Working as a freelance blogger means a lot of juggling. I juggle topics, clients, deadlines, and my time. Like a lot of writers, I’m looking for ways to integrate AI as a useful tool—not a replacement for my writing. My clients pay me precisely because they don’t want mediocre generated text straight from GPT. 

But AI is a lot more than auto-generation. With Contextminds, AI tech becomes my creative and research partner. I’ll walk you through a recent example. 

One of my clients wants a series of blog posts that position her as an expert in B2B environmental consulting. She gave me a creative brief with:

• A list of keywords and phrases
• Some brand guidance, and
• A standard word limit for posts

I had two jobs: find some interesting potential topics and write a sample post for her to review. I used Contextminds for both.

Looking for topics

Everything in Contextminds starts with a map. I already had some info from the creative brief, so I chose to generate my map from a prompt. 

I chose ‘Content topics map’ from a list of possible map purposes. In the prompt box, I specified a brainstorming map for blog post topics and copied in the keywords from my client brief to narrow the search. 

Once I clicked, ‘Generate new map’ I had enough time to take a couple sips of coffee before my map was ready. I could have fine-tuned the information, but I was happy with this starting point, so I hopped right in.

At this point, the map had some good topic suggestions, but I wanted to hand pick a few more. Any item I selected on the whiteboard helped determine suggestions in the search tab. And there were lots of different kinds of suggestions to use.

I scanned the lists of suggestions and clicked ‘plus’ to add what I liked to the map. Once I was happy with the number of ideas I’d collected, I organized the topics by dragging and dropping individual items. I grouped similar ideas and deleted ideas that weren’t going to work.

That was the first part of my mission completed! I had a decent list of relevant topics to suggest for my client’s blog. And it took me fewer than five minutes. Which is about 12 times faster than my previous ‘stare-at-a-blank-screen’ brainstorming technique.

Getting started on a post

It was time to create my sample blog post. I liked the idea of a cost-benefit analysis because I wanted to outline the value of hiring my client as a consultant. So I grabbed every item related to that topic and made a mini-map on the side of the whiteboard. I made a very broad-strokes topic and subtopic outline to get started.

Remember how I said I didn’t know much about B2B environmental consulting? Here’s where Contextminds helped me research. I selected my little mini-map and scanned related article suggestions in the search tab.

I added the articles that looked promising to my map. In just a few minutes, I had a list of related articles to read and to cite in the final post. That helped clarify everything in my head. I felt confident and ready to write about environmental consultancy.

The next step was a detailed outline, and Contextminds helped there, too. To generate a focused outline, I added the information from my original content brief. I dragged ‘Content style’ from the toolbar and filled in the blanks where I could. All that info was added to the map as a new item that helped to refine parameters for the Generate tab.

In essence, all the information I’d mapped out for the post:

• Topics
• Questions
• Articles
• A content style

… became part of my prompt. I selected it all and opened the Generate tab, where I clicked ‘outline’. That was it. 

The result was a detailed outline that included:

• In introduction and conclusion
• Five subtopics with developed arguments
• Contextual links to articles I could cite
• An appendix of sources linked to the original articles

Going from topic list to post outline took me under four minutes (not counting the quick detour to read and vet article sources).

The right starting point

An outline is the perfect level of fidelity for me. It helps me organize my thoughts and structure my argument, but leaves the wordsmithing to me. The final post always has an authentic, human voice.

Contextminds is exactly the kind of writing tool I need to take advantage of AI. No low-quality text, no sea of open research tabs, and no prompt engineering. It’s an intuitive process that integrates with the way I already work. And, I’m in control—able to refine at every step along the way. I can share my map with the client, or I can use it as my secret weapon to brainstorm and research in a fraction of the time I used to need.