Creating amazing content in 2024.
With the advent of more and newer social media apps plus a 24-hour news cycle, there’s so much content being produced and published into the world. And now, with the addition of AI, that number is about to go through the roof. How do people keep up with it all? Well, the fact of the matter is most people don’t.
Did you know? Over six million blog entries are created every day.
– Zippia
So, how do you build expert-level digital content that’ll cut through all the noise to reach and resonate with your intended audience? The easy answer is drawing on what makes you different – your humanness, your experience, your research, and your point of view on things. When it comes down to it, what you’re trying to replace with AI is time, not talent.
Currently, we believe you can separate content into two buckets:
1. Created content
This content holds value because humans created it. It includes new ideas, thought leadership pieces, and other unique content. It can’t be recreated with AI because it requires original thought and drawing on a person’s experience.
2. Constructed content
This content only has value after it’s been assembled. While AI can, and will more and more, create content such as blog posts and social media captions, it does so by pulling from content that has either been scraped from the internet or fed by people. No original thoughts are brought out, and no unique experience is drawn on. So, you’ll end up with much similar content being created.
While you can churn out a lot of the latter, it’s proven that AI doesn’t know everything. It can sometimes create false or misleading information, an AI hallucination or confabulation. So, even if you are using it to build content like blogs, be sure you have an IRL human fact-checking and editing to ensure it’s ready for general consumption for the public. Otherwise, you may find yourself in hot water, whether that’s just a bit of public embarrassment or as severe as someone taking legal action because you’ve put something out into the world that’s wrong.
Keeping it quality over quantity.
In December 2022, Google updated their search quality ratings to deal with the addition of AI-produced content. Previously, you could remember it with the acronym E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Now, it reads E-E-A-T with the addition of Experience on the front end. This adds weight to using the author’s first-hand experience with the subject matter, which doesn’t happen when you ask a machine to create things like blog posts or similar content.
This will be helpful when it comes to your SEO work. While they won’t penalize AI-generated content by default, search engines will prioritize high-quality, helpful material created with humans in mind rather than AI-generated stuff. To keep your pages’ quality rankings, don’t rely solely on generative AI for content creation. Instead, you can use AI to figure out how to boost the quality and reach of your original, human-created content.
The future of searches
Everyone gets in on the AI train as generative content, helpful chatbots, and more emerge. Even Google is building an experimental AI-integrated ChatGPT-like search engine that reimagines online search. Staying on the cutting edge of technology and user journeys now, more often than not, includes AI in some form or another.
Humans vs. AI: a content challenge.
Just like the folklore tale told the story of John Henry and his duel against a drilling machine, CMO Huddles ran a 10-week ‘Man vs Machine’ content challenge.
First, they had 60 blogs produced:
- Human: 20 created only by humans hands on keyboards
- Humanoid: 20 almost entirely generated by ChatGPT-3.5 (proofread, fact-checked and lightly edited by the team to ensure they weren’t putting misinformation out into the world)
- Hybrid: 20 generated by ChatGPT-3.5 and then levelled up by the team to match the human-authored posts’ quality
Then, the articles were published worldwide and tracked for search rankings, visibility, and traffic by the team over a 10-week test period.
Key results
- AI was faster. Not surprisingly, the AI-generated content was three times faster to research, outline, write, and find sources.
- But AI still needs those training wheels—the team found errors and inconsistencies throughout the generated content, so human oversight and editing are still required.
- Humans are still the best at traffic jams. Human-generated content brought in more site traffic than both hybrid and AI-only content, improving traffic and rankings by threefold compared to AI-authored content.
- A shared approach is best. A hybrid approach is probably best, taking 1.5 hours instead of the 3.5 that human-only generated content took.
- Visibility ≠ traffic – Hybrid approaches helped increase search visibility but didn’t translate into increased traffic.
Lending a helping hand.
With AI, content creators have a powerful ally at their disposal. As mentioned above, AI saves you time, so it’s excellent for building outlines or the bare bones of a blog post or content piece. But put a similar query into something like Chat GPT multiple times, and you’ll see that you’re getting similar work repeatedly. This means there’s a risk of duplicate content on the web if others are trying to build content in the same arena of thought as you.
By using AI-driven research and optimizing content with AI analytics, you can elevate your digital content to expert levels. Leveraging it for content creation and pushing visuals further enhances the overall quality and impact of the material.
Run what you brung.
It’s crucial to remember that AI should be used to complement human creativity and expertise rather than a replacement. It can be helpful as a tool to aid you in building outlines and brainstorming ideas when you get stuck. But without original ideas and a foundation of experience, it doesn’t get you very far when creating unique content that resonates with your audience. At the end of the day, most blog posts fail because the content isn’t purposeful, original, or engaging.
By striking the right balance, creators can produce expert-level digital content that their audience will connect with and trust, leaving a lasting impression in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
