8 practical uses of AI for writing blog posts

Introduction

In our previous blog post, we gave a high-level overview of how you can employ AI tools to assist you with creating blog posts - from doing research to writing and editing, as well as proofreading.

We do not think you should try and hand everything off to AI writers. Rather, keep writing in your own voice and style and employ AI as an assistant that can work alongside you to craft more engaging content. In this blog post, we focus on eight practical tips to help you create better content for your blog.

1. Create blog post ideas

Suppose you’re visiting Bangkok and looking for ideas for blog posts to write about the city. You can use ChatGPT to help you brainstorm a few ideas. The initial ideas are bland and something every other blogger writes about. You like to put a bit more of a cultural spin on your blog posts, so you prompt ChatGTP to give you ideas that are more in line with this

2. Perform research

The idea of spirit houses and superstitions sounds interesting and unique to Thailand, so you ask ChatGPT for more information. You prompt ChatGPT to refer you to online books and resources that you reference for more background information. The resources above allow you to get background information on spirit houses before you arrive. However, once you arrive, you would like to get some first-hand knowledge on this subject, so you ask ChatGPT whether it can suggest any museums, tours, or local experts you can consult.

3. Summarise text from research

AI can be used to summarize text from research as well. Suppose we want to use some background information in the Wikipedia article on spirit houses for our introduction. We can copy the text from the Wikipedia article and ask ChatGPT to summarize it. In this case, the summary is still too generic in referring to the Southeast Asian region. Let’s ask ChatGPT to focus more on Thailand. Another example where you can use the ability of ChatGPT to summarise text is when you want to write a summary of a product based on the content of their marketing website. Let’s take this section of the Notion website describing the uses of their Notion AI product. We can ask ChatGPT to summarize this text into one sentence.

4. Create an outline

Let’s head back to the blog post on spirit houses. We can also ask ChatGTP to provide us with an outline for our blog post on spirit houses. This can serve as a good starting point for us to start iterating and produce something more in line with our own style and voice.

5. Create engaging headlines

So, you have done the research and written the blog post; now it is time to create a catchy title to draw your readers in. Once again, ChatGPT can give you some ideas to start iterating on.

6. Creating blog post excerpts

When publishing blog posts, it is typical to write a short excerpt for the blog post that you can use on the blog listing page or when sharing on social media. This is another example where ChatGPT can help you out.

For this example, let’s use the blog post we recently published on the release of Collection filters in Cloudpress. We can ask ChatGPT to write a one-sentence excerpt for this blog post.

7. Creating featured and open graph images

We can also use AI tools when creating a featured image for our blog post. We can use Midjourney and ask it to create an image of a Thai spirit house in Wes Anderson style. As you can see, Midjourney created four images for us to choose from. I like the one in the bottom right, so we can ask it to create an upscaled version of that image that we can add to the blog header. We can also use this image in Canva to create an open graph image that will be displayed in the social media feeds when the blog post is shared on social media like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

8. Repurpose existing content

One final item I’d like to touch on is where you can use AI to assist you in repurposing existing content. Imagine you are primarily a video content creator with a companion website to your YouTube channel. You can repurpose the video and turn it into a blog post using ChatGPT.

Open the video you want to convert. Open the overflow menu beneath the video and select the “Show transcript” option. The transcript of your video will be displayed to the right of the video. Select all the text in the transcript and copy it to the clipboard. Next, head over to ChatGPT and ask it to covert the text from the video into a blog post. ChatGPT will convert the content from the transcript into text for a blog post which you can paste into your CMS. If your CMS uses a format like markdown, you can even ask it to format the content as markdown so you can have it in the correct format for your CMS.

Conclusion

In conclusion, AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney offer invaluable assistance in blog post creation, from brainstorming ideas and researching topics to summarizing content, creating outlines, and generating engaging headlines and excerpts. Furthermore, AI can also help with visual elements, such as creating featured images and repurposing existing content, like turning videos into written blog posts.

By leveraging these AI tools as creative partners, bloggers can enhance their writing process, improve the quality of their content, and ultimately produce more engaging and informative blog posts for their readers.