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We share our thoughts and ideas on how to grow a business.
We have started really experimenting with
different AI tools and finally have come
to the conclusion that the technology
is just getting so good that we can't
ignore it anymore, and it is able to
produce content at a very high quality
level if you know how to use it properly.
This might get me in trouble, but it's
honest, so I'm gonna say it is a few
things that you did not say that I will
be the bad guy and say, I don't think
a lot of these marketers or agencies.
Even know what good quality
content is, and I don't think
they were producing it before.
Ai.
Things are really gonna change in
the future, and this is kind of why
I wrote that piece around AI is going
to be the age of the creative marketer
because the more creative ideas are the
ones that are gonna win going forward.
I truly think that in the next two to
three years, producing just written
word content from those really good
content teams will become table stakes.
And the really, really good content teams
are going to be the ones that just wow
people, the pieces of content they create.
People will never have seen something
like this before because AI enables
them to build just any of their ideas
now where they just wouldn't have
been able to execute on it before.
Welcome to another episode of the
Grow and Convert Marketing Show.
I'm Daish.
This is Benji.
Today we are going to
talk about how our agency.
Is using ai.
So unlike a lot of our recent episodes
that are more our perspective on how to
do X, y, Z, this is gonna be a little bit
more of, um, opening our door and kind of
talking about how we're approaching it.
So, Benji, take it away.
Yeah.
Uh, even that intro might be
surprising for some people.
I know we've kind of gone back and forth
on our thoughts of AI over the years.
Um.
I think we first started talking about it
in 2023, right when chat GPT was released.
And I even have an article here that
I can share just kind of sharing
those thoughts from the early days.
So I, I actually looked at the
date when this was published,
not the last updated date, but it
was published in May 17th, 2023.
And as we started playing
around with ai, I wrote this.
Post to kind of share our thoughts
at that point in time, um, which
was essentially that if AI content
is going to do a lot of the things
that people said it was going to do.
So these were some of the predictions
at the time, and I can kind of walk
through which ones we think have kind
of come true and which ones haven't.
But AI is going to remove
the need for writers.
I still don't think this one's true.
Um, you're going to be able to
produce 10 x the content with ai.
Th this one actually might be true.
Um, but we'll get into
more of the details around.
This search is gonna become way
more competitive because companies
will able to churn out hundreds of
blog posts in the amount of time
it takes a human to produce one.
This is also kind of true, but we need
to talk through some of the details of
this because there's a lot of companies
that are doing this now, um, that see
an initial spike in results and then
see a massive decline because they're
just not approaching this the right way.
Um, keyword strategy won't be
important because you can produce
so much content that you'll be
able to rank for anything Not true.
I still don't necessarily agree with this.
Yeah.
Writers will become prompt engineers.
This one actually is fairly true and,
and we'll kind of explain how we're
thinking about this and how our team
is starting to think of this, but I, I
do think this is true in that I think
the way that you produce content.
Is going to change from a writer
needing to write everything
themselves line by line to almost
being more of the orchestrator.
Um, yeah.
The orchestrator of the content piece,
they have the idea in mind of what they're
trying to achieve, and they're working
back and forth with an LLM or some content
production tool to get the outcome.
And they're still writing, but
they're writing in smaller chunks and
they're writing their original ideas.
Into the LLM and the LLM is helping
them organize those thoughts
into a cohesive piece is kind
of more how I'm thinking of it.
We hope so.
Yeah.
Like, and I think that's the perfect
segue actually, the, the last two or three
of these points is the perfect segue.
Into the first thing I think you want to
talk about, which is quality or the, the
next thing you wanna talk about, which
is quality is like, we hope they're doing
what you just said in terms of prompt
engineering, but from what we have seen
and heard, including from other clients,
our clients experience with other.
Agencies and vendors, many are just
doing straight automated AI content
that is barely, or in some cases we have
been told literally not touched by a
human, and in our view that is AI slot.
That is dangerous, and that is exactly
what you talked about, which is multiple
people have reported in the SEO industry
that that has led to this spike in
traffic, followed by some sort of
shadow type penalty by Google, meaning
you're not gonna see it as an official
penalty with an email and a notice on
search console, you'll just notice that
a lot of your traffic has absolutely
dropped off the face of the Earth
and it takes a long time to get back.
Yeah.
So I wanted to go back to this post,
um, in the very beginning because it's
gonna tie to some of the things we're
gonna talk about in this episode.
But essentially, I say all these arguments
centered around the theme of companies
being able to do way more with less.
But none of the conversation is focused
around the quality of AI content and
if your customers will actually want
to read anything produced with ai.
And I think this part of this
post becomes true, and it's
still relevant today because.
The way a lot of the agencies and
marketers in house are approaching, AI
is still around this theme of doing more
than less, but they have sacrificed the
idea of quality content because they
have this idea that if they can just
rank for a bunch of different keywords
or produce a bunch of content, that
quality doesn't really matter anymore.
Um, and I do not think that this
is going to pan out well for a
lot of the agencies that are just.
Producing really high volume at the
expense of quality, or same with the
in-house marketers that are producing
things at the expense of quality.
So I think what we wanna argue today is
that the way to use AI going forward is
yes, you are gonna be able to do, produce
more content with less resources, but.
If you're sacrificing that
quality bar, it's going to come
back to bite you in a big way.
And the focus of how to use AI should
really be around how do I produce
more while maintaining that same
quality bar that you had before,
before you get into the details.
And I think you, you're going to get into
the details of how we are starting to
use AI to help with content production.
And speed, but maintain
really high quality.
I'm gonna say some things on what you
just said about why it seems like your
observation that others aren't doing it.
This might get me in
trouble, but it's honest.
So I'm gonna say it is a few things that
you did not say that I will be the bad
guy and say also, I don't think a lot
of these marketers or agencies even know
what good quality content is, and I don't
think they were producing it before ai.
Maybe it's not gonna get me in trouble
because we kind of said this many years
ago with our post on Mirage content.
I even said it actually in
that same post that I shared
the next, the next eight two.
It makes me need like less of a bad guy.
No.
The next eight two is Chachi
PT is Mirage Content 2.0.
Yeah.
Because, because.
I think what I argued here, and I still
see the main problem being is that
people took a bad process around content
production and then amplified it using ai.
So if they already weren't doing things
like focusing on getting originality
into their pieces or unique ideas.
The company's thoughts and weaving
that into the content, then they
already weren't doing a good job.
Uh, yes.
Arguing.
They took, they took a L
process and made it lazier.
That's what AI lets you do.
Exactly.
So like what I was objecting to
is the way you phrased it, gave
them too much credit five minutes
ago where you phrased it like.
They had this choice of high quality
versus not, and they're choosing to
go with high volume over quality.
And I'm saying, I'm not sure 90%
of these people even had a choice.
'cause I don't think they could
produce quality content before.
They don't have the taste for it.
They didn't know the, the process of it.
They didn't create that.
That's why we wrote Mirage
content a million years ago.
And that's why you're calling
this Mirage Content 2.0.
Like in order to be able to
produce quality content from ai.
You're right.
First you have to have
the desire to do it.
You're right.
And we, we sort of approached it being
like, quality content is our lifeblood.
That's what's built our entire business.
Um, and so therefore we need
to figure out how to do it.
You're right.
They need that intention.
And then, but what I'm saying, which
is maybe the part that's gonna.
Make me look like cocky or whatever
is then you need to actually be able
to know what quality content is and
have some kind of process pre or
without AI to even do it in order
to have a hope of doing it with ai.
Okay.
I'll get off my soapbox.
Fast forward to today.
I, I still think a lot of the arguments
in that post were true, which is
that people are thinking about
quality over qua, uh, quantity over
quality and that they're taking a bad
process and kind of amplifying that.
Yeah.
And, and I think when we wrote that post.
The main LLM at that point in
time was chat, GPT, and the
problem with chat GPT was that it
hallucinated a lot of what it wrote.
It wasn't even chat GPT.
All models back then were sort of,
he heavier on the hallucination
and they just weren't as good.
Yeah.
So we were more anti AI writing
at that point in time just because
of where the technology was.
We had tested things out and
we continued to test things out
over the, the, the years to see.
How good the technology was getting and
if, if it could basically replace our
writing process or the way that we wrote.
And in the last two to three months,
or even in the last month, really,
we have started really experimenting
with different AI tools and finally
have come to the conclusion that.
The technology is just getting so
good that we can't ignore it anymore,
and it is able to produce content
at a very high quality level if
you know how to use it properly.
And so essentially what we're starting
to do is trying to mimic our approach
to writing the manual way and, and doing
it in AI tools because again, I think it
all starts with having a good process.
And if you don't have a good process.
Then no matter what tool you use, it
isn't going to fix your content problem.
It's not gonna turn bad
content into good content.
But what we do believe now is that
AI can really help us produce content
at the same quality bar much faster.
And the different thing is it act, it
can actually enable us to do things
that we weren't able to do before.
And so I wrote this post last week, AI
and the Age of the Creative Marketer,
and in this post I argue that essentially
the last 10 to 15 years has been.
The age of the performance marketer, the
data-driven marketer, where everything
was measurable and marketing largely
fell to performance marketing channels.
So content marketing, all the
way direct attribution, paid
marketing, direct attribution.
Everything was about about measuring
everything and basically the
marketing craft all skewed to.
Measuring performance and
really data-driven marketers.
And the more creative marketers that
had these large ideas for campaigns and
things like that weren't really able to
execute it because they didn't have the
resources available and couldn't get the
budgets to approve a lot of their ideas.
And by the way, if I can interject Sure.
We, we were part of that, very much
part of that, our, our whole, um,
positioning and, and, and strategy and
framework around bottom of funnel was.
Part and parcel with that thinking
that the whole argument around pain
point SEO is that when you look and
measure the results, these bottom of
funnel articles convert a lot higher.
And to give credit to sort of
this what you're calling creative
marketers, um, but I would say maybe
top of funnel brand type marketers.
Is that this cultural ethos that you're
speaking of in marketing where it
became numbers and performance driven
hurt folks that focused on marketing
tactics and strategies that were
more top of funnel or brand based.
And we have mentioned this before, I
believe in an episode here, if not,
definitely in our content before that.
Please don't mistake.
Mistaken US, or I don't know the right
phrasing, like, please don't take us
the wrong way, let's say that way.
Um, we're not saying there's
no place for top of funnel.
Absolutely any marketer worth their
weight and Salt knows that the
ultimate dream for a brand is to
have so much brand recognition that
you just end up getting this kind
of word of mouth kind of dominance.
In your space when people
are thinking about it.
And ultimately that's gonna require
some brand marketing, right?
And some top of funnel type stuff.
And, and that ties into what you're
saying here is there was a pull
away from that to things that were
directly, directly attributable.
Paid what we're talking about a bottom of
funnel and, and, and where you're gonna
go is now AI search is muddying that.
Yeah.
So creative marketers or things that
you couldn't measure, weren't really
getting budgets from a lot of companies.
Like the company was just like, if I
can't really attribute it, I, I don't
know if it's worth spending money on.
But I think now having used AI for the,
the last few weeks pretty heavily and
just done different projects with it.
I had this realization that there's
gonna be a resurgence of the creative
marketer and the, and the reason
is because the creative marketer to
pull off a lot of their campaigns
or their ideas needed multiple
stakeholders in their company involved.
And oftentimes the company
couldn't justify spending
money on these activities.
'cause they were really large
projects, again, that were
somewhat Irma immeasurable.
But now.
Using ai, this creative
marketer can execute from their
vision to finished campaign or
finished product with AI alone.
And so it now changes this dynamic
where you used to be constrained by.
The resources in your company to now
you're kind of constrained just by the
amount of ideas that you have and how
much a single person can execute on.
And so there's this big sh i I think
what is going to lead to over the next
five or 10 years is a big resurgence
in this creative becoming very valuable
because they're gonna have tons of
different ideas for ways that they can.
Grow the company and now execute it
on their own, using ai, building their
own apps, building their own mini
products, building landing pages,
building all sorts of stuff with ai.
And so this person is now
gonna become very valuable.
Um, so we do talk about some of the
things that we've discussed already.
AI accelerates whatever you already are.
If you're not, if you don't
really have a process or strategy.
Uh, it's not really going to help you
solve that problem, but if you do have a
really good process or you do have really
good ideas, AI is gonna help amplify
that and you can kind of 10 x yourself.
I also want to share that I wrote this
post with ai, this was AI assisted again,
and if, and if you read it line by line, I
would, I would make the argument that most
people wouldn't be able to distinguish.
This writing from my own, and it's
largely because of the way that I
used AI to help me produce this.
This is all my own original thoughts.
I didn't ask AI to come up
with the arguments for me.
I gave it the arguments.
And I used AI to help formulate
the structure of this piece.
That's critical.
By the way you people listening,
if, if you glossed over this
should pause and rewind 10
seconds and listen to that again.
Yeah.
Because that I think is the core of
the problem that we were talking about
be with and without AI of folks that
are producing low quality content.
Yeah.
Like I, I think this is gonna become the
key thing with content production is.
The quality bar needs to be, is
the content indistinguishable
from a human's writing?
Yeah.
And that is going to be the key thing
going forward is when you can tell it's
written by ai, and this is still where
a lot of other companies are at where.
We can read an article and
tell if it's written by ai.
If a human can do it, Google's
gonna be able to do it.
Your customers are gonna be able to do it.
Not, not going to, not going to.
This is already happening.
You're speaking in future tense,
but both things you talked
about are already happening.
I guarantee you, whatever writer
you're working with, no matter
what they're telling you, they
are using AI to help them write.
Fine.
I'll say 99%, maybe there's 1% of writers.
I'm sure there actually are because we've
talked to some and they're very sort of,
there's some folks that are just like,
staunchly, I'm never gonna, whatever.
But 99% are already doing it.
So this is happening.
And also most people listening,
I think themselves are using it.
They're probably helping it write
emails like everyone is doing this.
Um, as an aside, I think that also
ties into something you said at
the very beginning, which is like.
Sort of are your customers, it was
in your article, are your customers
gonna be okay reading AI content?
I think what I'm seeing culturally is
using AI tools and, and you're gonna be,
we're talking about like fancy agentic
tools, but just like what things like
are parents are using, like Chacha BT
has sifted through the culture so fast.
Has spread through the culture so fast.
People are getting so used to talking
to and interacting with ai that I think
that initial resistance back when you
wrote that, let's say like roughly a
year ago from when we're recording,
where it felt weird and it's like, I
don't wanna, no, it was three years ago.
Oh my god.
That was three years ago.
Yes.
Oh God.
Let's see.
That's hopefully the angles
of this YouTube video.
You can't show the number of gray
hairs I have versus three years ago.
But anyway, PE people
are just used to it now.
We're all kind of used to it,
and so it's not as big of a deal.
So they're doing that.
And then the second thing you
said is already happening.
It's not Google will that I think
Peak recently released a study and
everyone has talked about this.
If Google is already punishing low quality
content, and I think that merging of like,
it doesn't matter who wrote it, we can
just all tell when content is helpful or
not, whether it's AI or human written.
And that was our argument of the Google
research paper that was bad content.
Way before ai.
It was freelance writers showing
up, Googling a topic and writing
some basic article, intro this guide
to this, and just summarizing it.
It was poor quality That was,
you know, people say AI slop.
That is just freelance writer slop
and every company was doing it.
And so LOP is slop
regardless of who does it.
Yeah.
I, I think it's worth giving
a nod to peak on this study.
We've seen similar things.
We've seen numbers of case studies
being shown that the companies
that are just producing a a ton of
content without a focus on quality,
it's leading to bad results.
And this study by Peak kind of
shows the same thing, both from a
visibility perspective and they're
also losing Google rankings.
And so there's a ton of people just trying
to use AI to produce content on their own.
And again, they don't
have that lens of quality.
They don't have any original
information in there.
They're scraping different data
sources to come up with the arguments
for what's in the piece instead of
relying on their own expertise and.
It is just not working.
It you, you, for a lot of these
people, they see this initial bump.
And then you see this decline right
after, uh, we had a, a client that
we were working with late last year
where they, they had worked with
an agency that was just pumping out
AI content and their whole site got
de-indexed, including their homepage.
Oh.
Just to be precise.
It was not de-indexed, it was indexed.
They got what we have been referring to
as a casual term of a shadow penalty.
Yeah, like we said, I mean, so tying
this back to what you were talking about
at your process and, and we discussed
briefly before we started recording, but
we can, you can decide how much of our
internal process we, we want to share.
Obviously to some extent, it's like a
process that we are spending a lot of.
Our time, you and mine, but also the
whole team's time carefully honing.
So you know, we're not gonna share
every detail of it 'cause it's
like sort of near and dear to us.
Um, but, but, but continue your
story of producing that article.
So we paused and I think the
most important part, which is
the ideas you did not seed to ai.
And that's what we're saying
people are, are making a
mistake, is just automating it.
Start to finish.
Here's my air Ops or innate end process
where ai, I give it a keyword and AI
researches what people are saying.
AI structures and outlines it.
AI turns that into a draft and
everything start to finish as ai.
And so by definition you don't
have good quality ideas are all,
that's not what you did here.
That's not what we're doing.
Yeah.
So in, in my own writing process for that
piece and, and I have produced, I think.
Three or four pieces in a little over
a week, which is very rare for me
if, if you've looked at our blog, I
haven't written in a long time because
writing for me takes a lot of effort,
mental effort of just clarifying
the arguments that go into the piece
before I even get to the writing stage.
And then the actual writing process
takes me a decent amount of time.
I wouldn't say that I
am a writer at heart.
I am a marketer that can write, and
so it has always be, it's, it's always
been a little challenging for me to,
to write articles quickly compared to
the well-versed writers on our team.
But the way that I've been using
AI recently is to help me clarify
a lot of those ideas upfront.
I think in the past, what I
used to do is I used to call
Davis and we'd have 30 minutes.
Calls and hour long calls going
through the arguments of a piece.
And that was how I clarified
the idea before I could write.
And then I would sit down and write
and the article could take me two
to three hours if I was really in a
flow or it could take me 10 hours if
I was struggling getting through the,
the structuring of the arguments.
And I think over the last few weeks
I've gone that writing time down to.
At best two hours, uh, at
worst, like five hours.
So there, there is a
significant time savings.
And again, I'm not using it in a way of
saying I wanna write this piece on AI
and the age of the creative marketer.
Can you write this blog post for me?
I come up with the idea, I'm going
back and forth and I'm doing this in
an iterative process, and I'm saying,
here are the key parts of the arguments.
That I, I want in the piece, here's
the way I wanna structure it.
I give it a raw outline, and then it's
helping me e essentially craft the
arguments in a way that makes sense.
And then I'm doing a round of edits
in the LLM, and then I'm also doing
a round of manual edits after.
So it's, it's all of my own ideas.
It's all of my own edits, and
I'm getting to the outcome that
I want much faster, but it's not.
A fully automated process, and I
think that is the mistake that I see
a lot of people making is they're
trying to automate everything.
Again, I think if, if you're trying
to automate everything and you don't
have a good process, it's gonna end
up with a really, really bad outcome.
Even if you have a good process and
you're trying to automate everything,
I still don't think it's gonna end up
with the outcome that you want, because
every single piece that you write.
Requires a slightly different approach
and it, it is not a cookie cutter process.
Even.
Even with our agency, we have different
styles of SEO pieces that on the surface
kind of look cookie, cookie cutter.
They're like an SEO piece going
after a category keyword or an
alternatives keyword, and a lot
of them follow similar structures.
But there's nuances to doing those piece
for every single account and every single
piece that we do that if we tried to
take some fully automated approach and
said, pull this information for this
piece, structure it in this exact same
way with these H twos, it's just not
going to end up performing well, and
it's not going to end up getting that
uniqueness or originality in the pieces.
And so I think.
This is still the mistake that I see
a lot of people making is they're
trying to automate everything.
And I think to get to that outcome
where you have content that's very
indistinguishable from a human.
It really takes an iterative approach
with AI and having pieces of those
processes be automated, but not the
entire content production process.
Yeah.
An analogy that comes to mind, and
this is not a perfect analogy, but I
think it's it's instructive, is I had a
conversation with a friend of mine that
owns a business that's in kind of the
IT development, um, sphere, and he has.
An offshore team, and he said, Daish, this
was like years ago, like early Chatt PT.
He said, Daish, this has
been transformative from just
an English language level.
And I was like, what do you mean?
And he said, previously I couldn't
have any of those members of the
team be talking directly to clients
just because their English wasn't
good, their written English.
And so now they can just
say what they need to say.
They're the developers
working on the project.
And then Chachi PT just turns
it into native sounding English.
So in that respect, he, all of the
ideas, it's a developer, like updating
the client on the project status.
The idea is in the developer,
it's in their language and chat.
BT just translates into English.
There is a useful ana, it's not perfect,
but it's a useful analogy here to
what you're saying is you're saying.
The way we're doing it, the way you wrote
this article and what we're experimenting
with both for ourselves and for our
clients, is the ideas is still ours.
What you're using AI for is translating
the idea into fully written English.
In my analogy, it was from another
language, but in this case it's like.
You, you have all of the ideas like,
this is what we wanna say, this
is how we wanna flow, whatever.
And it's that last piece of just turning
it into polished full sentences and
prose that is very tedious and that
language generation AI is very good at.
And some another like peek behind
the door that I'll say that you
didn't say in in our discussion is.
Benji in setting up his process, had this
conversation, um, with this AI tool, and,
and, and it even was smart enough to admit
like, I can't think of X, Y, Z things.
That the, the previous articles that
you're, that you wrote that you're
wanting me, that we're analyzing Do,
so you are gonna need to provide that.
It was, it was aware enough to know
that, like you need the original
ideas and so that's what we're saying.
And AI is just there to turn it into
language and fully polished English.
And then even then you're saying
then you heavily touch it again.
Two more times to be like, okay,
now you, you got that down.
It's, it's like, it's like you're
using it to just conquer blank
page syndrome, which causes a lot
of like hesitation in writing.
Exactly.
And then once you have that, you
can edit from there pretty quickly.
Yep, exactly.
So I think big picture where I see
this going is that the people that
are good at content marketing.
Producing just normal written blog
posts should become table stakes.
They're gonna get really good
at using these tools to produce
content at a very high quality.
And again, I don't think that that's
gonna be a majority of people, but I
think, yeah, I'm not even sure if I agree
with that for the reasons I already,
like went on a tirade earlier in this
episode about is like, most people
are not properties at a high quality.
Most people won't.
But I think the, the good
content marketers Yes.
And, and, and the, the
very good content teams.
Again, the ones that have a, a great
process, the ones that are already ranking
well, those people should be able to
produce high quality SEO content and
just even like that essay, high quality
content in general that is just written
only, that should be become table stakes.
Where things get really interesting is
I think the next iteration of content
marketing is going to be people using
AI to create very cool content projects
that they weren't able to do before,
or that would've taken their team
a week or two weeks to execute on.
And so these are, instead of just
going after a keyword with written
words, you can now build an app.
Or a tool to satisfy search intent.
And there's already been people doing
this over the years, but I would
say it's not happening as much as it
could happen because those projects
were really difficult to execute on.
You would, you would need to, to write
something to go after that keyword,
and then you would have to have a
designer come in and design this
mini app, design the logic for it.
If it was a like a tool or a calculator,
you would have to have someone
create the modeling behind that.
Think of those skill sets that requires
someone that knows Excel really well.
How to financial model or how to,
how to like wire frame something
and then you need dev resources
at the end of all of that to turn
it into like an interactive thing.
Exactly.
Then it goes to design development
and then all these companies
were resource constrained.
They had their developers and designers
were working on other projects.
They're not gonna, they're not gonna
like do market last on the list.
Yeah.
They're not gonna do content projects.
When they're, when their same
designers and developers are just
trying to build their site and grow
their business already, like it,
the, the marketing team never got the
budgets for those kind of resources.
But this is where things get
really interesting in the future.
If, if I look to the future of what really
great content is gonna be, the very good
content teams are gonna be looking at a
keyword and thinking, what is the coolest
project that I could do to go after this?
It, it's what can I build?
What, what can like truly
differentiate this content piece
than anything else else out there?
Can I make this page interactive?
Can I make a quiz to
go after this keyword?
Can I make some sort of tool
that really helps the customer?
And these also don't need to be fully SEO
driven, but the SEO driven ones will get
the benefit of the distribution behind it.
But I think things are really
gonna change in the future.
And this is kind of why I
wrote that piece around.
AI is going to be the age of the
creative marketer because the
more creative ideas are the ones
that are gonna win going forward.
Again, I I truly think that in the
next, let's say two to three years
producing just written word content
from those really good content
teams will become table stakes.
And the really, really good content
teams are going to be the ones
that just wow people, the pieces
of content that they create.
People will never have seen something
like this before because AI enables
them to build just any of their ideas
now where they just wouldn't have
been able to execute on it before.
And so that's where we
want to go as a business.
I think now, if we talk about our own
agency and how we see content changing,
we're currently in the process of
our whole team is experimenting with.
How to produce that same quality content
that we've always been known for with
AI so that it is truly indistinguishable
from our writing process before.
And we don't ever see a world where
we're just publishing content at scale.
Yeah.
Untouched AI flop or just content.
Content written with
AI that looks like ai.
Again, our quality bar is still gonna be
the same, whereas we're not gonna publish
stuff that looks like it's AI generated.
Or that you could even tell
it's grow and convert pre AI
versus grow and convert post ai.
But I think the really cool opportunity
that we see is now starting to think
about content differently in terms of
not only going after keywords from a
written word standpoint, but thinking
through what is the most unique or
compelling way to go after this keyword?
What can we build?
What can we do for our clients that
is truly unique and differentiated
that will help us get rankings just
because it's so helpful to that user?
And that's kind of where we want to go.
I think in, for those that have
been following us since the very
beginnings of the agency, we were doing
those kind of projects in the very
beginning with our first few clients.
Like we were doing crazy data analysis.
And we have like some examples of what
those pieces looked like back then,
but, and if you're listening and you're
like, well, then why did you stop?
It's because we, back then, we did
it in a slightly less mature way.
But this was like, we're talking
like almost a decade ago.
This was 2000?
Yeah, this was 2017.
So serving 5,000 developers and
then doing extreme data analysis
on the cost of freelancers in, in
different regions around the world.
And these pieces.
Got picked up by tons of publications
because they were super unique.
They had unique data that no one
else had access to, just 'cause
of the nature of their business.
And we helped them produce
this piece that kind of went
viral in their, their industry.
And I think it's these kind of
content projects that AI now enables
us to do, again, for our existing
clients and for new clients because.
Now we have a tool that can help us
analyze this data set very quickly,
whereas opposed, like I remember back
then we hired some person off ex uh,
Upwork, or you used one of your friends
who's very good at modeling in Excel.
To, to even do this piece because
to do this kind of data analysis
was just very complicated back then.
So a few, a few fun comments about this.
First of all, shout out to them
that that from 2017 is still there.
I think they've updated it in, in the
screenshot you were sharing there.
Those graphs, they've like updated it.
I can tell.
I originally plotted those and
designed it in like keynote
because I'm not an actual designer.
I don't think Figma
even existed back then.
And then, but the colors of those bars
I picked, 'cause they're my keynote
defaults and I still see the bar
graphs have those same colors, even
though they like redesigned it and,
and, and to complete the story I was
saying, if you're listening and being
like, well you guys used to do it.
Like why, why are you, why did you stop?
Is because.
Of the exact reason Benji's saying this
resource constraint is we then, you
know, if you followed us long enough,
we have articles showing this history.
We then discovered pain point SEO and the
conversion potential of bottom of funnel.
So we shifted to doing that, and this is
exactly what we're talking about here.
If you're asking why, why?
If you guys are maintaining the
exact same quality and you think
it's indistinguishable from
pre ai, why even use AI at all?
And the answer is because
it still saves time.
Again, we're not gonna reveal
everything in our process because
it's too near and dear to us.
But what Benji is saying is we have
figured out how to, we're in the
process, but it very promising and
we're figuring out as we speak, how to
produce a high, are high quality, using
our process, but have AI assist us.
Why?
Because it saves us a bunch of time.
In that actual writing parts.
And so now that it saves us time there
and it can obviously save time in these
doing this kind of data analysis and
even now these, some of these are so
powerful, they can help with designing
and the HTML CSS and creating that.
As Benji said, you would normally have
to go to dev and design resources, which
they always put the Mon marketing and
content team last on their priority list.
All of these things save
time, so now we can do both.
Now we can continue to provide the pain
point SEO bottom of funnel conversion
heavy work for our clients and go
back to doing some of these pieces,
which by the way, you mentioned some
from like using this more creative
ideas to amplify your SEO content.
We're also brainstorming, doing straight
up non SEO content that can go viral
and have other uses for our clients.
And so that's really exciting.
So it's still the, the, the core
reason is the same as everyone else.
Is this thing saves time.
You can get more done.
But if I can summarize what you're
saying, it's that what we're seeing a
lot of other people do is, oh, I can
get more in the same amount of time.
I'm just gonna produce more slop.
I was producing freelance writer slop
before what we called Google research
papers, and I'm gonna do it more with ai.
And we're saying, no, no, we're gonna use
that time to keep the quality bar high and
then do even more creative and cool stuff.
That normally was just an absolute
resource like constrained thing
that you just like can't do as a
marketer or a marketing team without
a bunch of other resources and that.
I want to echo what you
said is super exciting.
I think all of us have like, it
has invigorated kind of the team.
There's just like ideas.
Being spit out every day.
Slack is super interesting.
You and I are like texting or calling
each other at odd hours being like,
I just thought of this other idea.
Um, and, and, and that's been very
exciting and I'll leave it with this.
I, I think AI is going to enable us to
improve many aspects of our service.
So we have reporting that we're
kind of rethinking now because we
have access to be able to plug into
different analytics tools and view
analytics in a different way than.
A lot of the out of the box tools
allowed us to do before, so we're
kind of rethinking that whole process.
And then I think as I think to the future,
content will not only be about SEO, and
it's not to say that it hasn't been so
far, but I think because of the nature
of SEO being the best distribution, we've
heavily leaned on SEO as the way to drive
traffic and conversions for our clients.
But if, if I really think to the next.
A few years in terms of
how content will change.
I, I think we're gonna take the
approach to SEO still being the
foundational backbone because that's
the thing that compounds over time.
But also now having other ideas and,
and taking a more holistic approach to
content marketing where we can now do
data pieces that get pitched through PR
channels or we just create such cool.
Pieces of content that they just
naturally get shared in the industry
because they're so unique and no one
else has done that kind of stuff.
And that's really what we're thinking
about going into the future here is
not only just how to produce our same
quality content faster, but just how
we can do content in a way that goes
viral just because of how cool it is.
And I think that's where.
The ideas for AI and the creative marketer
really came from, because I think if
I have a, a look into the future, I
think that's where things are gonna go,
is the people that build the coolest
things are the ones that are gonna win.
You.
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