How To Expand An Outline Into An Ultimate Guide: The 10 Magical Ways

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Ahoy, Digital Writers!

Today, I’m going to walk you through a simple framework for using ChatGPT to expand an outline into an Ultimate Guide using the “10 Magical Ways.”

To create an Ultimate Guide, all you have to do is expand something already "working" on social: a Twitter thread, a LinkedIn post, a Medium article, etc. These were the “short” versions of your topic. But that doesn’t mean the reader is done!

As long as they have that problem, they will always want more!

Build Your Ultimate Guide Outline

Start by going into your analytics and sorting by Likes, Replies, or Shares, and just start making a list of your highest-performing content in each individual bucket.

Data should tell you: “This is what readers want!” Pull a few different proven pieces of content together into a cohesive whole. Take an outline from a Twitter thread, Atomic Essay, even a tweet, and build from there. However you get there, what you want is for the outline of your Ultimate Guide to be based on something that is “already working.”

Once you have your outline, it’s time to start expanding each point.

Expand Your Outline Using The 10 Magical Ways

Every single section, of any type of content, can be expanded using 10 different ways.

• Tips

• Stats

• Steps

• Lessons

• Benefits

• Reasons

• Mistakes

• Examples

• Questions

• Personal Stories

In short: you want to make each big idea in your outline into a long-form blog post. (Which means your Ultimate Guide is really just 5-8 long-form blog posts strung together.)

The way you write your Ultimate Guide is to literally just go step by step and “expand” each point in your outline with Tips, Reasons, Mistakes, Lessons, Personal Stories, Case Studies, and/or Research. You don’t need all of these in each section. They are like LEGO blocks—and you can stack and assemble them however you see fit.

Start by “expanding” each section with ideas, first.

• What do you want to say?

• What are some of the ideas you want to make sure to cover?

• What are the examples/stories you want to use in each section?

Just make notes to yourself, and get all the pieces out onto the page.

You want to get all of this “thinking” out of the way and clarified, so by the time you start writing sentences, you are basically just cleaning up your “notes.” And the wonderful thing about ChatGPT is it can clean up your notes and speed up each step of the writing process for you!

Now let’s walk through how you can use ChatGPT to do this in 3 simple steps.