The truth about automated content creation is simple. It is revolutionizing how brands manage their content workflows, saving time and money while maintaining a high-quality output. Powerful tools like ChatGPT combined with automation workflows like Zapier and Make are transforming once labor-intensive processes into streamlined, efficient operations. So why is there so much crap out there, and how can you avoid it?

If your business uses content marketing to attract new leads, you know just what a monster it can be when it comes to making demands on your limited time and resources. Between blog posts, social media, and the other demands of your role, it feels like there’s never enough time in the day.

As someone who has been working as a professional content writer and copywriter since 2007, I get it. It can be overwhelming sometimes, especially when a deadline is breathing down your neck. If you were one of many people who dipped your toes into AI writing when it first hit the headlines, you also know that ChatGPT needs a lot of TLC to write engaging content that actually sounds like your brand.

Think about it: how many times have you coaxed AI into writing a piece for you, only to be disappointed with the lackluster results? Once the humanization and editing is done, you may well have been better off just getting it all done yourself.

Indeed, many businesses chose to return to old-fashioned human writers over 2023 when they realized that their results with AI writing just didn’t match up to the hype. But why do so many more businesses continue to use AI, including professional writers?

Why Some Professional Writers Champion AI Writing

I was also disappointed by my initial experiments with AI, but I knew others were getting excellent results – and it was a matter of professional pride for me to understand how and why. I invested significant time and resources into mastering prompt engineering and automation with simple goals in mind:

• Automatically publishing and scheduling social media posts
• Quickly generating blog posts ideas and outlines
• Creating engaging, on-brand articles with minimal edits
• Easily repurposing content across multiple channels
• Analyzing and optimizing content performance in once place

Most of all, I just wanted writing that read like a human wrote it. Something that would connect with people. Something that would, in the context of marketing, work to push people along their customer journey.

After all, if the bots were coming for my job, they could at least do a better job than I ever could!

I soon realized that conventional AI writing tools were not good enough for my needs. If I was to get the best possible writing, I would need to build my own automated content creation system in order to get the results that I wanted.

This led to the foundation of my AI automation agency, Slashrepeat. I realized that there was a huge demand for this service, yet few automation experts come from the same background I do: professional content writing and sales copywriting.

In this article, I’m sharing what I’ve learned on my journey. I believe that a custom-built automated content creation engine is something that every business needs in their everyday arsenal of marketing tools.

And yes, of course I still think there is room for professional writers in this world, because AI writing and human writing are a great team for any business’ content marketing strategy.

The Problem with Today’s AI Writing Tools

Almost every AI writing tool in the world promises great results in minutes. However, if you’re fussy about your writing like I am, you know the reality: even tools that include time-saving features like publishing your content for you can fall short with the actual content.

It’s not even bad writing.

It’s just generic, often fluffy writing that makes your business sound the same as every other business. Why? Because picture this, you’re publishing the same top-notch content that navigates the fast-paced realm of your topic that every other Tom, Dick, and Harry does.

And that’s a big content marketing no-no.

This isn’t the only problem.

Many of these tools are just nicely-designed websites running on the ChatGPT API with an automation engine ticking over in the back office. The business model is a simple one. To use the ChatGPT API, you must buy credits, which fund the tokens that the AI uses to write.

These AI writing tools have already paid for the credits and are simply giving you those credits at absurd markups. OpenAI is incredibly cheap to use, which makes the AI writing tool industry high profit-margin business. You can check this yourself by comparing the subscription fees of any major AI writing tool with the base cost of the credits from OpenAI.

You’re essentially paying through the nose to use ChatGPT. In many cases, you can’t even edit the prompts set by these tools. If you’re using a smaller tool, there’s also a chance they’ll simply go bust when the AI bubble pops (and it will).

Now, if you’re happy with your AI writing tool, then maybe all of this doesn’t matter so much. But with custom content creation automation that leverages AI, you can build your own in-house AI writing tool that…

• Works exactly how you want it to
• Costs no more than OpenAI fees
• Gives you the freedom to prompt

Why would your continue to bleed money into tools and websites that may not be around when the current AI bubble bursts?

What if you could set up everything around how you like to do work, so that every piece of content your business produces comes from one click of a button? What’s more, content that sounds like your brand and not a generic approximation of it.

What, then?

The answer to this question is obvious.

It’s also a question that is increasingly important, simply because businesses who use content in their marketing efforts are turning to AI, even if the tools leave a lot to be desired.

Why Professional Writers and Content Marketers Use AI

While AI writing wasn’t met with the fondest reception by writers (2023 was not a good year for the writing industry!), the dust has since settled. AI is here to stay, and we all need to adapt. Companies that are using AI in their writing and marketing are pulling far ahead of those that are not – and that’s across the board, not just in one or two select industries.

Any professional writer worth their salt understands that AI is a tool that can complement their work, enabling them to deliver better results to their clients – and faster. Not all content needs to be a masterpiece; sometimes, it has a more opaque, but equally valuable role in a business’ content ecosystem.

Take programmatic SEO, where content is created specifically to target a keyword. This is used to great effect in local SEO, but there is no denying that manually creating these articles is deeply tedious, especially if they are created solely to pass link equity onto a specific landing page.

This is where a custom-built AI-driven automation shines, taking a boring and repetitive manual process and turning it into something that just works. In turn, talented writers are freed up to focus on more valuable types of writing, such as sales copy on the landing page that is being boosted by the link juice from AI-written pages.

And this is just one use case. Small wonder that 68% of companies that use AI writing point to it as the source of their increased ROI. These companies are able to claim hundreds and thousands of keywords using AI at a fraction of how much they would have had to pay an SEO agency and its writing team before.

Businesses that are not adopting are falling behind or overspending when they no longer need to.

The Reality of Content Writing In the AI Era

There has always been a market for writing that doesn’t need talented writers, or even any writers at all. Spinning articles has existed as long as the internet has, and until ChatGPT landed on the scene in late 2022, there was a huge marketplace for ultra-cheap writers on content mills and freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr.

In many ways, AI writing is an advanced spinner. This makes it very useful for less vital content where the quality might not matter so much. Ultra-cheap writers with no real complementary skills simply cannot compete.

But skilled writers who wear many other hats have found AI to be a boon. I’m one of them. Writing is not my only skill. I also know digital marketing, SEO, web design, content strategy, research, sales, automation, and psychology.

Multi-skilled writers with a unique grab-bag of skills are valuable to the companies that hire them, whether in-house, on contract, or via freelance marketplaces. Their ability to write is matched by their ability to strategize and advise, building powerful content strategies designed around business goals.

Most importantly, their expertise gives them insight into which content should be written by a person, and which content should be allocated to your automated content creation systems.

Here’s A Little Secret Most AI Automation Agencies Won’t Tell You

There are very few automation experts or AI writing tool providers who will tell you what I am about to tell you, simply because most of them do not come from a background in writing. This isn’t to say that they are bad automators, just that they may not have a deep understanding of the content process.

An AI writing automation’s primary job isn’t to produce perfect content that sparkles with prize-winning words.

It’s a nice thought, but it’s not the correct one. An effective automated AI writing system producea content that performs three distinct roles:

• Pushing your business goals forward
• Answering your audience’s questions
• Matching your brand voice

What’s missing from this list? Ah, yes, saving you time and money. How could I forget? Well, quite easily, because it is only after you meet the above goals that you should focus on saving time and money.

There is no point saving time and money if the content is generic copy that nobody wants to read. If that is what your system produces, you’re not saving anything at all.

But still, it sounds good. That’s the magic of marketing for you!

Automated AI Writing Systems Doesn’t Mean Laying Off Writers

The average salary of an in-house writer in the United States is around $50,000. More often than not, your in-house writers wear multiple hats. While they are excellent writers, it’s just one part of their job, and in many cases, writing may not be the best use of their time in terms of ROI for your business.

An automated content creation system frees them up from writing articles that don’t necessarily need human writing. Instead of spending 3 hours writing an article that is destined to act as link equity for other pages, let them hand over the work to an AI writing automation.

That’s three hours more that they can use to focus on activities that help your business to grow, such as coordinating a new content marketing campaign with your marketing department, or creating new sales scripts and materials for your sales team.

Back at the writing desk with a well-optimized content creation system, it is almost trivial to give AI-written work a final check, fact-checking and humanizing the content before adding it to an automated publishing queue.

A Quick Note: No, Google Doesn’t Necessarily Penalize AI Writing

A lot of people are under the misconception that Google penalizes AI content. This is a myth, and one that Google has corrected, stating that it rewards high quality content no matter how it is produced.

Google does penalize low quality AI content spam, just as it has always penalized low-quality content spam of any kind, whether made by man or machine. So long as your content meets Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, it will not be penalized.

There is no reason for any business not to use AI if their goal is to create high quality content. Adoption of this technology is becoming more and more widespread; sitting on the fence will only mean falling behind your competitors.

What Automated Content Creation Looks Like Behind the Scenes

The image above shows a small part of an automation in Make that I built for a client. It can also easily be replicated in Zapier, Pabbly, or Power Automate.

It’s a simple automation, starting with a form that asks for basic information about what the article should talk about and other relevant details. From there on out, everything is done automatically:

• The answers on the form are stored in Google Sheets
• Set variables is used to pull key data
• The key data is sent to ChatGPT, which writes an article outline
• Make then converts ChatGPT’s output into markdown for WordPress
• A folder is created in Google Drive
• The article outline (now in markdown) written in Google docs

Just after this, the article is stored in the Google Drive folder. From there on out, the choices are yours.

You could add a step to send this automation to a team member to write.

You could continue the automation, writing a full article, sourcing images, and finally publishing on your blog – unless, of course, you’d rather ping that team member again for a quick fact check.

But why stop there? After all, this automation only takes a minute or two to spit out an article.

You could set a second automation that jumps into action as soon as a blog post is created, creating social media posts and publishing them across all your social media channels.

You could use the article as the basis for a script for a YouTube video, which itself can be broken down into multiple video shorts for TikTok and Instagram.

All of this can be built. It’s not magic. It’s just automation, or, more specifically, an AI automation that gives you a well-written, on-brand article a couple of minutes after you complete the form.

And, while the automation I’ve shown you is started by filling out a form, there are many other ways to do it. Does your business often comment on news stories in your industry? Well then, why not start an automation with a custom RSS feed?

The joy of automation is that you are really only limited by your imagination. If you’ve ever wished that there was content tool that could do something in a very specific way, then you need an automation.

Automated Content Writing Isn’t Perfect

There is typically one sticking point behind an automation like this; the writing is rarely as good as that a professional writer would produce. That may change in the future, but for now, it’s a common complaint. There are only two solutions:

• You skip AI writing altogether, using automation for all the work around the writing
• You focus on prompt engineering to build a system that delivers good content consistently

And by “good content” I don’t mean amazing content. I mean content that reflects your brand tone and voice and only needs a quick once-over with minimal edits before publishing. The type of content quality that you might expect from a writer at a talent mill, just a lot more efficient at a fraction of the time and price.

I believe it’s important to be realistic when it comes to AI writing, at least with its current limitations. So how can you overcome these limitations without resorting to the old-fashioned way of getting a human to write it?

That’s a good question, and the answer today is what many people call hybrid content. Let’s talk about that a little.

Hybrid Content Is One Way to Approach Content Automation

Hybrid content simply means content that’s written by AI and finished by humans. Usually, this means that the AI writes everything as the human writer, well, humanizes it, fact-checking the output before publishing.

This isn’t a bad model by any means. It’s certainly one you should consider as an option if you’re still weighing up your choices, or if you’re unsure whether a full-blown, custom-built automated content creation system is for you just yet.

However, hybrid content writing usually isn’t automated beyond AI writing, which means your team will still be dragging and dropping things between folders, marking tasks as done in your CRM, and carrying out the many other repetitive micro-tasks that go into publishing an article online.

Hybrid content is almost there on its own.

In my opinion however, it really shines when you combine it with automation. Since you can automate many more things beyond the writing, you free up your teams to focus on higher-value tasks that deliver more ROI to your business.

Let’s take a look at how an automated approach to hybrid content can help with SEO as an example.

Turning Hybrid Content Into an Automated Content Creation System

One of the hungriest content monsters today is SEO. To get on the first page of Google for a keyword, we need to create content that targets that keyword. Get it right, and the organic traffic, overflowing with leads, will rush towards your business.

Hybrid content helps you to achieve this faster. It’s just a numbers game: the more articles you produce, the more opportunities your business has to rank. But what if you turn on automated hybrid content for your business?

Now we’re talking.

In one click, an automation can write up a fully-researched article, complete with images, is added to your CRM and assigned to a team member. A few minutes later, the assigned team member refines it it before throwing it back in an automation stream towards approval and eventual publishing.

At the cost of just a few extra minutes, your AI content quality has significantly improved and your team has only had to spend a short time on it before returning to more valuable tasks.

Best of all, you can repeat this time and time again with consistency.

It is this approach that I strongly advocate for all businesses who are thinking of AI writing to produce their online content. It is easily the most efficient way to produce the quality content that Google approves of while building out your various online content strategies.

Is Building an AI Content Automation System Worth It?

	Manual Writing	AI Writing Tools	AI Automation
Production Time	Several hours/days	Minutes to hours	Minutes
Cost	High	Moderate	Low after setup cost
Customization	High	Limited	High
Brand Alignment	Excellent	Low to moderate	High
Scalability	Limited	Good	Excellent
User Control	Complete	Limited	Complete
Content Quality	High	Variable	Consistent

Businesses who are maximizing their return from automated content creation systems are using human oversight to ensure quality. Not with AI writing tools like Jasper, but with their own custom-built, in-house automation engines that are designed to fit their workflows and processes like a glove.

The only way to compete with these businesses is to build your own systems. This is where an AI automation agency like Slashrepeat comes into the picture. Building an automation isn’t necessarily complicated, but it takes time and experience to build systems that work around your business needs, rather than the other way around.

While you might consider hiring employees to do this for you, it’s faster and more cost-effective to work with an agency where the expertise is baked in and the work can start right away. The longer it takes you to build, the more catching up you will have to do later.

The only question you need to ask yourself is whether your business can the hidden cost of lost and unrealized profits from missing out on search engine rankings.

Don’t Fall Behind: Use Content Creation Automation!

I hope this article has given you some food for thought, as well as an insight into our approach to automated content creation at Slashrepeat. Content automation is something that you can start to implement today, enabling your team to work smarter, not harder by freeing up their time and energy to focus on activities that help your business to grow.

And just in case you’re wondering, yes, this article was 100% written by me! Remember what I said about important content? This article simply wouldn’t reflect my experience, expertise, or knowledge if I put it though an automated content creation system. It might come close, but not without a lot of editing. I do not wrestle with an entire article full of the wrong words and thoughts when I can simply write, and neither should you.

Sometimes, it’s just better to write, and this is particularly true of money pages where you need every word to contribute towards converting your leads. But in many other cases, an automated content creation system is a wonderful tool to have at your side. There are few other AI automation agencies who would dare to threaten their business model by admitting that sometimes, a human writer is the best choice after all!

If you’re interested in building your own AI content automation system but don’t really know where to start, schedule a a free 30-minute consultation with us. We’ll walk through your current content marketing and writing and show you how a professionally-designed content writing automation system can help you to transform your business’ content marketing strategy over a nice cup of virtual tea – no strings attached!