Writing blog posts comes almost natural for AIs. After we went through a few email scenarios in the last installation of our series, we’ll focus on how to use AIs for writing blogs.
Why blogs?
Blogs are an invaluable asset for businesses for several reasons. Firstly, they significantly enhance a company's online visibility. Search engines, like Google, favour websites that consistently publish fresh, relevant content. This is especially crucial in the digital age, where a strong online presence can be a major factor in a business's success.
Secondly, blogs are a powerful tool for establishing and showcasing a business's expertise and authority in its field. By sharing insightful, well-researched articles on topics relevant to their industry, businesses can demonstrate their knowledge and proficiency. This helps in building trust with the audience, which is essential for customer loyalty and brand credibility.
Lastly, blogs offer a unique way for businesses to connect with their audience on a more personal and engaging level. Through blogging, a company can express its brand's personality, share behind-the-scenes stories, and connect with its audience through a more conversational tone.
So there you have it. Blogs are an important part of you online business and with AI tools even micro enterprises can easily write several blog posts a month and boost their search ranking, showcase their expertise and build a community.
Writing a blog post
Let’s start with a simple task and write a blog post about the importance of having a blog for a business. The corresponding prompt is straightforward:
write a blog post about the importance of having a blog for businesses.
You might notice that the blog post is rather short, but contains interesting ideas that are worth exploring. So let’s do this. A technique for making the basic blog post longer is to expand every section. This can be done rather simple by this prompt:
expand the introduction. introduction = """Introduction:In today's fast-paced digital world, having an online presence is crucial for businesses, regardless of their size or industry. Among various digital marketing strategies, blogging stands out as a powerful and versatile tool. This post delves into the significance of maintaining a blog for your business and how it can be a game-changer in your marketing efforts."""
This gives you a longer version of the introduction. You can go through every section and expand section after section in the same manner. After you went through every section, you’ll end up with a nice long blog post (scroll down to see how we did it https://chat.openai.com/share/69eaa56f-e5c2-46c4-9b56-d4b38e5d591f). It is a bit rough around the edges and needs some additional editing, but compared to writing a blog post from scratch is almost nothing. Also, if you are not satisfied with the result of a section, you can generate several versions and keep the best one.
Structured blog post generation
A different approach to write a blog post is to start with an outline. After the outline is written, it serves as guide for the generation of the sections. This is a more structured approach and suitable for longer texts. Here’s the prompt:
write a blog post outline about the importance of having a blog for businesses.
Just like before, go through every section and let the AI write the corresponding section. You have best results when you ask for an explanation or phrase it in form of a question. Here’s an example:
write the section “”“Defining thought leadership in a business context.””” explain why this is important.
If you go through sections and subsection be aware that you could end up with content that is kind of repetitive. This happens when the outline has many subsections that are related. In the end you have to go over the text and check it manually.
Ideas for niche businesses
If your business is in a niche, like so many are, you might have troubles finding ideas for new blog posts all the time. Fortunately this is also something where AI tools really shine. They can help you with finding ideas and titles for blog posts. Let’s assume that your business is to sell fireproof doors and you want to populate your blog. Here’s a prompt to get you started with blog post ideas:
give me a list of 20 blog post ideas for a business that sells fireproof doors.
You might have noticed, that this request is rather generic and the result too. Let’s improve it by adding context and address it to a specific target audience:
give me a list of 20 blog post ideas for a business that sells fireproof doors. The target audience are private house owners and companies that renovate houses.
Now you’re getting a different list.
Search Engine Optimization
An important aspect of blogging is search engine optimisation (SEO). The primary goal of SEO is to increase a website's visibility in search engine results. This is crucial because higher visibility typically leads to more traffic to the site. So how do you get more visitors? A good strategy is to look for so-called long-tail keywords as base for writing you blog posts. A long-tail keyword is an often longer phrase that targets a niche audience rather than a broad one. These keywords typically have lower search volumes but higher conversion rates due to their specificity and alignment with particular user intents. They have less competition and are more targeted. Here’s how you can use a prompt for this:
You are an SEO Keyword expert. Please give me a list of 10 low-competition long-tail keywords related to "why a blog is important for a business". browse the web and use bing to check for your keywords. Structure the data in a table with the keywords ranked by popularity.
You might have noticed that you instruct the AI to act as SEO keyword expert. Role-playing prompts are a way of instructing AIs to adopt a specific persona, such as a character, a profession, or a function, and respond accordingly. This gives AIs an additional layer of context to make them understand the scenario better and responds with more specific, targeted advice.
After you have your list of keywords, your next step is to use these keywords to generate blog titles. In contrast to the previous approach, we now instruct the AI to use the keywords for the generation of blog titles. This is a different approach than before: it’s more data driven and guides the AI. Here’s the prompt:
use this list of keywords to generate 10 blog titles.list ="""1 benefits of blogging for small businesses2 blog impact on business growth3 reasons to start a business blog4 how blogs increase business visibility5 blogging for business marketing strategy6 business blog engagement techniques7 cost-effective blogging for businesses8 SEO benefits of business blogging9 building brand through blogging10 blog content ideas for businesses"""blog titles:
These blog titles are a good starting point. As it is often the case, they are often inspirational rather than the final result.
Conclusion: Harnessing AI for Impactful Blogging
The integration of AI in blog post creation is a revolutionary step for businesses, especially for SMEs. The flexibility and efficiency offered by AI in generating relevant, engaging content cannot be overstated. They serve not only as tools for boosting online visibility and SEO but also as platforms for businesses to establish their authority and connect personally with their audience. With AI, even small businesses can now consistently produce high-quality blog posts, which previously required significant time and resources.
Moreover, the use of AI in generating niche-specific blog post ideas and SEO-optimized content further underscores its value. By tapping into AI's capabilities, businesses can stay ahead in their content game, ensuring that their blogs are not only visible but also resonant with their target audience.
In essence, the journey from a basic blog draft to a well-rounded, SEO-optimized, and engaging final product is now more accessible than ever, thanks to AI. This not only levels the playing field for all businesses in the digital domain but also opens up new avenues for creative and effective content marketing.
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