← Back to Knowledge Graph

Five Topic Categories: Never Run Out of Content Ideas Again

The Framework

The Five Topic Categories from Alex Hormozi's $100M Leads solve the most common content creation bottleneck: "I don't know what to talk about." By organizing all possible content topics into five temporal categories, the framework guarantees an infinite supply of ideas. Every experience you've ever had and every observation you make fits into one of these five buckets — and each bucket produces content that resonates with different audience segments for different reasons.

The Five Categories

1. Far Past. Stories and lessons from your early career, childhood, or formative experiences. "How I got started in real estate with $500 and no connections." "The worst job I ever had taught me more about business than my MBA." Far Past content builds relatability and origin-story credibility. It answers the audience's unspoken question: "Were you always this successful, or did you start where I am?"

Far Past resonates because it creates identification. The audience sees their current struggles reflected in your history, which builds trust that you understand their situation — because you lived it.

2. Recent Past. Lessons from the last 1-5 years — recent enough to be relevant, distant enough to have perspective. "What I learned from losing our biggest client last year." "The three changes we made in 2024 that doubled revenue." Recent Past content provides tactical credibility because the lessons are current and the details are specific.

3. Present. What you're doing, building, testing, and learning right now. "I'm running an experiment with cold outreach this month — here's what's happening." "Today I interviewed 5 candidates and here's what I noticed." Present content creates intimacy and real-time connection. The audience feels like they're on the journey with you, not receiving wisdom from a distant authority.

Present content also creates accountability — when you share what you're working on publicly, the audience follows up. This engagement loop (share → feedback → update → share) generates ongoing content naturally.

4. Trending. Current events, industry news, cultural moments, and emerging patterns that your audience cares about. "What the new algorithm change means for your content strategy." "Everyone's talking about AI — here's what I actually think." Trending content captures search traffic and algorithmic amplification because platforms prioritize timely, relevant content.

The risk with Trending: it has a short shelf life. Content about today's news is irrelevant next week. Hormozi recommends mixing Trending content (for reach) with evergreen content (for lasting value) rather than relying on trends alone.

5. Manufactured. Deliberate experiments, challenges, and provocative content created specifically to generate discussion. "I'm going to cold call 100 businesses this week and document every response." "Unpopular opinion: networking events are a waste of time." Manufactured content creates engagement through novelty, controversy, or participatory challenge.

Manufactured content is the most strategic category because you control the timing, topic, and format entirely. While the other four categories are reactive (responding to what happened), Manufactured is proactive (creating what happens). Hormozi's own challenge-based content ("I'll build a business from zero in 30 days") is Manufactured content that generates months of derivative content from a single concept.

Cross-Library Connections

Berger's Contagious explains why each category drives sharing through different STEPPS mechanisms. Far Past activates Stories (narrative arc). Present activates Social Currency (insider access). Trending activates Triggers (environmental relevance). Manufactured activates Emotion (high-arousal curiosity or controversy).

Dib's Writer's Toolbox from Lean Marketing — five ongoing files (Story Bank, Content Bank, Swipe File, Snippets, Made Me Buy File) — provides the organizational infrastructure for collecting raw material across all five topic categories. Each Toolbox file feeds multiple categories.

Hormozi's Content Unit framework (Hook → Retain → Reward) applies identically regardless of which topic category the content draws from. The category determines the raw material; the Content Unit structure determines the delivery.

Understanding which category a conversation falls into allows the operator to calibrate their technique deployment: rapport-building topics (personal interests, shared experiences) support Hughes's Activating Trust Protocol, while decision-related topics (choices, commitments, plans) create natural opportunities for embedded commands and double binds. The category determines which tools from the Linguistic Arsenal are most effective in context.

Implementation

  • Open a document with five columns, one per category. Spend 10 minutes brainstorming 5 ideas per column. You now have 25 content ideas.
  • When stuck, pick the category you've used least recently. If your last 5 posts were Present content, write a Far Past story or a Manufactured challenge.
  • Batch by category. Record all your Far Past stories in one session. Write all your Trending takes in one sitting. Batching within categories is faster than switching between them.
  • Use Trending sparingly — no more than 20% of your content. It captures attention but doesn't build lasting value.
  • Manufacture one challenge or experiment per month. The content from a single 30-day experiment can fuel weeks of derivative posts across all five categories.

    • 📚 From $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi — Get the book