Did you open this post expecting me to say all my content has been or will be written by AI? I think that would have been my assumption if I’d clicked through to this one, to be honest. There’s (rightly, in my opinion) a lot of negativity surrounding AI, especially in the content creation/copywriting world. My partner is a freelance writer with many years experience and he’s finding AI is taking a lot of the work, and that the work is then a terrible standard. It’s not a good thing.
I will never, ever, use AI to actually write words for me. The words in this post, and all of my posts, are 100% written by me. I will always declare if something is written by someone else (like a guest post from another blogger) and that honesty is important to me.
I’m going to be using AI as an aid, not as a writing tool. This post is talking about the fact I’m going to be using AI to help with Inside Laura’s Head, and I’ll talk about how and why I intend to use it. I’ll then, in three months time, share what I thought of it, and the results.
Why are you using AI at all?
Honestly? I thought it would be an interesting experiment, and that writing about it would make good content. I’d rather write about it than not, and not mentioning I’m trying this feels disingenuous to me. Whilst I’m starting to use AI now (September, when I’m starting this post) I’ll be completing this and posting the results in the middle of December. I wanted to make sure I got this post up and shared before any content goes live that I’ve used AI assistance for, so I am being totally honest and transparent.
If it’s not writing for you, how is AI going to be helping with this blog?
I’m using AI for three different things. The first is to develop my content ideas, so I’m telling it the sort of content that does well with my readers and asking it for similar post titles. I’ll look at these and see if I think I could do them justice, if I think people would find them interesting or useful, and if I think they’d fit in well on Inside Laura’s Head. If there’s ideas I like (and I hope there will be!) I will write some of this content, and I’ll link that in the results post.
The second part is using AI to help me figure out where is good to promote my content. I’m hoping it may give me some ideas beyond ‘post your most recent post on X, put it on your Instagram story, have a Facebook page’ and that these ideas will get me excited to actually promote my work more. I always see the benefits when I do this, I don’t love the admin side of it, and I definitely need to diversify where and how I am promoting content.
The third bit of work I’ll be asking AI for help with is keyword research. If you blog, or if you know anything about online content, you’ll know that for a post to be found via search engines, it needs to contain the correct keywords and rank high on the list. Think about if you’re searching for things to do in Malaga, as you’re flying out there in a couple of weeks. You’re going to search ‘things to do in Malaga’ or ‘best free things in Malaga’ or ‘good food in Malaga’ or similar. You’re then going to pick a search result, or a few, that pop up. You’re not going to scroll through to page ten of the search and choose the post from www.newblogger.co.uk titled ‘My holiday photos from Malaga’.
I aim for my content to rank high for certain words and phrases, and for the most part it does. What I’m not good at, though, is working out other words and phrases to try to rank for. I would search ‘spending 48 hours in Pristina’ if I was headed to Kosovo’s capital, and if you do this, you’ll see that my post sits at the very top of this search. But if someone was to search ‘should I visit Pristina?’ I’m near the bottom of the first page, and ‘things to do in Pristina’ has me halfway down page six. Clearly, this means that I could be doing better with keywords in this post, and I know that all of my content is the same.
I’ll be allowing AI to guide the keywords and phrases I use, and tracking how that impacts traffic to those posts over a 6 month period. So, there will be a future ‘I used AI for keyword research and here’s how it went’ post in June, which I will link here once it’s written. I’ll be choosing a small number of posts for this experiment, rather than trying to do 11 years of content in one go.
What next?
This post is going live on 13th September, and the results post (which I’ll start working on now, so I can remember any key successes, challenges and any absolute failures) will go live in the middle of December. My post with the results of the keyword research section will go live in June, as I plan to put the work in on the improvements from September, give it a couple of months to be picked up by the search engines, and then track improvements on views on those posts.
How will I track if this is a success?
For this to be a success, for me, it will need to;
*Give me at least five post types I wouldn’t have considered, of which at least three I go on to write.
*Show me at least two new ways to promote content, leading to a 25% or more increase on monthly traffic to Inside Laura’s Head.
*Increase traffic to the posts chosen for the keyword research portion of this experiment by at least 25%, over the 6 months since optimising them for new keywords/phrases.
Wish me luck, everyone. I’m excited to see where this goes.
It’ll be interesting to see if this works! I have such mixed feelings about AI. I use tools which use AI to help me with things like internal linking or keywords, but it’s rare that I use ChatGPT on its own.
Corinne x
I’m really intrigued about how you get on and can’t wait to read the results. I think there’s definitely a lot of negativity surrounding AI because it is taking away from so many job roles, not just content creation.
This is an interesting take on content creation and I am eager to hear more. May I ask what tool you’ll be using for the keyword tracking? I pay for a Keysearch subscription and even though it is not too expensive, I sometimes wonder if it is still worth having it or if SEO has completely become irrelevant these days. I do sometimes use Chatgpt to help me with editing. English isn’t my first language and I tend to use phrases which may sound odd or are grammatically incorrect, so it helps me improving my language. So yeah I am looking forward to your progress and how AI works out for you. Until then best of luck!
Carolin | Solo Travel Story
Ooh this is a really interesting experiment. I’d be especially interested in the results of the second part as I’m sure there must be more places I could share my content rather than just the usual suspects. I do have a love/hate relationship with AI so I’m looking forward to the results of this and how you’re using it. Good luck with it!
This intrigues me, and I’m looking forward to learning your results. I’m very wary of AI and absolutely hate it when I see an AI bot has scraped my site. I share your concern about AI-generated content, but I know I’m not very good at keyword research, and my ideas for getting my content in front of readers tend to follow the regular social media routines.
Super interesting experiment, and I’m going to be following along to see what you find out. I sometimes use it to help with post titles which I hate thinking of, but I have used AI a bit more in my regularly job. One great function I like is it’s ability to summarize documents, or help me come up with talking points for a meeting etc. I feel like we need to embrace AI as it probably isn’t going away, but at the same time make sure we stay true to ourselves and know when and when not to use it.
When it comes to Ai for writing, I only use Grammarly to help me with my grammar. The rest is all by myself. For me, writing is supposed to be from our hearts.