Why You Need to Automate 75% of Your Content Creation
I manage a team of top-talent writers who have, except on a few random Tuesdays, human brains. We went all in on AI content because it promised to make our jobs easier. Instead, it’s burning us out.
AI has totally taken over content. It’s everywhere now. We’re doing it, you’re doing it, your aunt with the pyramid scheme is doing it. The SEOs are saying we shouldn’t do it; they’re doing it.
“This is going to make writing so much faster,” said the AI visionaries, but then they’ve never met someone who was born to be a copyeditor.
Why AI Is Killing My Writers
It’s everything but writing that’s the problem.
What we found was, oh yeah, we could totally churn out 5x more content, and even good content, but all the steps we had to take outside of putting pen to paper were still there.
Adding links, adding images, getting accurate info on products and services, making sure Page A was 90% different from Page B while still being 90% different from Page C even though they’re all on the same exact topic, editing for God’s sake— the list of tasks outside of actually writing a page of content goes on and on.
These tasks didn’t go away when we turned to AI, and at the scale at which it allowed us to write—well, they got a whole lot bigger.
What You Need to Do About It
If you think that by just relying on ChatGPT or Claude is going to benefit your writers, you’re gravely mistaken.
Taking half of the work off their plate will only double their workload. You’ll burn them out. You already are, and it’s because when it comes to AI, you’re thinking wayyyyy too small.
You need to take off another 25%—25%, at least. You need to automate all the tedium around AI, and you can do that with simple scripting.
Find a way to automatically add links to good, solid anchor text (NLP is a great tool here). Make selecting images instantaneous. Build content comparison models. Make the road from planning to output the span of a spreadsheet uploaded to a prompt template. Simply put, for pulp content, automate everything but editorial review.
I challenge you: Get your dev team in the writers’ corner for a week, two weeks even; build them everything they need to lighten all the load of everything that goes into content writing that’s not content writing. You’re dev team is busy, yes, but your content writers will be busier. And they’ll leave.
If you can’t do that, have the decency to learn the skills yourself and do it.
What Happens if You Stop Making Writers Pay for What AI Did to Us
The only way at AI can make a writer’s life easier is if there’s good, simple scripting around all the tedium through which AI forces us to sludge.
In exchange for this simple courtesy, we promise you that your brand will win.
Here’s why, and keep in mind, there are still some maniacs of the ludicrous belief that they can buy or steal backlinks with nothing more than a dozen or so run-of-the-mill blog articles (like this one), an email address, and enough caffeine to wake Julius Caesar from his grave.
Just like Caesar, those days are dead and gone. But brand awareness, relevance, and memorability is still here.
If you automate the pulp content, your writers are free to work with other teams in your marketing department. PR, print media, organic social: Your writers can write content across the whole department that builds your brand — and really, that’s the only thing getting you a backlink at the end of the day.
You can actually leave all the keyword stuffing to the Great Machine, while your writers can get back to doing what they were meant to do: get you leads with good, smart copy.
You’ll still get your precious keywords with their precious traffic. Just give us something to give a damn about, and we’ll give you even more.
