Bad blog posts are easy to create, but good blog posts take time and skill. Many people are using ChatGPT for Blogging, but I don’t recommend that to generate blog posts on its own, especially for authors who consistently strive to produce high-quality, unique, and engaging content. However, with the help of ChatGPT and other AI tools, bloggers can streamline their workflow, create content faster, and improve the overall quality of their blog posts. Using generative AI tools to create content (ChatGPT, ContentBot, Midjourney, and others), bloggers can experiment with different writing styles, get copywriting and editing assistance, and explore new topics and angles. They also can help offload some of the mundane tasks they don’t excel in, like creating meta-descriptions, riffing on titles, or creating images that match their style and the topic of their message.
Where Artificial Intelligence Excels for the Blogging
Generative AI excels in several areas when creating blog posts. First, it can help generate ideas and topics for blog posts by analyzing large amounts of data and identifying patterns and trends. This can save bloggers significant time and effort in researching and brainstorming topics. If you want to blog on a more current topic, ChatGPT doesn’t provide the most up-to-date results here, but I suggest trying Bing Chat should you have access. It can help with creating llstcicles that have more up-to-date information than OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 through integration with Microsoft’s Bing Search.
Generative AI can help streamline the writing process by generating outlines, headings, and entire paragraphs or articles. This can be especially useful for bloggers struggling with writer’s block or needing to produce a large amount of content quickly. By automating some of the writing processes, generative AI can improve the efficiency of the blogging workflow and help bloggers create more content in less time. Though I caution you on using ChatGPT on its own to write articles, you hope to rank for search. You may be able to write an article that works for educating your customers on a topic, but rarely is the article well-optimized for search if that’s your intent.
Finally, generative AI can help improve the quality of blog posts by analyzing language patterns and making suggestions for improvements. This can be especially helpful for non-native English speakers or bloggers who struggle with grammar or syntax or to translate blogs to their native language. Using generative AI to analyze their writing, bloggers can improve their content’s readability and overall quality, leading to higher engagement and more traffic. Overall, generative AI can excel in several areas when creating blog posts, making it a valuable tool for bloggers looking to accelerate their content creation process.
ChatGPT can help generate new and unique ideas for blog posts. It can suggest ideas based on keywords, phrases, or topics provided by the blogger, allowing bloggers to easily generate content ideas that they may not have thought of otherwise. ChatGPT can assist with writing tasks such as grammar and sentence structure. It can suggest alternative word choices or correct grammatical errors in real time, making it easier for bloggers to produce high-quality content. ChatGPT can save bloggers time by automating specific tasks. For example, it can generate social media posts, headlines, or even entire blog posts, allowing bloggers to focus on other aspects of their blogs. ChatGPT can help increase engagement on a blog by providing helpful and informative answers to reader questions or comments. This can improve readers’ experience and increase engagement with the blog.ChatGPT can assist with language translation, allowing bloggers to translate their content into different languages easily. This can help increase the reach of a blog and attract a wider audience.
Limitations of Using Generative AI to Create a Blog Post
If you ask a generative AI to create a blog from scratch optimized for search, rank high in search, engage readers and do so with a simple one-sentence request, you will probably not meet this goal. While generative AI tools can provide improvements in your workflow, they aren’t perfect. Knowing where generative AI can help and what limitations to be aware of can make your blogging better with little downside.
First, generative AI is imperfect and may produce irrelevant, inaccurate, or nonsensical content. It is crucial for bloggers to carefully review and edit any content generated by AI to ensure that it meets their quality standards and is suitable for their audience. Generative AI may not have knowledge of your topic and may hallucinate or make up facts that aren’t true. These things can be mitigated by training the AI, but in the case of ChatGPT 3.5, the model only had data that was current through 2021 despite being released in 2022.
Second, generative AI may not be able to capture the nuances and subtleties of language necessary for effective communication. This could result in blog posts that feel stilted, robotic, or difficult to read. For example, it may not understand the highly technical or industry-specific jargon.
Third, generative AI may not be able to fully capture the creativity and originality that are required for successful blog posts. While AI can generate technically correct and informative content, it may lack the human touch that makes blog posts stand out and connect with readers on a personal level.
Fourth, generative AI tools may not excel at including images and text from the same interface. Therefore you may need to use multiple tools to cover all your bases.
Finally, there are ethical considerations to keep in mind when using generative AI for blog post creation. It is vital to ensure that AI-generated content is original, not plagiarized and that any AI-generated content is clearly labeled to avoid misleading readers.
While generative AI can be a valuable tool for creating blog posts, it is essential to be aware of its limitations and use it with human creativity and expertise to create high-quality, engaging content.
AI Tools to Help Improve Your Blogging
Here is an example of creating a blog post using ChatGPT and other tools. I also highly recommend ContentBot.ai and Jasper to manage and codify your workflows. However, they are paid offerings and may not meet every marketer’s budget.
Generate Blog Ideas with ChatGPT
ChatGPT can generate content ideas and outlines for your blog post. Provide context by including your target keywords and briefly describing the topic. ChatGPT will return a variety of content ideas and possible structures for your blog post, which you can refine and select based on your goals. In this case, my keywords were:
Blog Posts using Generative AITypically you want to be as specific as possible to get the outcome you want from ChatGPT, but in the case where you aren’t sure and want creativity over a specific result, a short prompt is better than a long one.
Generate an Introductory Paragraph with ChatGPT
You could feed the whole outline into ChatGPT and take your chances. I feel I get better results when I work on single points of my outline one at a time. In the case below, I could have regenerated the paragraph, but by giving the thumbs down in ChatGPT, I was offered the ability to improve the model. I didn’t think the intro of “In recent years” was very strong, more like fluff, so I regenerated the paragraph and let ChatGPT iterate. If you choose ChatGPT, create an outline, copy it into the WordPress Guttenberg editor or in SurferSEO (for my cornerstone content), and then flesh out the blog post. Then I follow the outline using ChatGPT. Grammarly provides live spellchecking, grammar, and rewriting suggestions to improve the text. I also use the Jasper Chrome Extension, which hooks to my paid Jasper account and allows me to generate text in the editor. Jasper uses the underlying ChatGPT technology.
Blog Outline Using ContentBot
Once you have an engaging title, it’s time to bring structure and flow with outlines and subheadings. This is hit or miss with ChatGPT. Actually, it’s more miss than hit for anything that is niche. Ironically when I ask For something more mainstream, like dog training or fixing cars, I think ChatGPT is fine. However, my top choice for creating a draft of a longer piece of content is the ContentBot Long-Form Content Wizard. It walks you through the creation of a blog from beginning to end. Though I feel for the deep dive cornerstone content, I like to produce. I call this an outline because what it does is really provide a deeper workflow for blogs. I don’t consider the output in-depth enough for most technical blogs, but I think it’s a great tool that provides a fleshed-out outline but still requires a bit of additional human input to produce a high-quality blog. You can generate titles; then the Content Bot Blog Wizard will suggest Multiple Subheadings; this is the outline piece; I feel like I get a more creative and exciting set of headings than I do in ChatGPT-4 or other tools. Then you can generate each section with snappy copy. Honestly, I don’t find it to be extraordinarily good for more technical content, though the copy was good in the example below for a blog post on the new Ford Bronco versus Jeep.
Using ContentBot is a great way to create a scaffold that you can build into a high-quality piece of content.
Optimize Your Content with Links, Images and Using SurferSEO
Ensure your blog post is easy to read by breaking it into short paragraphs, using bullet points or numbered lists, and adding relevant images or multimedia. Include internal and external links to authoritative sources to boost your content’s credibility and SEO value. Once again, ChatGPT doesn’t do a good job of including links, and, in my experience, when asked to include links, I didn’t get good results. This is where the marketer needs expertise in providing the right links and making sure the story is cohesive.
AI-Powered Search Engine Optimization with SurferSEO
SurferSEO is a powerful tool that can help optimize a blog post to drive organic search results. By analyzing top-ranking pages for a particular keyword, SurferSEO can provide data-driven insights and suggestions for optimizing content to improve search engine rankings.
Surfer SEO is a cloud-based on-page optimization tool that allows you to analyze and compare your own pages against what currently ranks on the SERPs. It helps you write articles that read well and rank high by providing you with relevant keywords, a real-time measure of optimization, and a detailed outline of your content. Surfer SEO also uses natural language processing (NLP) to interpret the meaning, structure, and sentiment of your text2. Surfer SEO claims to be able to boost your organic traffic, increase your visibility, and improve your rank.
Some of the main features of Surfer SEO are:
- Content Editor: This feature helps you outline and write content that’s optimized for search engines. It gives you a list of relevant keywords, phrases, and related topics that you should include in your content. It also shows you a real-time Content Score that measures how well your content matches the top-ranking pages for your target keyword.
- Content Audit: This feature helps you audit and improve your existing content. It analyzes your pages based on various on-page factors and gives you suggestions on how to optimize them. You can also compare your pages with your competitors and see what gaps you need to fill.
- SERP Analyzer: This feature helps you analyze the first page results for any keyword. It shows you over 500 on-page signals that correlate with rankings, such as word count, keyword density, headings, images, page speed, and more. You can use this data to understand what Google prefers to rank and how to optimize your pages accordingly.
- Wordpress Integration: One of the features that makes it convenient for Wordpress users is the ability to output directly into your Wordpress blogs.
Overall, SurferSEO can help writers create content that is optimized for the target keyword and meets the standards of top-ranking pages. By following the data-driven insights and recommendations provided by SurferSEO, writers can improve the search engine rankings of their blog posts and drive more organic traffic to their website.
Add Custom Images with Midjourney
Crafting an enticing blog header is crucial for grabbing and maintaining the interest of your audience. This header image can also appear on social media platforms such as Twitter or LinkedIn, enhancing the appeal of your content. Therefore, incorporating an attractive graphic into your blog post can be essential in directing potential readers to your website. I have experimented with several image-generating platforms, among them OpenAI’s DALL-E, but in my opinion, Midjourney provides the most fascinating results, despite its slightly more complex interface. You can follow my process for Using Artificial Intelligence to Create Unique Stunning Blog Images. That is precisely how I generated the header image for this blog.
Creating a Meta Description with Frase
Write a concise meta description (approximately 155 characters) that summarizes the content of your blog post and includes the primary keyword. In my opinion, this is where specialized tools like Frase Free Meta Generator or Jasper.ai are better.
The Most Important Step: Review and Edit
Like any content, you should proofread and edit your blog post for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Make sure the content flows naturally and delivers value to your readers. Grammarly provides great spell and grammar checking and offers useful rewrites to my content to improve my writing. I like using Grammarly to check posts in WordPress, but one annoying nit for me is that it sometimes requires you to reload the page to ensure all of your writing is checked.
Check Your Facts
This is, without a doubt, the most significant and most important feature when using generative Ai. You should pay close attention to factual information that is put forth by AI tools. Sometimes it reverses the facts and makes the good guy the bad guy and vice versa, as in this BBC story. It also can make up total fiction which can hurt your creditability.
Check for Plagiarism
Beyond incorrect facts, I am concerned about plagiarism in my writing as a result of using third-party tools. I try to run everything through a plagiarism checker. I use three different tools for this; the first is Grammarly which does a good job of plagiarism checking. If I use SurferSEO to optimize content, it has a plagiarism checker. If I use ChatGPT and Google Docs to create content, I cut and paste the text into Duplichecker, a free website that checks the copy against a database of other content.
Generative AI Blogging isn’t Perfect, but it is Faster
Generative AI Blogging is not flawless, and to create the best content, you still need to be a diligent editor. However, creating high-quality SEO-optimized blog posts can save time, improve content quality, and drive organic traffic to your blog. Following this step-by-step guide, you can seamlessly integrate AI into your content creation process while maintaining control over your keywords, meta description, and overall content strategy. Embrace the potential of ChatGPT and elevate your blog’s search engine performance.
