SEO

7 Ways To Use AI Writing Tools To Generate Content Ideas

Published

3 years ago

June 20, 2022

7 Ways To Use AI Writing Tools To Generate Content Ideas

Creating relevant, engaging, original content for your audience on a regular schedule is a necessary aspect of any content marketing strategy.

The more content you create, the more keywords your website is going to rank for in search results, and the more visitors, leads, and prospects you’re going to reach.

The problem is, it’s really hard work to produce fresh new content over and over again. How often do you find yourself staring at a blank page that always seems to be staring back at you in defiance?

What if there was a way to make it easier to come up with unlimited new content ideas without ever having to worry about writer’s block?

That’s where the magic of AI-assisted writing technology comes to the rescue!

What Is AI-Assisted Writing?

Over the past year, a new suite of AI writing assistant tools has been making waves in the content creation world.

Unlike old-school software that’s programmed to perform a task, these tools are programmed to learn and develop their own skillset without having to be coded with a specific set of rules to execute.

Think about AI computers that have learned to play chess so well over time that they can now defeat grandmasters.

In a similar way, AI writing assistants are learning to write like a pro, and they are learning fast.

There are some caveats to consider, which I will list at the end of this article. The biggest is that Google considers AI-generated content to be spam, so you shouldn’t just publish whatever an AI gives you without looking at it. You still need human writers. But AIs can change the game for ideation and even roughly drafting content.

By simply providing these tools with some initial guidance, like target keywords, product descriptions, and who your target audience is, they can help you generate posts, marketing emails, SEO meta descriptions, marketing copy, and even blog topic ideas to write about.

You can generate topics, ideas, and even drafts in a matter of minutes, allowing you to create new content at scale with the help of a personal AI muse that never tires, never sleeps, and is always at your beck and call!

How To Use AI Writing Tools To Generate Unlimited Content Ideas

The best way to illustrate the different ways an AI writing assistant can help you say goodbye forever to the threat of writer’s block is by showing you real-world examples that cover a number of areas in a typical content creation workflow.

Blog Posts

Since blog posts are the basis for most content marketing strategies, let’s begin there.

AI writing assistants can help you quickly generate topic ideas for your content calendar and then, using a topic as a blog post title, go on to generate the post’s intro paragraph, outline, and even the conclusion.

Sounds too good to be true?

Let’s put these tools to the test:

Topic Ideas

For this example, I’m going to use a fictional website for a business that specializes in smart home installations.

They’ve created a blog called The Smart Home and their target audience is made out of home owners that would like to lower energy costs and increase convenience.

Using one of the leading AI writing tools on the market, I’m going to use a topic ideas generator template and provide it with the following guidance:

Company name: The Smart Home.
Product description: This blog reviews the latest in internet connected home appliances and devices, like door locks, thermostats, light controls and wireless audio.
Audience: Home owners.
Tone of voice: Practical.
Examples: How to Manage your Energy Budget.

Now, let’s give AI a spin:

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

These are great topics for upcoming posts. Now, let’s take it to the next level. I’ll choose one of the above topics and create the structure for a blog post.

Intro Paragraph

So, I’m going to pick the 3rd topic from the list as my title and use the intro paragraph generation template to begin writing the intro so I don’t have to come up with it from scratch;

Here are my inputs:

Blog post title: 5 things every homeowner needs to know about smart homes.
Audience: Homeowners.
Tone of voice: Helpful.

And here is the AI output:

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

Excellent.

This is something I can definitely build on.

Next, let’s create a blog post outline with the different headings I’m going to need in order to add meat to the bones.

Outline

For this task, all I need to supply the AI writing assistant is my blog post title:

Blog post title: 5 things every homeowner needs to know about smart homes.
Tone of voice: Helpful.

And the AI outline is…

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

So far so good. Now, we could reuse the intro paragraph template to craft an introduction for each of the above headings.

Finally, we need to come up with a conclusion paragraph.

Conclusion

For this task, I’ll be using the blog post conclusion paragraph generation template.

The required inputs are the blog post title followed by all headings as bullet points plus a call to action, as shown below:

What are the main points or outline of your blog post?
5 things every homeowner needs to know about smart homes.
What is a smart home and what can it do for you.
How to get started with a smart home.
The benefits of having a smart home.
The cost of setting up a smart home.
How to maintain your smart home.
Call to action: Contact us at TheSmartHome.network.
Tone of voice: Helpful.

Here’s the AI-generated conclusion:

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

Jasper.ai, Jun 2022

Not bad for about 15 minutes’ work!

In my experience (and with practice) you can easily generate a new AI-assisted blog post in about a third of the time it takes to do without AI, or put another way, you can triple your content creation throughput with the same effort on your part.

Now, let’s look at other aspects of content creation that you could also speed up with the help of an AI assistant.

SEO Meta Description

If you want to create great meta descriptions for your posts on the fly, all you have to do is to feed the AI tool with your title, intro paragraph, and your target keyword. Presto! You’ll get an auto-generated blog post description in seconds:

Company/Product Name: The Smart Home.
Blog post title: 5 things every homeowner needs to know about smart home.
Blog post description: When it comes to technology, the home is one of the last frontiers. But that’s changing fast, as advancements in smart home technology make it easier and more affordable than ever for homeowners to automate everything from their thermostats to their garage door openers. If you’re considering making your home a smart home, here are five things you need to know.
Keyword: smart home.

AI output:

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

One less thing to spend time on!

Personalized Cold Marketing Emails

If you’re doing cold email outreach, say, to influencers in order to drive more traffic to your site, you can use the personalized cold marketing email template to generate copy in seconds.

The required inputs are your product description, your company or blog name, and some context for the email.

Here’s an example:

Tell us about your product: This blog reviews the latest in internet-connected home appliances and devices, like door locks, thermostats, light controls, and wireless audio.
Your Company/Product Name: The Smart Home.
Context to include in the email: I’d like to offer you a free smart home consultation.
Tone of voice: Persuasive.

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

Short and sweet, but long enough to easily build on.

Marketing Copy

Finally, if you need to come up with marketing copy from scratch for your product pages, email marketing campaigns, landing pages, etc., you can use the AI-generated AIDA framework (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to get your creative juices flowing.

All we need to do is to supply it with your company name and product description and let AI do the heavy lifting.

Let’s put it to the test:

Company/Product name: The Smart Home.
Product description: When it comes to technology, the home is one of the last frontiers. But that’s changing fast, as advancements in smart home technology make it easier and more affordable than ever for homeowners to automate everything from their thermostats to their garage door openers. If you’re considering making your home a smart home, here are five things you need to know.
Tone of voice: Persuasive.

AI output:

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, June 2022

All done in a few seconds!

Imagine how long it would take you to come up with the above copy from scratch.

Things To Keep In Mind When Using AI-Assisted Writing Tools

Now the caveats I promised.

While AI writing tools are quite impressive, they do have some issues you need to be aware of so you can take the necessary precautions.

Below are three areas you need to pay close attention to:

As I said above, Google considers content wholly generated by an AI to be spam. That means humans still need to be involved in the content writing process. Don’t just publish whatever the AI gives you.
AI writers will sometimes quote facts and figures in their output text. The rule is to never rely on them at face value, because oftentimes they’ll simply make them up in order to fit the narrative. So, make sure to always use AI facts and figures as placeholders for you to replace with real data before publishing.
AI writers do a fantastic job generating human-like writer output, but it’s not always great the first time around – sometimes you just need to keep generating new outputs until you find what you like. For the above examples, I had to run the AI templates an average of three times each.
Finally, AI writers are not subject-matter experts. While they can write with the confidence of an expert, they don’t really know the topic. So, always use these tools in areas where you have expertise so you can make the necessary corrections, and never use them to publish content in areas where you don’t already have expertise.