AI is tricking you into thinking it's easy to create great content. But the truth is you're probably not ready to DIY with AI.
If that felt personal, hear me out.
The rise of AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT has lured people into a false sense of confidence in their content creation abilities.
I'm not taking a jab at you. This is universal.
Even for seasoned content marketers, creating high-quality content with AI isn't easy.
Full disclosure before we get deeper into this topic...
This is not a knock against AI tools. On the contrary, I'm very actively working to figure out how to use AI within my own business and leverage it for my clients.
Why?
Because I truly believe that the marketers who can master these tools will be the ones who succeed in the long term. AI will help save costs, cut back on labor, reduce delivery times, and improve content marketing outputs.
But I digress... back to the topic at hand.
I've heard people say that working with AI takes a 10-80-10 split:
But I've spent dozens of hours:
What have I found in doing so?
I don't think 10-80-10 is realistic right now. I think the split is more like 40-20-40.
That's because it takes a few key ingredients.
Creating high-quality content with AI takes strategy and unique source material—like an expert's insights or an original idea or perspective.In my opinion, this is as much about ethics as it is about quality.
If you're asking AI to write, say, an article without giving it unique source material to work from, all you're doing is taking existing information, packaging it together, and presenting it as your own when it's not.
Even with SEO-driven articles, you still need to consider keyword strategy, provide value, answer search queries in the right way, and optimize content appropriately.
The almighty Google is actively seeking and penalizing low-value AI content.
To get a draft from your AI tool with any reasonable degree of quality, you need proper prompt architecture—and this is an intensely detailed and iterative process.
You need to train your AI tool on:
Then, once the AI has drafted your content, you need to review it, identify issues, and incorporate them into your existing prompt architecture to ensure you're getting better results next time.
Once the content is drafted, you might be 70% of the way there. But you still need to spend time editing the content to ensure it's high-quality rather than just another addition to "the mountain of meh."
This takes a human touch and a degree of expertise in creating quality content.
Don't get me wrong. Eventually, AI will be able to create outstanding content with minimal human oversight.
But, even then, it'll still require:
So, if I could leave you with one thought, it's this:
Don't let AI tools fool you into thinking it's easy to create great content.
It isn't.
AI can—and will—help augment the process, but it's no silver bullet.
I've used the word "quality" six times so far. That's no accident.
Quality has always been important in content marketing.
But with AI making it easy to flood the internet with mediocrity, quality will become more important than ever—at least if you want results. Don't just create content because AI makes it easy to do.
You need tact, strategy, expertise, time, and patience.
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