How to Use AI for Content Creation

What’s the problem with AI generated content these days?

It feels like every other day a new generative AI tool drops that “outperforms” yesterday’s model…it’s faster, or it has more memory, or it claims to write better copy.

Then why does it feel like generative AI is getting worse, not better?

The first time I played around with ChatGPT I was blown away. I asked it for help pricing my PS4 for sale. It gave me a great synopsis of how I could research the price using Facebook marketplace, noted that prices could vary depending on location, and also suggested that I go to my local video game store to see about a trade-in.

The copy was clear, helpful, and felt like magic. I felt like George Jetson.

That was then. This is now.

The more I played around with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, the less it felt like magic. In fact, I began to see the marionette’s strings.

What was the problem?

Too much bland, inoffensive copy with no perspective.

Too many “in today’s fast-paced world’s,” or “unleash the power of’s,” or “as you may already know’s.”

In fact, just yesterday I saw some AI generated content that read, “in the evolving digital landscape….” 🤮

As a mental exercise I just asked ChatGPT for some “overused phrases that identify copy as being AI generated.” Here was the introductory paragraph:

AI-generated copy often comes with some telltale phrases and characteristics that savvy readers—and, frankly, anyone who's been around the digital block—can spot from a mile away. Here are some of the biggest offenders that can make copy scream “I was written by a bot!”

The digital block? Spot from a mile away? The English major in me is full of cringe.

Interestingly, it did identify some phrases that I happen to use myself…”without further ado” and “let’s dive in” are some (overused) phrases I know I use on my podcast. Let’s call those “false positives,” which is easier than me admitting I’m pulling from the lazy cliché bag.

How AI Might Be Hurting Your SEO

As someone who has always been focused on SEO and driving traffic through search, AI has got me worried. There are two main problems that I see when it comes to AI and search or SEO.

• AI is making it even easier for people to create content at scale. Want a blog post about the history of the chili dog or how to set up Google Tag Manager? It’s only a (lazy) prompt away. With so many lazy or unethical marketers out there flooding the internet with content, how will your copy ever get found? The signal to noise ratio has never been great, but AI’s got its foot on the pedal and we’re heading for a cliff.
• Search engines are using AI to answer prospects’ queries. Visit Google and you’ll get AI Overviews that regularly appear above “regular” results from other websites. Visit Perplexity, the AI search engine, and you’ll only get AI-generated responses. And now ChatGPT has thrown its hat in the ring. (Wait, that’s lazy writing. How about…) And now there’s a piece of parchment in the Goblet of Fire with ChatGPT’s name on it. Why bother clicking through to the source (your website) when Google, Perplexity, or ChatGPT has just given you the answer?

In short, almost everyone is seeing a drop in search traffic to their website, and it’s all AI’s fault! (Not really, but it’s not helping.)

How to Outperform AI-Generated Content…with the Help of AI

I’m not suggesting that you don’t use AI to create content for your business! In fact, I often have multiple tabs open for ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, and more.

But as I spend more time using these tools, I’m starting to see where they can help me craft better content to market our business…and where I should trust my own gut.

Here’s the thing: I believe that I’m a better writer than ChatGPT and other LLMs (Large Language Models).

Here’s another thing: I believe that you’re a better writer than AI, too! If you agree with me, you can skip to the next section. If you don’t think so, I just want to be clear that I’m not talking about whether you are a horrific speller, or you dangle the occasional participle, or you don’t know your Oxford Comma from your elbow.

I’m talking about the fact that you have real world experiences. You’ve made mistakes, you’ve had successes. You have something to share with your customers, your audience, and other people on this planet.

If you’re worried about spelling, or grammar, or structure, that’s what AI is for! If you need someone to bounce ideas off of to clarify your thinking and argument, that’s another great use for AI! Need an editor to improve the readability of your blog post, white paper, or email newsletter? Again, AI comes to the rescue!

In this post I’m going to share some of the ways that you can use AI to create the type of content that will rank well, drive traffic, and generate leads and sales on your website.

How to Set Up AI Before You Write

There are plenty of ways in which you can leverage AI’s power, strength, and speed before you even start writing. Some of these tasks might be one-and-done, such as creating a buyer persona, and others you may need to run each time you sit down to create, like research.

Build an Effective Buyer Persona with AI

You’re never writing to everyone. Instead, you should be tailoring your content to your Ideal Customer Persona, or an ICP. If you’re selling tours to Japan you’re going to have a different message to families than you would to history buffs. If you’re selling environmentally-friendly concrete, you’ll likely have a different message for architects, vs. homeowners.

By creating a buyer persona you can then query that creation to better understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and objectives. If you have more than one ICP don’t worry; you can just repeat this exercise.

For this exercise, go to ChatGPT or your favorite LLM and create a prompt that describes your ICP. Here are a couple of examples:

• Build me a persona of a nursing home administrator of a 100+ bed assisted living center responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the facility. This person is looking for help in finding, hiring, and keeping skilled employees and is considering outsourcing some of this work to an HR agency.
• Build me a persona of a homeowner looking to build a net-zero home from the ground up. They are very interested in sustainability and have a household income of over 200K/year. They are looking for an architect and builder who can make their dream a reality.

Your AI will create a persona based on your description proving a name, background story, details, and more. If you feel like it missed something, or got something wrong, you can continue to iterate.

• The nursing home facility is located in a rural area where the talent pool isn’t very deep.
• The homeowner has a spouse and two children, and will be looking to have charging stations for their electric cars.

Once you have your buyer persona where you want it, you can pepper it with questions:

• What are your criteria for a good hire?
• What do you hate most about working with outsourced HR agencies?
• How important are aesthetics when it comes to your new home?
• What’s your biggest concern when it comes to moving away from fossil fuels to power your house?

Pro Tip: Garbage in, garbage out. We’re making some assumptions about our ICP, and AI is known for making things up (officially called “hallucinations.”). If our premise is wrong, or if AI takes too big a leap, we may not be addressing our buyer’s biggest pain points while making a big deal out of something they care nothing about.

One way to overcome this is to interview some of your best current and past clients. Ask questions to better understand the problem or issue they were experiencing before they started working with you, why they chose you, and how it helped them reach their objective.

I recommend doing it over videoconference and using an AI note taker like Fathom. You can then feed the transcripts of these interviews into ChatGPT and ask it to integrate those answers into the Buyer Persona you created.

With your Buyer Persona created you can tailor your content to address their pain points and their needs more effectively.

If you come up with more questions down the line you can just find your Buyer Persona and pick up the conversation where you left off!

Enhance Your Research with AI

These days, even a simple Google search is likely to feature artificial intelligence through its AI Overview, so chances are you’re using a bit of AI already.

But there are other types of queries that might be better handled by AI that can help you flesh out your content as well.

Query your favorite AI with questions like:

• Who are some of the influencers or thought leaders in this field?
• Create a list of experts who might be willing to contribute a quote to this article based on how often they provide quotes to other bloggers.
• What are some of the more controversial opinions about this topic?
• What are some interesting topics or themes that haven’t been covered by other blogs in this vertical?

This can spur your creativity and help you develop content that really stands out.

Boost Your SEO with AI Insights

Many of today’s leading SEO tools have AI built right in. Ahrefs, one of our go-to tools here at flyte, currently has an AI Content Helper Tool in beta.

You can drop the keyword you want to rank for into the tool and it will find some of the top ranking pages, organizing them by intent.

 

Once you’ve chosen the intent of your piece, you can start from scratch, copy and paste your content in, or select an existing blog for improvement.

 

The tool can provide feedback on how well you’re doing on some of the key topics, provide improvements on your title tag, meta descriptions, headings, and more.

Another one of my go-to AI tools for SEO is MarketMuse. This tool also allows you to do research into competition for a specific keyword and provides on the fly advice as you’re creating or editing your content based on the top 20 results at Google.

It takes into consideration topic, length, intent, competition, primary and secondary keywords, and more.

Generate New Ideas and Frameworks with AI

One of my favorite ways of using AI these days is ideation, which is just a fancy way of saying it’s a great tool to bounce ideas off. Another way I use AI is to help me develop frameworks for blog posts so I don’t forget anything. There’s often some overlap here, so let’s take a look at a couple of use cases.

You’re writing an article on the right way to introduce a new student into an established classroom. This is something we’ve seen in dozens of movies and it’s always painful and awkward.

You’ve been teaching for years and have seen this play out dozens of times. In fact, you feel that you have a certain knack for it. Still, you’re not sure how to get started or what to cover. Here’s a prompt you might use:

I need to write an article about how to introduce a new student into an established classroom. This can obviously be a very awkward situation for the new student, so it needs to be handled with care. What should I include?

ChatGPT gets to work and gives you some feedback.

 

From here, you can work with ChatGPT to dig a little deeper:

How does age impact the approach? How would the introduction differ between a 1st grader and a high schooler, for instance?

 

You can continue to ask questions to help you flesh out ideas:

• What are some suggestions that might go against conventional wisdom?
• How might your approach differ if the student isn’t neurotypical?
• How can we head off instances of bullying?

And so on.

In another situation you may want AI to produce a framework for the blog so you can just get to writing without worrying if you’re forgetting anything important.

Let’s say you’re responsible for creating a new blog post for your landscaping company: How to Use Retaining & Freestanding Walls to Landscape a Sloped Yard. (A legit post we just had to write for a client!)

Now, you’ve been doing this for years, and there’s nothing you haven’t seen when it comes to retaining walls. But there may be some new approaches that you haven’t seen yet, or tools that you don’t use.

Head on over to ChatGPT and prompt:

You are an experienced landscaper and content creator and you have to write a blog post on “How to Use Retaining & Freestanding Walls to Landscape a Sloped Yard” for homeowners. Please create a framework for this post.

Note that this prompt uses the “role and goal” approach. You give AI a role (experienced landscaper and content creator) and a goal (the blog topic and audience.)

 

Just like before, you can ask ChatGPT questions to generate a better outline or develop a section of the post where perhaps you don’t have as much expertise.

Now that we know our audience, our topic, and have a framework for our blog post, it’s time to get writing!

How to Get AI to Write in Your Voice (but don’t)

You don’t have to look far on the internet to find AI gurus showing you how you can teach AI to write in your voice.

I’m not a fan.

If you’re doing this because you’re not a good writer, then your AI won’t be a very good writer either, will it?

If you’re doing this because you are a strong writer and you just want AI to take some of the heavy lifting, I would be very judicious on where to implement your echo.

Most advice goes like this:

• Give AI samples of your writing.
• Ask it to describe your writing.
• Iterate and tweak until you’re happy.
• Use that description as a prompt in creating new content.

Presto! Now you have a little literary Mini Me running around, ready to create content on your behalf.

Here’s what mine looks like:

Rich Brooks's Writing Style:

• Voice and Tone: Conversational, friendly, and approachable. Knowledgeable yet relatable, with a dry sense of humor.
• Word Choices: Clear and straightforward language, avoiding jargon unless necessary. Accessible vocabulary. Limit use of present participles.
• Metaphors and Analogies: Use metaphors and analogies to simplify complex ideas with vivid, relatable comparisons but don’t overdo it and be consistent with metaphors and analogies.
• Stories and Examples: Include personal stories and real-life examples to illustrate points. Use anecdotes to engage readers.
• Humor: Integrate light-hearted observations and playful language. Use self-deprecating humor.
• Structure and Organization: Organize content with clear headings and subheadings. Break down key points into bullet points or numbered lists. Maintain a logical flow.
• Engagement Techniques: Pose rhetorical questions, invite readers to take action, and provide actionable tips. End with a call to action.

It’s not wrong! That’s a good description of how I write. But take the Stories and Examples section: The AI version of me can’t include real personal stories unless I’ve already written about them. And that bit in Metaphors and Analogies about not overdoing it? It’s because originally the AI included a metaphor in every sentence! I saw some of the writing and iterated this description to more closely mirror my style.

There’s an article on Magai.co’s website, How to Make AI Write Like You (the Right Way), that shows why this approach is flawed, getting into some of the technical issues of generative AI. I was so intrigued I tried their approach on their platform…and it was worse. (I’ll fully admit I may not have given it enough time, effort, or direction.)

I don’t feel that this works well because we’re asking AI to summarize our writing style, and then to extrapolate based on that minimal set of instructions. Like with my initial interaction with ChatGPT, it feels like magic…at first. But the more you dig into it, the more you see the strings.

Here’s a visual example using the AI-image generator Midjourney.

Let’s start with one of our “Agents of Change”, Neuro. This is another brand we run with six digital marketing “Agents of Change,” illustrated by the very talented Joshua Fisher.

Using the “describe” command, I ask Midjourney to describe this image in a way that I could prompt it to create a similar image. It creates four options, but we’ll just go with the first one:

 

I then ask it to create an image based on this description (MidJourney provides 4 results by default):

 

Is it wrong? No. Is it going to be mistaken for the original? Again, no.

Of course I could have refined that description more, but no matter how far you take it, it can’t just recreate the original image based on the description.

Likewise, I don’t believe AI is at a point where it can accurately write like we do, even though it might be able to mimic elements of our style.

To me, this isn’t creation, it’s parroting. And you’re not going to succeed in content marketing if your AI is just parroting your previous work.

However, there are some exceptions where this parroting can be helpful:

• Creating obligatory social media posts promoting your actual writing
• Creating rough drafts of emails or other content you plan on rewriting
• Get a rough draft down that you can personalize afterward.

Still, always check “your” work before you post anything. AI is still prone to hallucinations and even if it gets the facts right, you may not be happy with the tone, wording, or the ridiculous hashtags AI often creates.

Polishing and Promoting Content with AI

Once you’ve completed your first (or second) draft, you can use AI to take your writing to the next level and position it to get found in the search engines while also driving traffic from social media.

Edit Like a Pro with AI Assistance

Here at flyte, we have a whole editorial process, where at least one other team member reads over your blog before it gets published. But if you’re working by yourself, or you don’t have a team that can edit your work, or you’re just under a tight deadline, AI can help out.

It’s as simple as dropping your draft into ChatGPT and asking it for recommendations. It’s helpful if you provide it the Buyer Persona you created earlier and provide some context around the intent of the piece.

Whether you’re just looking to catch grammatical errors, catching any important topics you may have missed, or ensuring that there’s a clear, coherent throughline in your piece, AI can provide that feedback.

Optimize for Search with More AI Tools

As we saw before, you can use tools like MarketMuse or Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper tool to improve your chances of ranking well at the search engines. Instead of starting from scratch, you can just copy and paste your content into the tools to optimize it further.

Beyond that, you could ask any LLM for help by providing it the keywords you’re looking to rank for and ask it to provide written recommendations to implement those keywords into the copy more.

For example, you might prompt ChatGPT: I'm looking to improve the search visibility around the keyword “motorcycle touring” and related keywords for this article: [URL]. Can you please review the article and provide the original sentence or section and then your recommended rewrite?

 

By implementing these changes, you are more likely to rank higher and drive more traffic to this article. If the rewrite doesn’t sound exactly the way you would write it, you can tweak it to find the right balance.

Add Custom AI-Generated Images

While creating images in AI may have its own challenges, having AI create images for you can be a time saver, if not a life saver.

Your company may not have access to Adobe Stock and it’s wide variety of photos, illustrations, infographics, and whatever this is:

 

But if you have the paid version of ChatGPT ($20/mo at the time of this writing), then you have access to Dall-E, the AI-image generator.

Personally, I prefer Midjourney, another AI image generator that also costs $20/mo. I just find its output superior to Dall-E.

Easily Repurpose Your Content with AI

It’s tough to create great content, so it’s a shame to just use it once.

Imagine taking that blog post about motorcycle touring and having AI rewrite a draft that’s geared for older riders? Or create a version that’s shorter for a partner site. Or rewrite it as an email newsletter.

You can also take it over to NotebookLM–an AI tool from Google–and generate summaries, study guides, and more.

 

But perhaps its coolest feature is turning that content into a conversational podcast! I kid you not! Just listen to what these two AI-powered hosts have to say about this particular blog post. 👇

Boost Your Content Promotion with AI Support

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear, does it make a sound?

Well, that tree could be your blog post if you don’t get the word out about it. AI can help you create compelling posts for social media and even generate images for those posts.

You can either copy and paste the article into the prompt, or save it as a document and upload it, or share the URL if it’s public.

Then you could prompt ChatGPT like this: Can you create an Instagram post, complete with appropriate hashtags and emojis, promoting [this article]? Please also include an appropriate image for the post.

Based on that prompt I got the following:

 

I didn’t love that first image, so I asked it to give me a version with a rider on the bike.

 

Like with everything else when it comes to generative AI, keep iterating until you get what you want.

Your Next Steps with AI and Content Creation

As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of outsourcing your actual writing to AI.

Writing that connects requires personal experience, expertise, and empathy. These are things AI can parrot, but can’t actually claim.

However, AI is the perfect tool for ideation, creating frameworks, helping with SEO, editing, and promotion…all things that can help you create better, more valuable content, and put it in front of the people who need it most.

If you’re relatively new to using AI to create (or enhance) your content, I’d recommend picking up a paid ChatGPT account and start using some of the prompts and ideas in this article.

If you want to add to your toolbelt, check out Ahrefs or MarketMuse for help with SEO, NotebookLM for repurposing content, and Midjourney for higher-quality image creation.

And there’s no need to wait…you can start experimenting with AI on your current projects, so just get started!