Generating blog posts for content marketing with Copy.ai

No matter what type of startup you have you won’t get customers until people know about you. This is why marketing is critical to every type of business, and with consumers increasingly starting their purchase research online your startup’s Web presence is key to your marketing success.

Content marketing is a popular technique that involves writing articles that are interesting to your target audience and will (ideally) rank highly in search engines. When prospective customers find and read the articles, the company that created them has the ability to include calls to action (CTA) directing users to their website, where they can enter the sales funnel. Content marketing also has a side benefit - search engines like Google increase the rankings of websites that have more inbound links, so content marketing should be a large part of your startup’s search engine optimization (SEO) process.

Developing and deploying a content marketing program can be a significant undertaking. Best practices indicate you should be publishing new content 2-4 times per week to maximize the benefit to your search rankings. Even if you have plenty of ideas and the founding team is skilled at writing this type of content, the time commitment is significant. In this Recipe we’ll use copy.ai, one of a new crop of writing support tools powered by advances in AI, to generate candidate articles that you can edit and post on your blog, social media, or anywhere you choose. These are not a substitute for an experienced marketing professional or agency, but for early-stage companies they can be an effective way to keep up with the pace of content needed until you have the budget to contract with an agency or hire a team.

To get started navigate to https://copy.ai . If you don’t already have an account, on the home page you can either sign up with an email or use your Google account to sign up if you have one.

If you are a new user you may be asked to complete a survey that describes how you intend to use copy.ai, but you can answer or skip as much as you choose. Once you are at the dashboard look for the Blog Post Wizard option and click it.

Even with AI building the bulk of the content, you still need to provide some initial direction based on your startup and your goals. Not sure where to get started? If your startup has built a competitor matrix you can create a blog post from each of the features you use to compare your startup with the competition. For example, using a title Why [Feature X] is critical for products in [Your market] can give you a ready-made outline; an introduction, a paragraph about the feature, how your product supports it, how each of your competitors do or don’t support it, and a conclusion. Looking for additional ideas? This article has a list of sixty common topics for blog posts.

For the purpose of this Recipe we’re using copy.ai to generate a blog post announcing a new Startup Recipes article showing how to generate Google Ad copy with AI. In the first screen of the Blog Post Wizard you’ll be prompted for a title, some keywords, and a tone for your content. The Wizard will use these to generate candidate outlines. Fill these out based on your needs and click Generate Outline.

The Blog Post Wiard will take up to several minutes and return a candidate outline for your blog post. You can edit or re-order any of the subheadings here, but if you are satisfied (or even if you’re just not sure) you can click Generate Talking Points to advance to the next step (you can always return to this screen and re-edit the subheadings if you decide the article isn’t going in the direction you prefer).

After a few minutes the Blog Post Wizard will show you several talking points for each subheading. These are key ideas that each paragraph will attempt to convey when it’s generated. You can edit or remove any that don’t seem relevant or are redundant. You can also add a talking point by hand using the Add Talking Point link or generate up to five additional talking points by clicking Generate More (but in general try to limit each paragraph to five or fewer talking points). If you are not happy with the talking points it’s generated you can click Regenerate Talking Points to have copy.ai create a fresh set for this subhead.

After another few minutes the copy.ai Blog Post Wizard will show you the outline it’s created, including an introduction, copy for each subhead to match the talking points, and a conclusion. At first glance this copy might look great, but it’s important to dig in and review in detail. Because of the way that these AI-powered tools work they will frequently include partial words, phrases, or even sometimes unrelated brand names as part of the content they generate. So you should expect to do at least a little bit of editing on each post.

If the article content just misses the mark entirely you can always click Go Back and have it try again. Once you’re satisfied, click Create Blog Post to see the final result.

Once the Wizard is finished you’ll see copy.ai’s Blog Post editor with the content created by the Wizard included. Here you can make any final edits, include images if you choose, or otherwise customize the content. The editor includes a toolbar with common formatting tools similar to any document editor. You can use these to add markup to your document if the tool you are using to post the content doesn’t include these tools. Also note that any articles you generate are always saved for later use. At the very bottom of the page you’ll find the word and character count for your article, as well as the estimated reading level. These can be useful if you are sharing the content to any third-party services that have restrictions on content length or complexity.

Although these tools can still yield mixed results, especially with longer-form content, AI-powered copywriting tools continue to improve. Writing 2-4 pieces of quality content can take hours of your valuable time, but leveraging tools like these to do the bulk of the work can help you keep up with the aggressive pace of writing needed to implement your SEO strategy and still be able to take care of the other 99 priority items on your to-do list.

We used this blog post on LinkedIn to advertise the launch of the associated Recipe on generating Google Ads copy. The published post is linked below.