As a busy business owner, you are likely feeling guilty for not spending time creating more content for your customers.
You know that your competitors are being found on Google by providing answers on their blogs to frequent questions that your customer base has. Having a website with service pages and a contact form just isn’t cutting it anymore.
And the cost of hiring a content creation team with SEO specialists is out of the question, as these can easily run $4,000+ per month.
Enter AI content generation.
Let’s dive into why you need a blog for your business website, who AI technology is rising fast as a cheaper alternative to hiring a team of writers, and learn the best strategy for using AI content while still holding on to that human-written feel that customer long for.
What is a Blog Content Strategy?
Before we delve into the world of artificial intelligence, we need to first discuss why having a blog content strategy is vital to any business.
A blog content strategy is the process of developing an editorial calendar that outlines how you plan to publish different posts, so that you’re able to publish high-quality content for your readers.
You may have heard that blogging is dead, and that’s just not the case at all. When your ideal customers do a Google search for something, they are searching for an answer to their problem. As you’ve likely noticed when you do a Google search for something yourself, it’s not service pages or home pages to websites that usually come up; it’s a blog post answering the question.
This is sad news if you’ve just spent thousands of dollars to get your new 5-10 page website built.
While having this website is a vital foundation to your business, it’s only just the beginning. Now you need to spend time to create helpful content and position yourself as the expert for your audience.
Researching What to Blog About
In order to create a content plan to publish on your website, you first need to know what you should write about.
It doesn’t help to write about random things or whatever comes to mind. You need solid research behind what you write.
There are tons of tools out there to help you find out what you client-base may be asking. The thing is, you don’t necessarily need to start there.
The best place to start your content research is by reviewing what your past clients have asked you.
Questions from past clients is a gold mine for content that others in your audience will find helpful. If you have a sales team, ask them what common questions people have asked them in the past. If you are largely involved in the sales process, think back and write these questions down.
Answering questions is largely what having a blog is all about. Being helpful to current and potential clients.
Not many clients in your business yet? No problem.
Just Google your product or service and see what questions people are asking in the People Also Ask section.
You can also check at the bottom of the search results page to see other results people are searching for.
All of this research can take quite some time, but it’s a good place to start.
Later in this article we will look at an excellent AI solution called Frase that will cut down the time it takes to do the research ten-fold while also provided a deeper look on what it takes to rank. In fact, I’m writing this article in Frase right now.
Making a Content Schedule
Now that you have a large list of topics to write about that will attract your ideal audience and help them answer their questions, you have to put this into an order you plan on writing them. You also have to give the articles deadlines or you won’t get the done.
You can invest in a project management to keep track of your content plan and deadlines. I use Ora.pm to make my content plans.
It’s also easy to make a free Google Sheet spreadsheet that simply has your due date, article title, and keyword you are targeting.
If you are interested in getting a copy of a little more advanced free content plan spreadsheet, check out my AI Content Plan opt-in on this page.
No matter what you use, just know that not having a plan is a major plan to fail. Plan what you will write and include due dates.
Creating the Content
Making the content will take up the bulk of your content creation time, even more so than research.
In order to rank on Google, you have to create content that is thorough, answers the question of the reader, and is also better than every other piece of content out there targeting the same keyword.
In order to do that, you have to take the time to turn your research into something that is bigger and better than your competition.
Google’s minimum requirement for any page or article of content is 300 words. Anything below that is considered a low-content page and will not have any chance of ranking.
That said, anything that’s under 1,000 words has an extremely low chance of ranking. You have to know your competition and what you need to do in order to make your piece of content the biggest and most helpful work out there.
As I use Frase right now to write this article, it is telling me that I need at least 1,900 words, 6 headings, 5 outbound links, and 8 images to make a piece that’s better than my competitions average.
Information like this is what you need to succeed in content marketing.
It sounds like a lot of work, and it is. That’s why so many businesses farm out these tasks to SEO and content agencies.
But not everyone can afford to hire a full-time employee or an agency to fulfill this essential business need. That’s where AI comes into play, and what makes up a big part of our overall artificial intelligence strategy below.
Promoting Your Content
The last step in a blog content strategy is to promote your content.
True, the main goal should be to rank on Google, but for new blogs and for those who can’t dedicate 24/7 to creating content, other strategies are needed to get eyes on your content.
That’s where a promotion plan comes into play.
You should pick a social media platform where your audience hangs out the most, and share your content there. This will help you attract your ideal audience to your site, and hopefully to your email list, while you wait for Google to rank your article.
AI can help us in the field of promotion as well. I use Missinglettr to crank out a year’s worth of social media posts to multiple platforms for each and every post I publish. This means it does all the work of publishing to my following while I’m able to work on my business and spend time creating more content.
This is artificial intelligence promotion at it’s finest as it helps me draw in traffic continually, and reminds me when it’s time to update old content to try and help it rank better.
There is even functionality with Missinglettr Curate to put your article in a bin for other to pull from and share on their social channels. It really helps save loads of time and maximize outreach.
Is Machine-Generated Content Good For Your Customers?
The rise of the Internet has brought about a new era in content marketing, where businesses are now able to reach out to their customers directly through blogs, social media sites, forums, etc. This is an exciting time for marketers as they can now use these tools to create content that will help them attract more traffic and ultimately convert this traffic into leads or sales.
But what happens when the content being created is no longer created by humans? Is this still a viable source of information for our customers to be reading?
The goal of content marketing isn’t to churn out content for contents sake. There are plenty of article spinner software out there that will help you create hundreds of articles in a matter of hours, or sometimes minutes.
I’m here to warn you that this is not good for your clients, or your brand.
Google is getting smarter in the ways of identifying content that is created using artificial intelligence, and if you are using a program that simply spins what is already out there, you have a few issues.
1) You are not providing any new insights to the world
2) You are not connecting with your customers. You are just respinning what’s already out there.
But don’t worry, not all hope is lost.
The way I look at artificial intelligence when it comes to blogging is as an assistant.
AI can help us get ideas, do insanely fast research, write a few paragraphs when we’re felling stuck or need to learn something new ourselves. It is AI content that is created with human assistance that will win in the end.
It is this marriage of human ingenuity and machine efficiency that will be help make the quickest and best content for our customers.
How Machine Learning Can Replace Your Marketing Team
You might want to consider using machine learning to automate your content creation process. You can use AI tools to do everything from identifying which types of articles to write, to the actual writing of the bulk of your article.
This way, you can spend less time creating content and more time focusing on other aspects of your business.
AI can take a huge burden off of small and medium businesses that may not have a huge marketing budget. A few tools can be used to complete usually complicated and time consuming tasks. These tools can be run by a business owner in their free time, or by a single employee instead of a whole team that you usually wouldn’t be able to afford to hire.
This is how you keep up. This is how to beat out competitors with bigger marketing budgets. Not with a team of content creators, but by working smarter and using AI.
Now that we know the importance of creating content, how to create content properly, and that paying for a few software can replace blown out marketing budgets, let’s dive into the different types of artificial intelligence we can use to help us meet our content creation goals.
Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence For Your Content Creation
When creating content for your business, there are many different AI tools that you can pull in for help.
Blogs require text to be written, images to showcase points in a visual format, and videos to explain more in-depth topics. Videos require music to help them flow better. All content requires data for you to be able to know what’s working and what’s not.
All of these elements can be created with programs that have been programed to help aid people such as us in making better content, faster.
Let’s cover these 5 different categories of AI content creations tools.
AI Writing Software
There are many different AI writing software solutions available today. Some of them even allow you to integrate your existing content management system (CMS) so that you can easily import all of your old content into the program.
You will then be able to improve upon old content, or create brand new content based on computer learning.
These programs also come with pre-built templates that you can choose from. They will then analyze your text and suggest relevant words and phrases that you can add to make your article better.
These programs are great because they save you tons of time by doing all of the hard work for you. However, you still need to provide them with some sort of training data so that they can learn what works and what doesn’t.
The good news is that most of these programs have an extremally friendly user interface, and have done most of the programming for the machine learning for us. We simply have to give the final prompts to get the software to churn out content.
All that said, how can machines crank out any original content that still sounds like a human wrote it?
How AI Replicated Human Language
If you want to know how computers can replicate human language, you must look at natural language processing (NLP). NLP allows computers to understand the meaning behind written text.
So, instead of generating words together that are just grammatically correct, the computer is also taught how words come together to form meaning.
This extra layer of learning allows content generation software to crawl competitor articles based on your keyword, get the context of what is written, and spit it back out in an original form to avoid plagiarism. Paragraphs can be reproduced in this way in seconds, and whole articles in a matter of minutes.
Top 3 AI Writing Software
Here are three of my favorite AI writing software options:
1. Peppertype.ai
2. Frase.io
3. ProWritingAid – ProWritingAid is a third choice if you prefer something a little less complicated. It is designed specifically to help writers improve their writing skills.
ProWritingAid is not really meant to replace a writer’s own efforts, but rather to supplement them.
You can use it to generate ideas for new posts, or even complete drafts of existing ones.
There are many different ways that you can use ProWritingAid to make your life easier when it comes to writing.
For example, you can set up templates for common phrases, and then use the software to fill them in automatically.
Or, you can use it to find synonyms for specific terms so that you don’t need to search through multiple dictionaries to find the right word.
There are many other things that you can do with ProWritingAid
AI Image Generation
Another area where AI technology can really shine is image generation. If you want to create images that look professional but aren’t too complicated, you can use AI to do it for you.
For example, you could take a picture of a product and then let the AI program generate hundreds of variations of the same photo. These variations would include things like changing the background color, adding shadows, adjusting the brightness, etc.
Then, you could pick the variation that looks the best and use it as the cover image for your website.
Top 3 AI Image Generation Software
1. AISEO Art
2. MidJourney
3. Dall-E
AI Video Creation
Video creation has become an increasingly popular form of online marketing. This is especially true in the world of eCommerce.
However, video creation isn’t easy. There are lots of technical issues that you need to deal with before you can actually start making videos.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence can help you overcome these problems.
In particular, you can use AI algorithms to create high-quality videos that look realistic.
Top 3 AI Video Creation Tools
1. Lumen 5
2. InVideo
3. Synthesia
AI Music + Audio
Music plays a huge role in any kind of online marketing campaign. It helps set the mood, creates emotion, and adds personality to your brand.
But, if you don’t have access to a music production studio, you may not be able to get the perfect sound effects or instrumentals.
That’s why you can use AI to create custom audio tracks for your videos. The process involves taking a sample of a song and then using various tools to manipulate the audio until it matches the original.
Top 3 AI Music and Audio Tools
1. HappyScribe
2. LOVO
3. Ecrett Music
AI Data Solutions
Data science is one of the most important areas of modern business. Without good data, there is no way to effectively run your company.
Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. In fact, it usually takes a lot of time and effort to collect and organize the right information.
The good news is that AI technology can greatly reduce that time and effort. For example, you can use AI systems to automatically extract useful information from the web.
This includes things like customer reviews, social media comments, competitor data, and more. Then, you can use this information to improve your products and services.
Top 3 AI Data Solutions Software
1. MarketMuse
2. Diib
3. SEMRush
A Complete Strategy for Generating Blog Posts
Now let’s cover our current content creation strategy we recommend using the AI tools at our disposal.
This strategy is subject to change as we learn more about the space and try tools that are a better fit.
1. Research What to Write About
Currently, most of our strategy will be completed using Frase.io. The reason is that it saves hours of time from the research phase, all the way through content creation.
I recommend that you start with the Wikipedia Concept Map.
As the business owner, you are already the expert on your subject, but diving into the Wikipedia Concept Map will make sure you get a thorough overview of all subtopics you can cover.
From this we can see Wikipedia’s breakdown of our topic in great detail, and we can even click into each of these topics for more depth.
It’s good to make note of these, and also how they relate to each other. Creating what is called a Topic Cluster, a group of articles surrounding a main article, is a popular SEO strategy for creating highly authoritative content that Google loves to rank.
Once we have this list and how they relate to each other, we can go to step 2 in the image above, using the Outline Builder.
Simply type in a query (read: keyword), and you will get keyword suggestions.
Pick any of these suggestions and you get a list of related questions asked on Google and Quora. These will be the rough outline for our article, and we can create a new document right from this screen.
From there we will cut our competitor research to a fraction of the time.
2. Research Your Competition
There are several things to check out when looking at your competitors for a specific keyword.
And yes, you have new competitors for every single keyword you are targeting.
The first thing you can easily see is how many words and headings your competitors have.
A general rule is that longer content is best, as long as it is helpful to the reader. If it’s fluff, then having the longest article won’t help you.
Another thing you can check is number of images used, what they are of, and what the alt tags are.
It’s also important to see what topics are being talked about. When you look at all of these top 10 to 20 search results, see what topics are being covered and jot them down. You’ll want to hit on most, if not all, of these, because if Google is ranking the article, it must deem them as important.
It’s also important to check the number of backlinks an article has. There are a number of tools to you can use for this. Most are paid tools.
All of this sounds like an insane amount of work, and it is, unless you use a tool like Frase.io that does all the heavy lifting.
Once you have your document created from the last step, simply check out the sidebar.
Everything we’ve discussed above and more is done for you, in less than 30 seconds as Frase automatically crawls the top 20 results for that keyword and gives you what you need to have a competitive article.
That in itself is worth the monthly fee for the software. It’s AI at it’s finest!
If you are interested in harnessing this power for your content, you can learn more about Frase.io here.
3. Outline Your Article (With the End In Mind)
If you’re following along, you already have a rough outline from our article generator.
We will use this outline as a rough base because these are questions that potential readers want answered because they are searching for them.
But we don’t want to just answer these questions and be done. That makes for a drab, boring article.
Instead we want to think about the overall result was want our reader to have. What do we want them to come away with having read what we wrote?
From there you can see where these questions fit in, what we need to add to make a well-rounded article, and what makes overall good flow for the reader.
Now it’s time to write.
4. Create Your Rough Draft
There are many ways we can create our rough draft.
If you have time you can sit by and type it all out, we’ve been using AI in such a way that we’ve already saved significant amounts of time. Congrats!
If you want to take this a step further, you can use Frase’s AI Content Writing tools to have it generate blocks of content for you.
Keep in mind that we still want to go over the copy when we’re done, make sure it makes sense, and add our human touch to it.
My recommendation is to type out what you have time to, and speak directly to your audience as yourself. Use AI for research and to write little snippets here and there on concepts you need help with, or to fight writer’s block and speed up the process.
Either way, you will knock out a draft in no time.
5. Polish Your Content and Add Links
Always make sure to go back over your content and polish it for clarity and audience intent. This is especially true if you are using AI to write large swaths of content for you.
Make sure to use an AI Content Detection Tool to see if your content sounds like it was written by a human, or if Google will flag it as obvious AI content.
Add stats and links to your content. Google favors pieces that are well researched and link out to other content.
If you need more AI help, use free tools like ChatGPT to find stats about your subject that you can use in your content. Just make sure to ask the tool for a source of the stat and link to that source within your content.
Once you have a good, polished draft, you are ready to publish.
6. Publish Your Content
Now it’s time to publish your content.
You likely already have a place you are publishing content, but if not, you have a few options.
You can publish content to your own website, which I highly recommend to help build your site authority.
You could also publish to a 3rd party site like Medium, build an audience, and use their existing authority to help your content rank.
It may even make sense to publish on LinkedIn if you run a B2B company.
Again, I would recommend building your own blog and creating greater authority for your business, and then sharing the content to other platforms from there.
Luckily for us, Frase has a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to go from document to published in no time.
7. Promote Your Content
While it’s good to write with Frase to optimize your content and make it competitive, you still need a plan to promote it to get extra views and reach your audience. Not everything you write is going to rank, but if you make good content, everything you write should still be seen.
As busy business owners, we’re still on a time crunch, so I recommend using another tool, MissingLettr.
This tool automatically pulls in content you publish and creates social campaigns by using elements it pulls from your content. It sets these posts on a schedule for the next 2 weeks to 12 months, depending on your settings.
With a few clicks you can have a years worth of content scheduled to publish to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This helps bring people back to the piece you just created all year long.
If you do this for each piece, you will soon have a content promotion machine reaching out to bring people back to your site all year long.
FAQs
Will AI content replace human writers?
It doesn’t seem likely that the human element will be taken out of content creation completely.
While it’s true that AI has already replaced the quantity of human writers needed to start and maintain a competitive blog, there is still a human element that is needed.
Even if a program spits out a perfectly written piece of content based on a given keyword, the business owners unique input is still needed.
Not all content fits each business. The world doesn’t need more generic content on a subject. It needs content that is uniquely tailored to a businesses ideals and how they approach their solution to people’s problems.
While AI can now handle the bulk of the work, the program still needs someone to tell it what direction the content needs to be spun in.
What can I expect to pay for AI content generation per month?
At a minimum I would pay for Frase.io to be able to create SEO friendly outlines and optimize your content through AI research. With Frase you can also generate up to 20,000 words per month with their AI writing tool, which will help speed up the creation process.
Frase will cost just a mere $44.99/mo as of this writing, which is pennies compared to hiring a marketing team.
If you are looking for most of the work to be done for you, you may look into getting Content at Scale, which will cost $1,000/mo, but you will get 50 articles.
This equates to $20 per article for quality that I’ve experience after paying someone $100 for an article of the same caliber.
Just like anything, the more you pay, the less effort you need on your part. It just depends on how much you have to invest.
Is AI content quality similar to human written content?
Many content creation tools are already churning out content that is better than the bulk of writers out there.
Don’t believe me? Hit up a freelance hiring website and hiring a 2 or 3 star writer. It will cost you $30-$50 for a 1,000+ word article, and you will end up basically rewriting the entire thing yourself.
Been there, done that.
Content generators are really good at writing in a way that sounds natural to humans. They are also insanely knowledgeable because they crawl top results for the keywords in question and rewrite what’s already there.
They don’t need time to learn and research, and they already have an A grade in English class, which a lot of writers out there don’t have.
True, you will still find some odd sentences here and there, and you still need to put your unique spin on the article, but all-in-all content generators can crank out content that is of higher quality that what most humans can write. And much faster.
How much does it cost to hire a writer vs buying AI generated content?
Above we discussed how much AI content can cost per month, ranging anywhere from $45/mo on up to $1,000 or more, depending on how much you have to invest. You can expect a large number of articles to be able to be generated for this investment though.
On the flip side, hiring a writer can cost $100 or more per article written, and the quality can still leave much to be desired.
In summary, you can pay similar amounts for AI content as you do in hiring a writer, but your likely able to have a higher output of content. Depending on your tools the output can be of greater quality as well.
Can I just buy a software and get results without hiring anyone else?
It really depends how much time you are willing to dedicate to being a content creator.
If you are able to write time to run the software and generate content into your schedule, then you may not need anyone else.
If you can’t possibly pencil in 30 minutes to an hour per day, then it’s likely a good idea to hire at least one person to run the program for you.
Even if you have to hire one person, it will still be cheaper hire them to run your content generation tool than to hire an agency or your own team of content marketers.
Do I need to have some specialized knowledge to use these platforms?
No.
The best part about where we are in the development of AI content generation is that there are tools already programed to do the brunt of the work for us.
Sure, someone had to program these machines to understand human language and to rewrite content into something original, but we don’t have to worry about that on our end.
As business owners we don’t have the time, nor the skillset to accomplish this.
That’s why companies have done the work for us, and now simply charge us a monthly fee to use the tools.
Not only have people already set up these tools for us, but in many instances the machines can continue to teach themselves further without additional human interaction.
Through deep learning, content tools and other AI can take the parameters that have been given to them, and continue to further their own knowledge much like a human can continue to learn a new subject.
Does writing on my blog make sense anymore?
Some people will have you believe that blogging is dead.
That’s just insane to me.
You need to have relevant content on your website other than just your about us and services pages. There is no other way to answer all of the questions that your potential clients have.
Simply do a Google search for a question you want an answer to, and you will see all different types of content answering the question. Most likely you will see blog posts taking over the top spots.
This is why we need a blog for our business. Without one, we have no chance at scoring most top ranking spots.
Is AI blogging better than traditional offline advertising methods?
If you are a business that still only runs ads in newspapers and phone books, it’s time for a little update.
We’ve covered the importance of a blog, but it’s more than just being present to answer people’s questions.
A good blog post is the gift that keeps on giving.
If you are using these old school methods of advertising to get your name out there, or even if you have made the jump to pay-per-click ads on Google or Facebook, you are still constantly paying to get your name out there.
But what happens with a blog post?
Even if you invest $250 in a blog post to have it AI generated and for an employee to go over the post and tilt the message to better fit your business and make sure it all sounds good, that’s still a one-time investment.
If you are able to rank that article solidly at the top of Google, you have no further investment to keep driving traffic to that page.
And if you are properly collecting leads within that article, you will continue to get free leads as long as the article ranks well.
When will AI content generation become mainstream?
Content generator tools are still fairly new.
They’ve been around a few years, but they are still being fine-tuned by programmers and their own deep learning.
There are many aspects of content creation that they have yet to learn, such as content marketing strategy, or how to use our own personal flair in the writing.
We’re also dealing with the fact that people are losing jobs over these new methods, which never sits quite right with people.
Creative jobs such as art and writing were thought to be untouchable by machines, and yet we are on the cusp of this happening.
As a general prediction, I would say that we are only 3 to 5 years away from AI content generation becoming common practice within most businesses. That’s why it’s so exciting to get ahead of the curb and adopt these methods now.
Do AI content generators produce plagiarized content?
No, AI content generators do not typically produce plagiarized content.
They are designed to create unique and original content that is tailored to the specific needs of the user. AI content generators use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to analyze existing text and generate new content based on the data it collects.
This means that the generated content is completely unique and free from any plagiarism.
That said, generated content can have the same essence as other content, and therefore won’t be unique or helpful enough for Google to deem it rankable.
When an AI gives you content, you have to make sure that it makes sense and uses your own tone of voice and viewpoints. Currently this requires a manual edit. If you are using full AI content straight from the program you won’t get ranked, or worse you could get a manual action against your site.
Do search engines like AI Content?
The purpose of search engines is to surface the best, most relevant content to the searcher.
So that means it’s our job to create the best content to make it rank-worthy by Google.
Google has said that the use of AI Generated Content is against its guidelines, but to what extent?
Is using AI content cheating the system?
Not at all.
If you use fully generated AI content, you will not rank because you will get the Google Slap, so there’s no gaming there.
And if you use AI content to do your SEO research for you and write the occasional general knowledge paragraph so you can focus on writing the good stuff, you are still largely using human-generated content, and just using AI to increase your output.
What is a language model?
A language model uses deep machine learning to create content in a way that sounds natural when read by a human.
The idea behind this is that we want our content to sound as natural as possible.
We want our readers to feel comfortable reading our articles.
If you’re looking to generate content for your business blog, then you might want to consider using an AI tool that has already been trained in such language models as GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer).
These tools take all the heavy lifting out of the use of AI, and allows us to use strategies to create blog content such as the one set forth in this article.
