In this Whiteboard Friday, Andy Chadwick explains why content still matters in the age of AI and reveals his 6-step framework to write faster, add personality, and maintain your authentic voice.
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Hello. I am Andy Chadwick, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, I’m going to be speaking about how I use AI to speed up content without losing my voice. Basically, how to use AI the right way to create your content. And by content, I mean top-of-the-funnel or what some people call blog content.
Should we still be creating content?
Before I start, I want to address the elephant in the room. There’s probably a lot of you thinking, “Well, should I even create content anymore?” And it’s a fair assumption to make because AI is stealing a lot of our clicks in the AI Overviews, or people aren’t even Googling anymore. They’re going to ChatGPT and Perplexity and getting their answers straight there. So some of you are thinking, “Should I even invest the time on creating this content?”
To that I’ll say yes, and I’ll give you four key reasons.
The first one is that it still provides you a very good link-building asset. Now imagine you are in quite a boring industry. Let’s say you sell traffic cones, and I’m sorry if that is your website, and you sell traffic cones. But you want to rank for traffic cones, right, and to sell traffic cones invariably. And if you are building links directly to your category pages or your product pages, that’s really risky because there’s not many people naturally going to be linking to a page about traffic cones.
If you develop your really interesting top-of-the-funnel content around what traffic cones are used for and it will be interesting, if you develop that content, then you can build links to that piece as like a shield, and then internally link to your product pages and then boost that through internal linking. So yeah, I guess what I’m trying to say is it provides a safer way to build links to your site.
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Point two is citations. These pieces of content are still getting cited in AI Overviews or in ChatGPT. They still sometimes provide the source from where they got the information. Okay, the clicks are a tenth, if not more, than what you used to get. But if someone is going to get it, at least let it be you, not your competitors. So if they’re still providing citations, we want your content to be the one that’s cited and not anyone else’s.
It might also be worth mentioning at this point, and I’ve got anecdotal evidence from some of our clients, the traffic that does come in, a lot less than they’re used to, but the traffic that does come in through AI tends to convert a lot better. So that’s worth bearing in mind.
Point three is topical authority. Producing all this content still helps your site be seen as a topical authority. And it’s a bit of a nebulous term, but there was a leak in May 2024, and there was some metric that talked about topical authority that Google uses. And so I won’t say too much more on it because, like I said, it is a bit nebulous.
But it’s always been the case that if you’re a suitcase brand and there’s another suitcase brand, and to all intents and purposes, both sites are exactly the same, same speed, same product, everything is the same, same prices, but one suitcase brand talks about other related content around traveling and things with all the internal links and link building to it, that one tends to do better.
So topical authority, although nebulous, is still a very real concept you need to consider and a very real reason why you should still be creating that content.
And finally, point four, original ideas still get shared. If you create something that is genuinely useful and genuinely quite entertaining, not only can you just repurpose that across all your socials now, but they will get shared in their own right.
In a world where brand building is becoming more and more important, spreading your original thought through those guides is key. So that is why you should continue making content.
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Introducing a framework to speed up content creation
But I think what I’m trying to say in this presentation is you can get the best of both worlds because you’re still sitting there thinking, “Well, do I spend £400 or £500 creating an article, or spending 8 hours if it’s not really going to get any clicks?” And I’m saying yes because you can use AI to speed it up, not replace it, but speed it up. You can get the best of both worlds.
And in this presentation, I’m going to be showing you the six steps that I use to combine AI with my original thoughts.
1. Let AI agents do the heavy research
Okay, so step one, I let AI agents do all the heavy research.
So there are various agents out there. I use Manus personally. But you can go and ask an agent, and it’s not like just a chatbot, which is based off of trained knowledge. An agent goes and does the work. So ask an AI agent to do all the heavy lifting for you in terms of your background research.
So I sometimes ask it very broad questions. An example might be, “Go out and find all the reasons that people are complaining about a keyword research tool.” Or, “Can you find statistics around this topic?”
What it does is it speeds up the research time that would have taken me maybe an hour or two and also finding points that I often wouldn’t have thought about. So at this point, I’ve got a document of statistics, of ideas, of things I haven’t thought about, and all the background research behind whatever topic I’m going to be speaking about.
2. Dictate your thoughts instead of typing them out
This then leads me to point two.
I literally just speak to my laptop like it’s a friend. I have an AI transcription software, which is again where I’m using AI, and I speak to my laptop as if it was my mate. And I’m reading all the research that this step has given me, and I’m just debating with it, and I’m musing over it, and I’m just speaking directly into the AI transcriber.
That transcript is then what I use to dump into ChatGPT or Claude, a little bit later, to then form that into a structured argument.
3. Merge research and your voice into a first draft
But, and this is where step three comes in, I combine it with the research that it’s already done. So in step three, I’m asking ChatGPT or Claude, I’m saying, “Look, here’s a load of research on this topic, and here’s all my thoughts on this topic. Can you combine it all and write a fully-written fledged piece of content on this?”
Now the real kicker is, and another tip I’ve got for you here, is if you’re using things like ChatGPT, you can actually train it on your tone of voice too. So you can create a custom GPT, trained off of the actual things that you’ve written in the past, so that it knows how you write, which means not only is it combining the two, but it’s already writing how you would too.
4. Add one example, then multiply it
This leads me to step four.
So I’m actually quite confident and this is probably a piece you can publish as it is, and it’s already better than most of the AI stuff already written. It’s in your tone of voice. It’s actually got research done by it, and it’s in your way of thinking. But I like to go a step further than that. People think in examples, and it helps break down complicated ideas into something more simple.
So I’m reading through this, and it’s done a really good job. It’s done a good job of combining everything. But there’s maybe an example I want to give, and I like to give three examples normally because people think in threes, and just one example isn’t quite enough to grasp an idea.
So let’s say I’ve written a long guide on tangential SEO and what it is. And if you don’t know what that is, tangential SEO is just a concept that you should write not only about things that you sell but things tangential to what you do. So in the example I gave earlier, a suitcase brand might talk about traveling, or Nike might talk about sports playlists.
So let’s say we’re writing a guide about tangential SEO. I’ve given an example. So that example was, yeah, it’d be like Nike writing about sports playlists because it’s not about trainers, it’s about like a gym playlist, right?
And then I’ll be like, “I really want the user to really understand this. So can you give me three more examples?” And it will, and it’ll say it’s like Costa writing about stories and novels because people go into there to read. And I’ll go through and just use AI to help me come up with examples a lot quicker than me having to actually think about it.
5. Use AI to craft metaphores
This then leads me to step five, really similar to step four, but I also like to give metaphors.
Metaphors, again, help break complex ideas down into something more simple. But it also adds a layer of personality to it, especially if the metaphors are funny and keeping in line with whatever my interests are.
Now I like food, hence this drawing of a burger turning into a light bulb, which probably wasn’t obvious for you, but I like food. So I’ll go through and I’ll try and get AI to add metaphors where I think it would fit.
So again, this concept of tangential SEO, I’ll be like, “Can you come up with an overarching metaphor that explains what this is?” And it might say, “Okay, yeah, tangential SEO is like a master chef who has to cater to a wide range of palates, but still fundamentally keeps to his signature flavors.” And maybe that wasn’t very funny, but sometimes I ask it to be a bit funnier, and I’ll go through the whole guide and add more and more metaphors all related to food, so it ties it all together and just brings through my area of personality and my interest into this guide.
6. Let AI polish and conclude the piece
Finally, that leads me to point six, so letting AI polish and conclude the entire piece. But now I’m reading it, and it’s, again, really good, perfectly fine to publish it as it is, but it’s maybe a bit long. So I’ll use AI to maybe shorten paragraphs.
Sometimes this example might not flow into this metaphor, and sometimes the structure breaks. So I’ll ask it to make the transitions between paragraphs smoother.
Sometimes I think it could do with a little restructure. So I’ll ask it to do that. Oftentimes, I’ll want a CTA at the end, like sign up to this. I’ll ask it to come up with that.
So I’m using AI just at the end to make sentences smaller, improve transitions, add CTAs, and then finally make a conclusion.
Use AI as a tool to refine your ideas
So I’m going to conclude on this. Use AI, but not to generate the whole article. Use it to refine ideas, add metaphors, add examples, do the research, get the outline, but inject that with your original ideas.
Original thought still wins. And in a world where everyone is just generating AI fluff, you do need to stand out in that world. And I gave you four reasons at the beginning of this talk about why you still need to create content, and that still holds true.
Use AI in the right way to create it, not just to mass generate it.
Have a great Friday, everyone. Please follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter or X, whatever it’s called now. You’ll find me there. And I hope that was useful, and I hope that you still go away and create content. Please do. And use AI, but do it in the right way and get your original ideas out there.