AI is supercharging the capacity for businesses to create blog content. The new technology can analyse vast amounts of existing articles, identify patterns, and generate content that aligns with the desired style and tone. A plethora of tools have sprung up to assist in content production, allowing for more efficiency and consistency. In this article we’ll outline steps to using AI to create a well-structured article with bespoke imagery that is optimised for SEO.
Choose your tools
ChatGPT-4 and Google Bard are two of the most advanced large language models (LLMs) available today and are free to use. Other tools are available that are designed specifically for article writing, including GravityWrite, GetGenie, Koala Writer and 10Web. You can take a tour and work out which one best suits your needs. The main tools for AI image generation are Dall-E, which is super-easy to use, and Midjourney, which is a bit more geeky, but allows you to be more creative.
Recognise the limitations
AI-generated content may lack the human touch, emotion, and creativity that define the uniqueness of human-written articles. Ethical considerations also arise in terms of potential plagiarism and ensuring the accuracy of the information generated. Certain topics may have large data sets available on them, while others offer not so much to draw on and you can end up with questionable results and some content might be out of date. But by using soft human skills of judgement, checking, editing and rewriting where necessary, you can offset these aspects and make sure your article rings true.
Define your target audience and content goals
There’s no point aimlessly creating more content just because you can. Understanding your readers' preferences, interests, and pain points will enable AI tools to generate content that resonates with them effectively. Clarity in your goals will ensure AI-generated content aligns with your purpose.
Generate a topic idea
AI can be incredibly helpful when it comes to idea generation. If you have a broad idea of the space you want to write in, or even just a list of keywords, you can ask the tool for a list of potential blog topic ideas. The bot doesn’t get writer’s block!
Create an outline
AI comes into its own in the creation of article outlines, suggesting a logical and coherent structure, based on existing writing on the topic. Having a good structure with easy-to-follow headings helps the article rank better on search engines. Once you are happy with your outline you can share it with colleagues and other stakeholders to make sure the article reflects aims and goals of your organisation. Allowing AI to take care of this work can free up more time for collaboration and agreement.
Generate the article content
You can feed your outline into your chosen AI platform and ask it to generate an article of the required length. At this point you can tailor AI content by requesting writing in a specific tone of voice and from a certain perspective / for a certain audience.
Review, make additions, check and amend
Review the AI-generated content and refine it by adding your personal insights, experiences, and unique perspectives. Injecting your expertise into the content ensures its authenticity and enhances the human touch. Some tools, such as Content at Scale allow you to check the text to see how much your article sounds like AI. Or you can use your own judgement as you proofread and check your final article.
Create unique visuals
Enhance the visual appeal of your blog articles by incorporating AI-generated visuals and graphics. Rather than scrolling through stock imagery, you can describe the image you would like and have it created for you. For example, to illustrate an article on understanding EPC as a landlord in the mortgage industry, you could prompt AI to generate an image of a person in front of a house holding a clipboard. The possibilities are endless, and you can experiment with different prompts to get what you are looking for.
Optimise your article for SEO
AI can help here by creating descriptions for images, which can help your article rank better. You can also use AI to implement on-page SEO strategies such as optimizing meta tags, incorporating relevant keywords naturally, and ensuring proper formatting.
Conclusion
Generative AI is revolutionizing article writing by autonomously crafting content across diverse subjects. Trained on vast datasets, it employs deep learning to generate coherent and informative articles, mimicking human language patterns. The technology can save your company time and resources, producing articles quickly while maintaining quality, and generating unique imagery on demand. By tailoring output to specific styles and tones, generative AI offers versatile article creation. But it’s important to recognise the limitations and review content carefully. While human oversight is crucial, generative AI serves as a valuable tool to create high-quality articles to effectively reach audiences online.
Image credits: The main image was created using the latest version of Stable Diffusion: SDXL – an open source text-to-image generative AI tool created by Stability AI. The 'Man with clipboard' imagery was created using Midjourney.
If you’d like to chat to us about using AI in brand marketing, do get in touch.