⚠️ Is AI Growing or Destroying Your Blog?

Hi there, Solopreneur! I hope you’re having an incredible week and that your solo business is rolling in Q4. I appreciate you letting me walk into your email and share a few thoughts on solopreneur strategy.

This week’s issue is a 5-minute read.

Creating insightful content that illustrates the amazing transition your business provides is essential.

A blog is an ideal strategy to make it happen.

🚀 Today, according to the Web Tribunal, there are approximately 600 million blogs worldwide. The blogosphere is highly competitive, and AI is staking it’s claim 24/7.

While it’s unlikely AI will play a role on every blog, chances are high that a large majority, including your competition, has AI on their team.

Why it matters:

If the top blogs in your sandbox are working with AI, what’s the right AI strategy for your blog?

🤖 Option 1: AI Writes All Your Content

The pros of this strategy are volume and velocity.

Your blog needs quantity to get early attention, and Google may interpret your robust catalog with a higher level of expertise if you post hundreds of blogs in a weekend.

The cons of this approach are that it creates content that lacks your personality and unique experiences.

In the long term, your readers won’t appreciate your content if it fails to present your views. It’s hard to be you if you’re a robot.

🔑Takeaway

Take caution with the 100% robot approach. If your community does not return to your site for fear of finding more bland articles that don’t edutain them, Google will notice. Your site traffic and your business will suffer.

🧠 Option 2: You Write All the Content

The pros of this approach are demonstrating your personality and illustrating your expertise. Show these in each of your blog posts, and your readers will respond.

💡 Quick tip. Include your bio at the top of the blog post. Google and your readers get a quick dose of your experience.

This builds trust and E-E-A-T (the four-letter word all bloggers like to yell!)

E: Experience

E: Expertise

A: Authoritativeness

T: Trustworthiness

The downside of this strategy is time.

If you conduct key word research (and you should! ), it can take 4-6 hours to research and write a strong blog post.

You may not have the bandwidth to dedicate 40–60 hours each month to your blog.

🔑Takeaway

Create your topic clusters before you start writing your blog. Go deeper into each category before tackling another. Be selective in the categories you tackle.

Google will appreciate your depth of knowledge, and you’ll build trust with your audience.

🙏 Option 3: You and AI Collaborate on Content

The pros of this strategy are that it strikes a balance that suits your production and content goals.

You can mix key word research, SEO strategy, and AI to build a healthy collaboration between your personal style and the robot’s efficiency.

If you embrace this hybrid model, remember to edit, edit, and edit again.

AI can toss in facts and figures that don’t make sense. If you’re building trust, the fastest way to ruin it is to misstate the facts and present false data.

🔑Takeaway

Ask AI to craft topic clusters, outlines, and title ideas. You write the blog posts and inject your personality.

You won’t publish as many articles as with the 100% robot approach, yet your content will show your style and expertise.

This builds rapport with your readers and will have a long-term, positive impact on your solo business.

🔥 Samantha North has been refining her blog strategy since 2013. She has grown two profitable blogs from scratch with no paid ads.

When I started to write blog posts earlier this year, Samantha was a valuable resource.

Her mission is to turn your expert knowledge into revenue using simple SEO and blogging strategies.

She creates topic clusters around two distinct categories, and her SEO mastery gives her a competitive edge.

🔑Key Takeaways from Samantha’s Interview

• 🔎Key word research is the first step for solopreneurs who want to build a profitable blog.

• 🗓 A long-term outlook is the key differentiator between bloggers who succeed and those who give up too soon.

• 🎥 Video should be a key component of your SEO strategy.

⏱ 5 Fast Questions for Samantha North

Erik: Why did you decide to start a blog?

Samantha: I started the first one about ten years ago.

Having this blog opened the door to a full-time marketing job in a tech company in London. So once I secured that, I let the blog sort of fall by the wayside.

When Brexit happened, we had our rights taken away from us. We couldn't live freely across Europe anymore, and that was very distressing to me.

I was actually going through this same journey myself because I was in the process that year of moving to Portugal.

That is why my current blog, digital emigre (dot) com, exists.

I have a third blog, which is Samantha North (dot) com, my personal one. Its most recent iteration is all about sharing blogging strategies, SEO, and also LinkedIn growth.

Erik: When you took a look at writing the blog on geography and the ability to travel around the world, what assumptions did you make about that topic that proved to be true, and what assumptions did you find were completely false?

Samantha: It's a bit more narrow than geography. It's more about emigration and seeking a second passport in a European country. And based on my own experience as well, I was surprised at how well that came together.

 
Erik: Let's take the flip side. Were there assumptions you made in starting to write about that topic that were untrue?

What I'm doing now is expanding a bit and either interviewing people who've actually been through that experience personally and quoting them in the posts, or alternatively, getting somebody who has done that thing to be the author for the whole post.

Erik: We're in the midst of some incredible changes with AI and Google. Do you think three years from now, blogging as we know it today will continue to be a viable and reliable way to earn an income?

Samantha: Google really wants helpful content, but it also really wants content from people with experience and expertise.

When you're using AI in your writing, it's too easy to get stuff on the page. But that's not sort of conveying enough of your own expertise and experience.

People who can complement their blogging with a video strategy with their own face, their own brand on video are going to be at an advantage as well, because we know that YouTube builds the most trust out of all the platforms.

Erik: If you were sitting in front of 100 energetic young new bloggers, what would you tell them about beginning a blog given today's competition?

Do they want to make money from it, or do they want to use it as a showcase for their writing to get a job in the future?

With the rise of solopreneurs and people going out on their own, it's more important that your blog be a vehicle for something that you're selling.

It could be your coaching or your consulting services; your freelance writing; your programming; whatever you do. Use that blog as an engine to bring in organic traffic that targets those services.

That's really what you have to define at the beginning if you want to be a success in terms of making money.

You can explore Samantha’s insight at SamanthaNorth.com.

That’s a wrap. Have a terrific rest of your week.

🧠🚪Stay curious and keep opening doors!

-Erik