Did you know that over a third of bloggers surveyed say their biggest challenge is creating quality content consistently? It’s no surprise that running a consistent WordPress blog takes a lot of hard work. Thankfully, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), many mundane blogging tasks can be automated.
Running a WordPress blog can be broken down into four main steps:
- Topic research and identification
- Writing, editing and publishing
- Promotion
- Updates and improvements
Each of these steps can scale up or down in time and effort depending on the volume and velocity of content that you aim to publish on your blog. Although you cannot automate this entire process, AI can help you save time and allow you to blog more consistently. Below we’ll explore how certain AI marketing tools can help automate these four parts of the blogging process.
Speeding Up Blog Topic Research With AI
Easily one of the most important and trickiest parts to get right is knowing what topics to blog about. You need to consider what topics your audience will like but also what makes sense for your business. Additionally, there are many SEO variables that need to be considered if you want your blog posts to rank well in search engines. The following tools can take almost all of the manual work out of researching blog topics and keywords. What’s best is they kill procrastination during these steps, helping you to be more efficient.
MarketMuse Content Brief
Using the power of AI, MarketMuse helps you automate the content research and data gathering process. MarketMuse’s Content Brief tool can create entire blog post outlines based on any topic or keyword you suggest. The tool will automatically analyze tens of thousands of relevant pages to uncover the best blog post structure. It only takes minutes to receive a full blog outline once you enter a keyword.
SEO Surfer
Surfer is similar to MarketMuse however it is more focused on SEO. Its Keyword Surfer extension allows you to generate blog outlines from Google Search within seconds. The Content Editor extension helps guide you towards crafting SEO-friendly blog posts. Best of all, you can access all of its features from within the WordPress text editor. That way, you can ensure each blog post is well optimized so it can better engage your audience while ranking well in search.
Automating Blog Post Writing With AI
Perhaps the biggest efficiency gain to be had with AI and your WordPress blog is the writing process. Gone are the days of sitting in front of a blank screen not knowing the first word to type for your next blog post. By using the blog outline generated from the tools in the previous step, the following tools can write the actual blog post words for you!
Jarvis
Jarvis (conversion.ai) is an AI-powered writing assistant. Its long-form writer tool allows you to automate the process of writing a unique blog post from start to finish. All you need to do is feed it some simple instructions about what you want the blog post to be about. You can copy your content brief from MarketMuse or SEO Surfer and have Jarvis take care of the rest for you. Jarvis also offers a handy integration with SEO Surfer. This allows you to fine-tune the SEO of your blog content as it is being written by Jarvis.
MarketMuse First Draft
Similar to Jarvis, MarketMuse offers AI-generated copywriting via its ‘First Draft’ tool. The tool allows you to import your content brief and restructure it in whatever way you like. From there, you can task the AI to generate a blog post. Unlike Jarvis, which writes copy in real-time, MarketMuse requires you to wait a few hours for the AI to generate the copy. However, it does free you from the writing process, allowing you to focus your time and efforts on the edit.
AI-Powered Email and Social Media Promotion
With your blog post published, the next most common step is letting your audience know about it. For most WordPress blogs, this means sending an email to your subscriber database and posting it to social media. As we’ve seen with the blog research and writing process, the promotion process can be aided with AI to help save you time. In addition to these tools, you can use the AI writers mentioned above to write your social media captions or even your entire email newsletter!
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a popular marketing platform that offers class-leading machine learning (ML) tools. Although not quite the same as AI, the platform uses ML to figure out when the best time is to send your emails to each one of your subscribers. It does this all automatically, giving you the best chance for your emails to be opened and read. Their handy WordPress plugin allows you to create and send emails all within your WordPress dashboard.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps you to plan, schedule and monitor the performance of your social media posts. The company’s ‘Iris’ AI helps automate data analysis by uncovering emerging trends based on your audience’s online behavior. This can help you better engage your audience by allowing you to tap into their interests as they evolve over time. The ‘Predictive Compliance’ tool uses AI to scan social media posts for any compliance issues. This tool can be useful for heavily regulated industries such as government, medical and finance, etc.
Leveraging AI to Improve Your Existing Blog Posts
Ensuring your WordPress blog content remains up to date over time helps to make sure it remains fresh and relevant. Search engines like Google want to serve their searchers with the freshest, most relevant content. That’s why keeping your published blog posts up to date and relevant is important if you want to not only maintain but grow your rankings over time. It can be difficult to know what areas of your existing blog posts need improvement. Thanks to the following AI-powered tools, they take the guesswork out of improving your existing content.
BrightEdge Insights
BrightEdge is an all-inclusive SEO platform that offers AI, machine & deep learning tools. The platform’s Insights tool uses AI to compare your published blog posts to millions of others across the web. It then distills its findings down to a few steps that you can implement to improve your blog post rankings.
MarketMuse Inventory
Another handy AI-powered tool from MarketMuse is Inventory. This tool analyzes your existing blog content and recommends improvements. While doing so, it also suggests new content ideas and opportunities based on your existing posts. To help you get the best ROI for your time, the tool shows how much organic search traffic you can gain depending on the improvements that you implement.
WordPress Blogging & AI Automation – Summing Up
If you struggle to blog consistently, then you should consider implementing these AI automation tools.
Although they are not a replacement for human common sense, they may help you blog more consistently.
If you are using any one of these tools mentioned above then I highly recommend taking a training course on them before diving in. Most of the platforms offer their own free short training courses to help you get the most out of the AI.
What are your thoughts on AI automation? Do you see it as a good or a bad thing? Are you using any of the tools mentioned in this post? Or do you have any other AI automation tools that you would recommend?
