Overview
Most content creators don’t run out of ideas because they’re not creative. They run out because they have no system. Every week starts the same way, staring at a blank page, writing whatever comes to mind, and publishing without knowing whether anyone will ever find it.
The pattern that works is separating ideation from execution. One focused session per month generates enough validated ideas to keep writing without stopping. AI makes that session faster and the ideas sharper.
In this workflow, you use Claude or ChatGPT to generate ideas at volume, then filter them against your audience and validate the ones worth writing with a basic SEO check. The result is a Notion database with a month or more of prioritized topics ready to hand off to a writer, an AI drafting tool, or yourself.
This is the starting point of a content system. Everything downstream drafting, publishing, repurposing works better when it begins with a validated idea rather than a guess.
Before you start
You need:
- Access to Claude or ChatGPT
- A Notion account (free plan is enough to start)
- A free or paid SEO tool — Ubersuggest, Google Search Console, or SearchAtlas all work
- A clear sense of who you are writing for and what problems they have
If you are not sure who you are writing for, spend ten minutes on that first. The quality of every idea you generate depends entirely on how clearly you can describe your reader.
Why Notion for an idea bank
A spreadsheet works for storing ideas but it does not help you manage them. Notion’s database view lets you filter by pillar, sort by priority, switch to a calendar view when you are planning a publishing schedule, and open any idea as a full page when you are ready to turn it into a brief. Everything stays in one place rather than spread across a sheet, a doc and a calendar.
For the ideation and planning stage specifically, that flexibility is worth more than the simplicity of a spreadsheet. For automated workflows that need to read and write data — like auto-publishing to WordPress — Google Sheets is still the better tool. Notion sits at the planning layer; Sheets sits at the execution layer.
[Time: 10–15 mins] Clarify the 3–5 broad topics your site owns. Every idea you generate should sit inside one of them, without pillars, AI produces ideas that are scattered and hard to rank for.
Typical Inputs
Your site topic, a description of your target audience.
Results
A short list of 3–5 pillars saved as a Notion database property so every idea can be tagged to one.
[Time: 10 mins] Build the database before ideas start coming in so everything has a place to land. Notion's board and calendar views make this more useful than a spreadsheet for planning and prioritisation.
Typical Inputs
Your list of content pillars from Step 1
Results
A structured Notion database ready to receive ideas
[Time: 15–20 mins] The goal here is quantity, not quality. Generate a large enough pool to filter from , cutting too early kills the session.
Typical Inputs
One content pillar at a time
Results
40–60 raw ideas in Notion tagged by pillar
[Time: 15 mins] Cut anything that does not genuinely match what your reader needs. Your judgment works faster than any tool here.
Typical Inputs
Your 40–60 raw ideas
Results
20–25 ideas marked as Queued in Notion
[Time: 20–30 mins] This is the step most people skip — and why good content gets no traffic. Search demand and realistic competition matter as much as the idea itself.
Typical Inputs
Each Queued idea from Step 4
Results
Each idea scored with volume, difficulty and a rankable rating
[Time: 10 mins] Sort your validated ideas so you always know what to write next without having to re-evaluate the list from scratch.
Typical Inputs
Your scored and validated ideas from Step 5
Results
A prioritised, filterable idea bank in Notion ready to feed your drafting workflow
Why this works
Each tool does one job:
- Claude or ChatGPT generates volume without bias toward what you already know
- Your own judgment filters for audience fit faster than any tool can
- An SEO tool validates search potential before you spend time writing
- Notion keeps everything in one place ideas, priorities, status and briefs, and scales as your content operation grows
By separating generation, filtering and validation into distinct steps, you avoid the most common content planning mistake: writing whatever feels interesting this week rather than what your audience is actually searching for.
What to do next
This idea bank is the starting point. The next step is turning your top ideas into drafted content either manually or automatically.
- Write the drafts yourself: Use the manual writing workflow — Turn Ideas into Polished Content Faster
- Automate the drafting: Use the automated workflow — Auto-draft blog posts from a brief with Make.com and Claude
- Not sure which approach fits you? See the full overview — Three ways to automate your content — pick your level
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