share it. Stop and pick another topic.

Once you have answered, do not stop. Like a car that has started rolling, each answer pulls in new ideas, memories and stories; keep talking or writing. Cường usually records at this step and says it all out loud. When you slip into telling a story, explain it all the way through: that is often the material in the post that is most your own.

Look at the ideas that just came out, usually seven to ten. For any idea that is still thin, ask the three starter questions again and record or write one more round. Repeat until you have twenty or thirty ideas, even forty or fifty. If you already understand the topic very deeply, one round may be enough.

Copy each idea as one short line, and set them side by side so you can see them all. This is where AI saves time: give it your recording or your writing, and ask it to group them and pull them apart into separate ideas. AI only sorts; every idea is still yours.

Write down three things about the context: who your customer is, what their problem is, and what your solution is. Squeeze them into one sentence. For example, a post about this very process has putting off writing as the problem, and pouring out every idea first, then choosing, as the solution. The details are in How to create a core message for a post.

Go through each line and ask: does this idea serve the core message? Keep the ideas that serve it, cross out the ones that do not, and save those for another post. Do not keep them all: put forty or fifty ideas in and the post gets very long and stops holding together. AI can make suggestions, but you choose by your own gut.

To go faster, give the transcript, the core message and the post type to AI with the idea-sorting prompt on the same sample prompts page. Each idea it gives back comes with a short paragraph, which is easier to picture than a bullet point. If an idea is not clear, ask the AI back how you explained that part in the recording. About 50 raw ideas usually come down to about 7.

When you pick ideas without sticking to the core message, it is easy to catch word hoarding: cutting 60 to 70% feels like a loss, so you stuff it all back in. A stuffed post tires readers and scatters their focus.

You only need this step when the first round was shallow: you only said what you remembered and did not dig deep. If you answered each question slowly and deeply the first time, skip it, because a second round usually adds only about 20%. The ideas you kept are usually not sharp yet. Record or write one more round, this time only about them: clearer, deeper, with no repeats. This round is shorter than the first pour, because you now have seven or eight ideas instead of dozens.

Put the ideas you kept in the order the reader needs to go through them. Give each big idea a short, plain title, with no fancy writing, no slang and no metaphors, because both readers and AI will scan these titles. A title that reads like a riddle makes AI get the post wrong, and you throw away your own edge. If a big idea is written long, ask AI to squeeze it into one easy sentence, then fix that sentence so it says what you mean.

Once the big ideas have their titles, adjust the post’s title to match them, because the title is the promise of the whole post. AI can suggest a few ways to say it; you pick the one true to the core message. Do not write the opening here: the outline has no opening, and you write it in the Edit step.