How to Discover Endless Content Ideas (with The Burroughs Matrix)

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Author William S. Burroughs was a polarizing figure in American literature. Along with poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac, Burroughs was a founding member of a literary movement in the 1950s called the Beat Generation.

Although Burroughs started as a conventional writer, eventually he began using a literary technique known as the cut-up method, or decoupe.

Without going into a massive literary essay on nonlinear style that is guaranteed to cause anyone reading it to jump off the nearest cliff while wearing a toga and gouging his or her eyes out with a wooden ladle, in a nutshell the cut-up method is as follows…

Authors would take two sheets of written word with equal line spacing and either fold or cut them down the middle, and then combine each slice with another vertically. By reading the newly combined lines across, one would see an entirely new sentence. Burroughs used a form of this technique to create his best known work, Naked Lunch (1959), considered by many to be one of the best novels ever written.

So what? What on earth does this have to do with affiliate marketing?

The Burroughs Matrix

I have often used some variation of what I call the Burroughs Matrix to develop new ideas. By mixing and matching previously unrelated words and sentences you can often spark a new topic to write about.

First, you consider what you would like to write about. You don’t need a title, and certainly no article yet, just a vague notion of a direction to start with.

For this example, let’s use the Idea Grid model by Richard N. Stephenson. He begins with the general idea, “staying motivated at work.”

Step 1: The first step is to rewrite your topic idea as a question. For our example, this becomes, “How can I stay motivated at work?”

Step 2: Write 3-5 qualities or characteristics you find important about the topic that may affect the question.

Step 3: Create a table with each quality listed at the top, and then create a list of words associated with each characteristic in the column below. You should end up with a matrix (grid) with everything laid out nicely.

Step 4: Here is where the magic happens. Take one word at random from each column, forming a path that runs across the grid creating a new sentence. In this case, some of the ideas Stephenson came up with were:

  • Reset your motivation by stopping reading your email, picking up the phone, and asking the intern to come to your cube to discuss what it will take to tackle important topics.
  • Get motivation through the ideas of others by talking with the facility representative in the lobby about reducing paper usage in meetings.
  • Instant message your group lead about facilities to make charts in the break room to maintain motivation.
  • Speak with your administrative assistant in your cube about motivation using the white board for examples.

And so on…

Pretty neat, right?

Now, much like using a headline generator, not every new sentence will be immediately useful as-is. You may have to mess around with them a bit to come up with something worth using. But that’s not the point anyway. Right now you’re just trying to spark new ideas.

The Burroughs Matrix is a fantastic way to come up with all sorts of new ideas. It helps you break out of common thinking patterns to think outside the box to generate content that you may have never discovered otherwise.

Share your thoughts on the Burroughs Matrix below. And please consider including any other brainstorming techniques you find useful as well.

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Recent Comments

35

Great information - very useful!

Thanks so much for sharing!

Wish you great success!

Bob

Thanks, Bob. You, too :-)

Amazing, thank you.

Thank you.

thank you for share such valuable info!
have a good weekend!

You, too. Thanks for reading.

This is really amazing. Got to do some research on this method.

AJ, you rock!

Hahaha... thanks. :-)

This is great!!! I will be using this one in the near future.

Cheers!

Nate

Awesome. Thank you.

I was writing key phrases the other night, yet I had not thought of this method. It would have been faster and fun. Like the game you play in answering a question, then pass the paper to the next person.
When everyone has the same amount answered, we read the answers. Quite a lot of opportunity arises from the answers.

Exactly, it's like playing "telephone whispers" with yourself. But be warned... you will come up with some CRAZY combinations. lol

Brilliant! When I read "Burroughs Matrix" I new it was going to be interesting. What's incredible about this as well is the ability to reverse engineer the competition in incredibly fresh and innovative ways. Love it!

Awesome. I am glad I was able to spark some ideas for you. Keep me posted and let me know what you come up with :-)

It's kinda like searching for keywords...see what new phrase you can come up with. I was trying to come up with a WA blog idea this morning, and just started writing. I found a new idea this way. Now will try to write the idea into a blog.

Excellent. I had not considered just random keywords, but that's a great way to explore. Well done, Fran :-)

Interesting approach...I may have to resort to this shortly.

Thanks for the information!
Cal

Let me know what you come up with. It's a heck of a lot of fun if nothing else :-)

Good brainstorming...get the thoughts going

There are may was of slicing and dicing, mixing and combining to get a better original. Thank you!

Absolutely. This is really only one way among many. We can slice words, phrases, sentences, or even entire paragraphs.

One fun exercise is to take a random paragraph from one book and add another paragraph from a different book. 99 times out a 100 it will probably be complete gibberish and not make a lick of sense... ah, but that one time you might something beautiful :-)

Thanks for reading.

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