AI has revolutionized the world of content creation by speeding up the labor-intensive parts of workflow which free up a creator’s time so that they can focus more on strategy and creativity (or whatever excites them more).
In this article, I’ll break down the 5 ways that I’ve been able to start using AI content creation tools to output more “content” while saving precious time and NOT sacrificing quality.
AI For Content Marketing Checklist
With so much content already available on the internet, how can you create content that stands out from the crowd and resonates with your target audience?
The answer lies in using AI-powered content tools to research, generate, and optimize your content.
Here are the five steps for leveraging AI in your content marketing strategy:
- Start with real human expertise & value
- Use AI content tools to research & outline
- Use AI content generators to quickly get first drafts out
- Manually edit & add personal touches
- Use AI tools to effortlessly optimize your content
Let’s dive into each one of these in more detail and flesh each point out with examples of how I’m personally following this checklist to quickly generate AI content that doesn’t suck.
1. Start with real human expertise & value
Before you start creating content, you need to find topics that are relevant and valuable to your target audience.
The best way to do this is by using keyword research tools to make sure there are real humans searching for whatever it is that you want to create content about.
If you’re going to spend precious time “creating content” you want to make sure people are actually going to search for it and find it.
It’s also important to understand that the key to adding AI to your content creation workflow is knowing that you will need to be heavily involved in the editing process if you want the content to be high quality and done quickly.
Make sure that you pick topics you have a decent level of expertise on.
The trick is to find that balance of topics that people are searching for and that you have experience and expertise with.
For me: I know quite a bit about music marketing, so I’m able to quickly fact-check and adjust the output that an AI tool spits out.
2. Use AI content tools to research & outline
AI tools can analyze the most popular content related to your topic and provide you with insights into what makes that content successful.
This information can be used to create an outline for your content, ensuring that it covers all the important points that your audience is looking for.
What I personally do is start by prompting a tool like ChatGPT with the topic that I discovered in the previous step (ie: write an outline on the 5 best ways to market my music).
This quickly gets the ball rolling so that I can reorganize and rethink the 5-point outline that it spits out. The end result is having a solid outline to follow for the rest of the content creation process.
3. Use AI content generators for quick first drafts
With your research and outline in place, it’s time to start creating your content. AI-powered content generators can help you quickly generate a first draft of your content.
These tools use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to analyze your outline and generate coherent sentences and paragraphs.
While the quality of the generated content may not be perfect, it can help you save time and get your ideas down on paper quickly.
There’s a famous quote about the first draft by Ernest Hemingway that I always think about when it comes to this part of the process:
“The first draft of anything is 💩.”
Ernest Hemingway
(well he used the word and not the emoji lol)
But the idea here is that AI tools can get that first draft down incredibly quickly, and since the first draft is never great anyways, you may as well get it out as fast as possible so you can move on to the good stuff.
I’ve found that asking an AI tool like ChatGPT to “create a 500-word blog post about the outline above” really gets the ball rolling for the content creation process.
I can then continue to ask it questions to get to the answer I’m looking for, all while removing any writer’s block and stopping me from overthinking any particular issue.
4. Manually edit & add personal touches
Once you have a first draft, it’s time to refine and polish your content (this is one of the most important parts btw!).
While AI-powered content generators can help you get started, they can’t replace the creativity and nuance that comes from human writing.
Once again, a quote comes to mind but this time it’s an album title of one of my favorite bands, Manchester Orchestra:
You Brainstorm, I Brainstorm, but Brilliance Needs a Good Editor
Manchester Orchestra
What I’ll usually do is rewrite entire sections, rephrase sentences so it’s in my “voice”, only keep the AI bits that I really like, and make sure to add in personal stories, anecdotes, or thoughts.
Take the time to manually edit your content, adding your own voice and personality to make it truly unique.
5. Use AI tools to effortlessly optimize your content
AI-powered content optimization tools can help you repurpose your content into multiple formats, such as videos, social media posts, and infographics.
This can help you reach a wider audience and make the most of your content marketing efforts while also saving precious time and resources.
Personally, what I do is leverage a neat tool called Descript that is able to create an AI voice modeled after the sound of my own voice.
By using this tool, I can then paste the blog post that I created with ChatGPT into Descript so that it overdubs the written words with my AI voice.
I’ll always record an intro using my real voice, but this allows me to quickly create a podcast version of the blog post I just wrote in a matter of seconds.
…want an example, my friend?
Here’s a podcast episode using my AI-modelled voice for the very article you are reading right now: