As I’ve been testing AI tools, I’ve discovered their potential to help small businesses create a better content marketing strategy and streamline the content creation process. This enables you to spend more time creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience. You no longer need to stare at a blank screen and wonder what to write. AI becomes your writing companion that can help make content planning and creation effortless and effective.
Areas that AI has made the process more efficient includes:
- Doing keyword research
- Organizing keywords into topic clusters
- Brainstorming topics within a topic cluster to fill your content calendar
- Creating better post titles
- Writing meta descriptions
- Generating outlines and starter text for posts
- Proofreading the content for grammatical errors and clarity
Although you can have the tool write the content for you, I recommend that you use AI to create first pass of the content and then rewrite it in your voice and style, adding your expertise.
Let me walk you through the process and prompts that I used to create a content marketing plan.
Doing keyword research
First thing I did was to prompt ChatGPT to provide a list of keywords for a particular search intent. For example, I asked for a list of keywords for someone who is searching to learn how SEO can help their small business and got the following list.
Organizing topics into topic clusters
Now that I have this list of 20 keyword phrases, I had ChatGPT organize them into topic clusters.
Brainstorming topics within a topic cluster to fill your content calendar
I then asked ChatGPT to provide basic titles for each topic in the cluster. If you already have content, you can see where it may fit into one of the clusters. Now you can create a calendar for publishing or updating existing content.
Creating better post titles
As you start to work on one of the topics, ChatGPT can give you a list of better titles for the content as you need to write them.
Now use these titles to form the best one for your post. Most of the time, I need to prompt for shorter titles. But having a number to start with can fuel your creative juices.
Writing meta descriptions
You can prompt ChatGPT for a 150 character meta description using your topic or title. Be sure to instruct it to include your particular keyword that should be included.
In this case, it is not perfect but you have the base to work from. You will need to rework the meta description to fit within the 150 characters with spaces in order to ensure it doesn’t get truncated.
Generating outlines and starter text for posts
It used to take me hours to research a topic to create the outline or come up with areas to include in the post. Now with ChatGPT, I can get an outline in minutes. My prompt was: Provide an outline for a post titled: Using AI to Create Your Small Business SEO Content Strategy.
Pretty complete but I would edit it for my needs. However, I now have an outline that gets me started. This can also be given to a writer to produce the first draft. You always want to control the content that is published under your brand, but having help from ChatGPT makes the creation process more streamlined.
You can ask ChatGPT to write the opening paragraphs to a blog post of this title.
I know for me, having some content on the page helps me get over the writer’s block.
Proofreading your content
Once you are done writing, you can use the tool to correct grammar and clean up content that may not be written very well. You can give it a paragraph to rewrite or ask it to better optimize the content for SEO. Here is the first paragraph of this post rewritten by ChatGPT. I asked it to optimize it for the keyword phase “AI content marketing”.
By testing AI tools, I’ve found their potential to optimize small businesses’ content marketing strategies through AI content marketing. By leveraging AI to develop your content marketing plan, you can create quality content that engages your audience. These tools streamline content creation, freeing up time to focus on producing better content faster. No more staring at a blank screen – AI content marketing makes content creation easy and efficient, allowing you to achieve better results.
Not bad, but I left my opening paragraph as is. The tone was not quite me but it does provide phrases I may wish to use.
Should you use AI for content marketing?
Given how busy all small business owners are, having a tool to increase efficiency in any area of your business is priceless. Using AI to help you implement a better content marketing strategy can help you with your marketing efforts. Leverage AI to optimize your workflow, generate higher-quality content and reach a wider audience. From identifying relevant topics to creating compelling copy, put AI to work to make your content marketing efforts more efficient and effective.
