10 Year Plus Content Writing Insights Until the Rise of AI
Lesson learned: Leverage AI tools in SEO content writing NOW or PERISH. Deep insights distilled from 10 plus years writing online.
What do you expect to gain from this article? If you’re a content writer like me who’s doing it for fun and as a hobby that unexpectedly earns, you will learn a lot from my story. I narrate how my writing evolved from sheer writing fun to search engine optimized (SEO) writing, then eventually AI-assisted publishing. Which approach do you think is the best way we can deliver content?
A Little Background on My Writing Venture
It has been a while since I wrote here in Medium as I was so engrossed with SEO content writing for the past 5 years or so. Occasionally, I write for the sheer joy of writing as I used to 10 years back. I let my thoughts flow freely powered by that inner inspiration of a passionate writer as I capture unconventional, irresistible, and pioneering ideas that pop in my head.
I feel an unexplainable inner satisfaction letting out what I think, derived from insights endowed by experience and learning through time. As a writer, I believe that unless I share what I know with others who have similar interests, or are interested in how I think, I will never know what value these insights hold.
Unexpected Viral Content
Writing online pays off, as many of the articles I write rank so high in the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. And many of my readers like and share those articles, so glad they learned from those articles and share the knowledge that they gained to friends, classmates, or co-workers. (If you’re curious, here’s my evergreen and viral content that’s always on top of the SERP despite the many changes in Google’s algorithm since 2015: Conceptual Framework: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Make One). I hit the nerve, somehow, of people who look for such information.
At that time, I was looking for information on how to develop a conceptual framework for my students taking up the research subject, as they have difficulty figuring out what it is. Having some doubts myself on how a conceptual framework should be written, I looked for information online, hoping to find an easily digestible piece.
I could not find a sensible and easily comprehensible explanation. So I took it upon myself, gathered all the materials I can get about the conceptual framework from my notes during my postgraduate years, tried to comprehend the essence of what it is and write how to develop the conceptual framework in my own words. I took time to illustrate the concept using my newly found graphics editing knowledge. I published that article for the sole purpose of sharing what I discovered.
I got hundreds of comments out of that explanation which took me awhile to figure out. I never expected that students and teachers all over the globe found that helpful. Google Analytics helped me discern that information about users. But that’s how far I can go, just knowing where the readers come from. When they comment, that’s the time I get a cue of who they are.
Hence, you will never know the impact of your writing unless you share it with others. This is the best SEO strategy I have ever done. Find what you need and if you cannot find it, create it yourself. I unwittingly satisfied the need of others when I tried to find information for myself.
Unexpectedly, that article found its ways in Google Scholar, and even got 215 citations as of this writing. It’s worth more than just a simple blog after getting online presence for 8 years.
SEO Writing as the Norm
I would admit that SEO content writing has significantly influenced the way I write for about half of my writing venture, as there are guidelines that need to be followed so that Google, the dominant search engine of our time, can find my articles and index it. Unless Google indexes my articles or blogs, no one will be able to read them. That is, if other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, or less popular search engines — each having their own unique algorithms — are not also able to index my articles.
I have found RankMath plugin as a very valuable tool that serves as my guide in writing search engine optimized articles. I aim for the perfect score of 100, but if I reach 80, and utterly satisfied with what I have written, I publish regardless. RankMath reminds me that I should have enough mentions of my focus keyword, write a compelling title, incorporate the keyword in the meta-description, write at least 600 words of content, ensure that the article has a table of contents, among others.
The RankMath guide seemed to work, until the web traffic of my site reached its peak on September 6, 2023 at 5,475 page views per day. From there, my blog’s traffic gradually decreased until now. I’m a bit worried it would go down to zero, as some reddit users whine about their once high traffic website. The series of Google updates, particularly in November, have taken its tool on many websites, some even at the verge or in a state of bankruptcy.
Here’s how the website’s traffic behave for the last fifteen hours to give you an idea how bad web traffic has gone in my website.
Looking at this graph bedazzles my mind. What’s the trend? I asked myself and pondered. Aside from that sudden spurt of web traffic of 100+ users at 2:00am, the number of users represented by the histogram, is going down, down, down. I got dismal web traffic nowadays. In fact, the website gets the lowest traffic it has ever had for the past three years since I got feedback from Ezoic’s analytics. And the revenue the website gets (represented by the black line) is erratic.
What’s happening?
My hypothesis: AI has significantly influenced Google’s indexing algorithm.
Why so? I discuss this hot and controversial issue in the next section.
The Rise of the Machines: AI Content Writing Revolutionized by ChatGPT
For those unfamiliar with ChatGPT, I will give a brief account in the next paragraph. You may skip to the next section if you’re familiar with this artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. But if you want to know more, you are most welcome to skip to the next paragraph.
ChatGPT gained popularity since it went public in November 2022. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI. In a matter of five days, more than a million users got attracted to what it can do. You can ask the chatbot whatever comes to your mind. And it answers like a human, even better. That’s because even if you don’t know anything about coding, you can ask it to write a code for you.
Now, how has ChatGPT influenced content writing? ChatGPT, despite its imperfections referred to as “hallucinations” by its creator, revolutionized content creation. Enterprising individuals developed apps based on the open source code of ChatGPT. These apps shortened the time it takes to publish an article. On whatever topic you can think of. Whoa…!
This viral technological innovation spurred the integration of AI-assisted writing tools in Ezoic — one of the most innovative startups that is home to more than 10,000 digital publishers — where I’m a member. Ezoic is already known for its AI that enables digital publishers to earn more than Google’s Adsense that also works in tandem with my account in this innovative company.
AI-powered content tools like the paid subscription in Writio and the free Wordsmith application integrated in NicheIQ (another Ezoic feature), provided me an opportunity to leverage AI in my writing. You will get to know these amazing apps if you join and believe what Ezoic can do for you.
Read More: How to Write an Article with AI: A Quick Guide
Honestly, I’m glad to be one of Ezoic’s publishers as it helps me keep my website online. Plus Adsense, of course. Pardon the ads, but those ads help me pay for hosting, subscriptions to comply with GPDR requirements, ward off spam, backup the site, enable the site to load fast, among others. Nothing’s free.
Insights on Contemporary Content Writing
Given the evolution of content writing through more than 11 years of writing experience online, I would say that as a writer, we should also evolve. I’m saying evolve in a sense that we do not completely forgo the joy of writing as we once engaged in a decade ago. We can still do the same approach, with our own writing styles, but not completely ignore the possibilities of integrating awesome pictures generated by Dall-E or similar AI-powered apps, based on our prompts. Or incorporating we-never-thought-of ideas generated by ChatGPT and cohorts in our writing to make it more factual, comprehensive, and likewise interesting.
Unless, you are a purist, who would rather sulk in your favorite corner, and let the mind drift to create a unique content out of your creative mind that no one ever thought about. We can always write content out of the ordinary, explore the unknown, and reveal secrets, that ultimately finds its way in the databases of ChatGPT. We can be original, and still creative.
Read More: AI Blogging: 4 Reasons Originality and Creativity Died
AI must have killed some of our desire to be original and creative given the temptation of relying on what AI can do for us, but we can harness its power to write comprehensive articles with our original prompts and outlines, integrate awesome imagery in our articles through descriptions of our fantasies and dreams, and include entertaining but educational videos using text to speech apps that milennials like to see while they skip textual content. Did we ever think about that possibility?
By the way, this article was written without any AI assistance. How did you find it?
It’s great to be back!
