Some people might believe that AI has waged a war on writers and their ability to sustain themselves as storytellers on the internet. Well, it might be true for some folks out there, but still, we all need humans to hand-hold AI when it comes to producing anything better than a lackluster copy.
It doesn’t matter if you are a content writer, academic writer, or copywriter; it is time for you to start using AI tools to keep up with the deadlines and streamline your workflow.
We know it is easier said than done, so today, with this article, we are going to show you how you can leverage the power of AI to take the extra heat off your shoulders and focus on more important things, which is curating the content that your client requires from you.
AI tools and their functionality can be implemented at every stage of your workflow, and here we are just going to provide you with a little glimpse of what you can achieve from it and how easy the use of AI tools can make your writing task. So, without wasting another minute, let’s dive in.
Why Do Your Writing Workflows Need To Upgrade Now?
Writing has changed a lot in the past 2 – 3 years, and some of the changes were driven by the implementation of AI and constant changes in search engines’ algorithms, which have made writers raise both their quality and speed of providing content.
See till the time humans are able to read, watch, and listen, the requirement of content is going to be there, and it will grow exponentially with time, but if you are still following the old school method of writing workflow, you are soon going to face burnout.
Here are a few reasons that the old writing workflow needs to be gone for good:
Common Bottlenecks
As a writer, one of the first things you have to do when you get any task is you start researching. Research can go up to hours, and if the topic is too technical or complex, it could take days before you can come up with an actual framework.
In such situations, AI tools can be a huge time-saver, especially for academic writers who often find themselves thinking, “Can someone just write my research paper for me?”
Tools like research paper summarizers can help break down dense material and provide concise summaries, allowing writers to focus on structuring their own insights faster and more efficiently.
On the other hand, starting from scratch when writing content is still one of the hardest parts for many writers out there, especially when they are working under tight deadlines.
The Growing Demand for Faster & Scalable Content
Writers are now expected to produce more content, ranging from email marketing campaigns to LinkedIn posts to social media platforms to website copies and even long-form blogs, all of this while still maintaining the platform-specific tone and length.
Writers are now required to merge their creativity with data, visual assets, and even use performance analytics, which results in the addition of an already complex workflow.
How AI Tools Can Power Your Writing Workflow: A Stage-by-Stage Enhancement?
Now let’s find out how you can use powerful AI tools to make your content workflow more efficient and streamlined:
Stage 1: Content Research & Ideation
As we already told one of the first steps of writing is research, generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Copy.ai and Writesonic can be your guardian when it comes to generating ideas for the topic, you can ask specific questions to find out more about the industry trends, include keywords that were given to you by the SEO team. You can also mention the audience’s interests.
Furthermore, you can also ask the AI with the right prompt to come up with an engaging hook and titles that are optimised for SEO or social media platforms. You can use these tools to brainstorm new ideas about the campaign’s theme or blog series in seconds by describing the niche for which you are curating content.
Stage 2: Content Planning & Structure
You can take help from AI tools like Notion AI, Surfer SEO, and Outranking, which can help you create a basic framework for the content in just a few minutes. With these AI tools, you can prioritise key sections and subheadings by analysing the top-performing content from your niche.
In addition to this, these tools can also be used to align your content with the buyer’s journey or to the different stages of the sales funnel, thus ensuring each section of your content is able to provide the correct information that suits the audience’s requirement.
Stage 3: Drafting The Content
After completing the planning and coming up with the structure of your content, you can again use AI tools like ChatGPT, Writesonic, Jasper, and Copy.ai to improve the clarity of your content and maintain a consistent tone.
AI can act as a collaborative writing partner for you, thus helping you in creating a compelling first draft, which is polished and has the right tonality that your client requires.
You can even use the AI tool to expand bullet points to full-fledged paragraphs while again maintaining your natural tone. Besides this, you can even rewrite and rephrase the content to make sure there are no repetitive words present in it, and at the same time, it also improves your content’s clarity.
Stage 4: Proofreading
See, even some of the most experienced writers out there indeed need a second pair of eyes, and AI tools like Grammarly, Hemingway, and others can come in handy.
After you are done writing your first draft, you can pick any AI of your choice to act as an intelligent editor, it can catch even small mistakes which you might not consider, it can also improve the structure of your content and help you in aligning your tone with the intended audience where you missed.
On the other hand, you can also use these AI-powered tools to break up long and complex sentences in short form, replace jargon with simpler alternatives, change passive voice to active voice, and even include transitional phrases to make the content more cohesive and easy to read.
Stage 5: Optimizing Content For SEO
This stage is quite crucial if you are writing content for the internet. In that case, you need to make sure that it follows all the SEO guidelines, as it helps your content to be seen on the internet. A content, no matter how well it is written and how much information it provides, won’t get many views if it hasn’t undergone SEO optimization.
You can take assistance from Surfer SEO, SEO Yoast, NeuronWriter, Frase, and Outranking to identify keyword variations and long-tail opportunities that you can incorporate into the content.
Likewise, you can use these AI tools to analyze competitors’ content to find out which of the following keywords they are using to drive more traffic to their website.
Stage 6: Plagiarism Checker & Fact Checking
You have done your research, you take inspiration from various blogs, podcasts, forum pages, sub-reddits, and from answers that were published on Quora. After taking all the inspiration you need, you write the content, but before submitting it to the client, it is your responsibility to check whether your content is plagiarism-free or not.
If the content is plagiarized, it will not rank on the search engine result page; thus, all your hard work will be of no use. By using AI tools like Grammarly, Quetext, Copyscape, and Orignality.AI, you can find out phrases that are plagiarized in your content.
You can also ask these AI tools to paraphrase your content and make it plagiarism-free, but be sure of one thing: closely paraphrased content will again be red-flagged by search engines’ algorithms.
Collaborate Don’t Paste
AI tools are here to stay, and the earlier writers start ethically using them, the better it will be for them. AI is your co-writer; it works as an assistant for you, but it cannot completely replace you or become your ghostwriter.
You should learn how to provide high-quality prompts to AI tools to get the most accurate outputs from them. You can combine various tools that we have mentioned in different stages of the writing workflow to create your own set of AI assistance.
But no matter what you do, don’t use the entire copy of AI or take every single fact coming out of AI to be true, check the facts, and use your creativity to form content that beats everyone else.
