How To Use AI for Blogging: 9-Step Masterplan

How to use AI for blogging is a branch of your online business that requires a lot of attention. It can serve as the virtual home on the ‘net for your brand, and if done correctly, can deliver massive amounts of targeted traffic at no additional cost.

Clinching the top spots in the search engine results pages (SERPs) as a blogger is very doable – but it has to be done right. If you simply slap up a bunch of useless keyword-stuffed posts, you’ll be wasting your time because Google and other search engines won’t reward you with good rankings.

The volume of work involved in building a lucrative blog is something most can’t (or won’t) do because they’re busy in other areas of their business. But if you want to make a splash and position yourself as a leading niche expert, you can use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to automate much of the process on your behalf.

AI can handle the research, creative endeavors, optimization, monetization and other aspects involved with blogging so that you’re free to focus on other tasks. Below, you’ll find a step-by-step process you can use that involves an automated routine driven by AI tools intended to explode the growth of your blog.

#1: Discover Your Niche and Audience with AI

AI has a great ability to dive deep into research that would take you far too long to do on your own. This is a necessity with blogging because you don’t want to blog about the same old topics everyone else is.

You need to provide a unique slant and approach to the information and tailor it to the needs of your audience. Even your audience has to be studied more carefully. You don’t want to just target “people who want to lose” for example.

Instead, you need to know exactly who makes up that entire demographic – their ages, gender, income level, behaviors, preference and more. And AI can help you gather that data in an instant.

When it comes to leading your niche, you want to show that your blog is a hot spot of knowledge and opinions that your audience will be clamoring to read day after day. Whether it’s a trend of breaking news, AI can make sure your blog is the #1 go to for your niche.

Whenever you go through these steps, save your prompts so that each day or week whenever you’re engaging in this work, you can past them into your AI tool and get new results.

You can prompt AI to begin developing niche research for you by asking it for research prompts you can use. It might tell you to ask for current trends and innovations inn your niche, for key insights and perspectives, for beginner guidance, opportunities and challenges, the history and evolution of the niche, predictions for the future, a deep dive into lesser-known aspects, and more.

So if we have a keto blog, we might prompt AI like this: “Take a deep dive into lesser-known topics in the keto niche for me and give me a list of topics to blog about.” It will give us ideas such as:

• Keto and gut health
• Keto and the hormone and endocrine system
• Keto and autoimmune disorders
• Keto and skin health

From there, we can prompt it with: “Give me more information about keto and autoimmune disorders.” This will give us a plethora of information we can use to decide if we want to blog about it, including anti-inflammatory effects, ketone and neuroprotection, individual responses and considerations and more.

When it comes to having AI dig into the demographic, we can ask it for prompts for this purpose, and it will tell us to ask for a demographic analysis, characteristics, trends, segmentation strategies, consumer behavior, psychological profiles, preferences, and basic demographic information such as location, income, gender and age.

We can take the information about the niche and conduct AI research about our target audience like this: “Give me a demographic analysis of who might be interested in the particular topic of keto and autoimmune disorders.”

It’s going to cover everything including about the age groups, gender, pre-existing health conditions, health-conscious behaviors, support communities, and more – giving you ammunition about who your readers will most likely be.

You can prompt a mix of niche research and demographic research by asking AI something like: “What are some buying behaviors for consumers in the keto diet niche?” AI will specify that this audience is concerned with scrutinizing ingredients, focusing on macronutrients, prefers whole foods and products specific to keto (not just weight loss), that they take reviews and recommendations seriously and love convenient foods.

If you know you’re going to be promoting info products to the niche audience, you can prompt AI like this: “What consumer behaviors does this target audience have when it comes to buying info products in this niche?”

That way you’ll know that they look for research-heavy guides, customization and specific topics like keto meal planning, practical and actionable advice, and ongoing support like a community or group.

You may want to use Google Bard for current trending information. You can say something like: “Tell me some specific trends in the keto niche.” It’ll tell you that this audience wants more information about plant-based keto, keto for athletes, and keto for mental health for example.

When the research for the niche and audience is finished using AI, you’ll be able to prompt it to use the information it’s delivered to you in your question to find slants for your blog posts.

For example, if you already know that there’s a high demand for plant-based keto, you might ask AI to “Merge the topics of plant-based keto and keto for gut health into a few blog slants for me to consider.”

It will respond with ideas specific to the research, such as: Harnessing the Power of Plants: Plant-Based Keto for a Healthy Gut, The Gut-Healing Potential of a Plant-Based Keto Lifestyle, or Optimizing Digestive Wellness Using a Plant-Based Keto Plan.

#2: Beat Competitors with AI Insights

One thing that's going to come in handy when you are blogging is knowing what your competitors are doing on their blogs. This is important because it gives you a way to not only step up and serve your audience better than what they have done, but also fill in the gaps with what is missing online.

You can prompt your AI tool to identify the top bloggers in your niche. You have to use one of the tools that has the ability to access the Internet and current information, because some tools, like ChatGPT, are limited to access of data in 2021.

AI will be able to tell you who your competition is, and also what they are blogging about, including which of their pieces of content are getting the most engagement and traffic.

You can take a look at that particular link through an AI tool and find out exactly what keywords they're ranking for, who is linking back to their post, and how they are ranking high for a particular keyword phrase.

You are kind of reverse engineering their strategy so that you can analyze what they're doing right and apply it to your own blogging efforts, and also see what they're missing so that you can include it in your SEO strategy and rank even higher.

So you can go to Google Bard and ask it who the top blogs are for the keto niche, for example. It will give you a list along with the links to these blogs and tell you how many followers they have and what type of content they feature.

There’s a blog called I Breathe I’m Hungry that’s all about the keto diet that Bard tells us about. We can then ask Bard: “What is the top ranking post on https://www.ibreatheimhungry.com/?”

It tells us that a post about nut-free keto chocolate chip cookies is the highest performer, with over 1.4 million views and over 10,000 comments. Sometimes, AI gets it wrong. This post only has 36 comments.

You can take the URL to the site and enter it in Ahrefs backlink checker and you’ll discover it has over 710,000 backlinks. If you have a good AI tool that can identify those links, you can reach out and secure a backlink to your own domain.

Ahrefs can also show you which pages have broken links on them that are both outbound and inbound. This webmaster might be willing to link to your blog posts instead of to wherever they were linking to that’s now a broken link.

If you go to the broken inbound links, you’ll find that Buzzfeed is linking to a broken page on the ibreatheimhungry domain for a Swiss chard ricotta pie with sausage crust in a post about keto breakfasts, so you could create a page on that topic, content Buzzfeed about the broken link and offer the replacement link instead.

When AI gives you a rundown of the most popular posts on your competitors’ sites, you’ll be able to see how they’re slanted. In this case, there are a lot of sweets or desserts on the blog and they’re titled or slanted with the name of the recipe, like keto cranberry orange cheesecake.

On some blogs and niches you might see other types of slants, like numerical listicles such as 27 ways to… or 101 types of… anything that gives them a list of results of a particular search like the best ways to build a list, 101 types of diet plans, and so on.

This information may change frequently, so you can use AI to see what’s ranking best on a weekly or monthly basis before you begin to map out your publishing schedule. It’s also a great way to add updates to your existing blog posts.

You might even get AI to break down their strategy for you. For example, you can say: “Give me an SEO analysis about what the website https://www.ibreatheimhungry.com/ is doing to rank well in search engines and be specific, not generic.”

If you don’t add that last part, it’ll give you generic information like “conduct keyword research, write quality content,” etc. Instead, it now tells you that this site targets long-tail keyword phrases like “keto chocolate chip cookies.”

It also tells you that the blogger gets specific about nutritional information, has high-quality images, does well with internal linking and backlinks, and is optimized for mobile devices.

But the great thing is, it gives you insight about what the blog could be doing better, including optimizing titles and meta descriptions, publishing more often, including specifically more long-form content like guides, promote the blog on social media more, and submit it to blog directories.

You can also ask AI for a list of the semantic keywords a blogger is targeting. On the ibreatheimhungry.com domain, AI tells us that they’re targeting things like keto recipes, low carb recipes, gluten free recipes, sugar free recipes, easy keto recipes, quick keto recipes, healthy keto recipes, and more.

It's so much easier to automate the entire process by simply prompting AI rather than having to dig around and do all of this research on your own by scouring their posts and looking at the page source materials to get information.

#3: Endless AI-Crafted Blog Topics

When you have used AI to automate the research and competitive analysis process, you can then move on to the next step, which is having it develop an ongoing supply of blog topics for you to create content for.

Artificial intelligence tools do an amazing job of coming up with slants that are unique and appealing to consumers. Remember, you now have niche details about your demographic and the topic itself that you can include in your prompts whenever you are asking for new blog topic ideas.

So you might prompt AI by saying: “I want to create a blog post about keto for weight loss. Give me a list of primary long-tail keyword phrases I can target for high volume, low competition for that topic.”

It can then give us a list of the phrases including how to lose weight on keto, keto diet for beginners, keto diet meal plan, keto diet recipes, and more. You can then take a phrase like how to lose weight on keto and ask AI for a specific slant for that topic.

We’ll ask: “Give me a list of possible slants for a blog post using the long-tail keyword phrase: how to lose weight on keto in the title.” AI then delivers a list of titles that use the phrase including things like:

• The Ultimate Guide: How to Lose Weight on Keto Effectively
• 10 Proven Strategies for How to Lose Weight on Keto
• Breaking Down the Science: How to Lose Weight on Keto Diet Plans
• How to Lose Weight on Keto: Unlocking the Secrets of Maximizing Your Weight Loss
• The Dos and Don'ts of How to Lose Weight on Keto

These are all slightly different slants, like a numerical list, dos and don’t, ultimate guide, scientific details, and more. Start with one and set the others aside for later use whenever you need more content ideas.

Once you have your slant, you can ask AI to automate the semantic keyword research process by asking: “What are some semantic keyword phrases I need to use when trying to rank for the keyword phrase: how to lose weight on keto?”

Now we have the following semantic keyword phrases:

• Keto diet weight loss tips
• Effective weight loss on keto
• Best ways to lose weight on a keto diet
• Keto weight loss strategies
• Losing weight with the keto diet
• Keto weight loss techniques
• Healthy weight loss on keto
• Keto diet for weight loss
• Achieving weight loss goals on keto
• Successful weight loss with keto

AI is gathering all of this information from a large database where it can identify patterns, user behavior and intent, and trends that would take you an enormous amount of time to sort through on your own.

#4: Boost Reader Satisfaction Using AI

After you have the idea in place, and AI has researched your demographic and niche topic, you’ll be able to have it automate the blog creation process for you. You want to keep careful watch over what it’s doing because this is information that is representing your brand.

In order to rank well and gain backlinks to your site, you have to make sure that your visitors have a fantastic experience on your domain. We’ll talk about the technical aspect of that later, but right now, let’s focus on reader satisfaction.

Your visitor doesn’t want to have to go elsewhere to find more information on the topic. They’re hoping for a one-stop-shop where everything they wanted to know about the search query resides.

This is what Google also wants to reward with high rankings. They’re looking for content with topic authority, meaning it’s comprehensive and thorough and delivered by someone with expertise.

When we’re ready, we can prompt AI like this: “I want you to outline a pillar (long) blog post that will rank high for the keyword phrase "how to lose weight on keto" and title it: 10 Proven Strategies for How to Lose Weight on Keto. I want you to include the semantic keyword phrases: Keto diet weight loss tips, Effective weight loss on keto, Best ways to lose weight on a keto diet, Keto weight loss strategies, Losing weight with the keto diet, Keto weight loss techniques, Healthy weight loss on keto, Keto diet for weight loss, Achieving weight loss goals on keto, Successful weight loss with keto. I want it optimized for SEO so it should have headers that are keyword optimized, too.”

We want to have AI outline the blog post first so that we have full control over what goes into the content. That way, we can look to see if anything needs to be removed or added before the actual blog post is written.

When you have the outline, you’ll want to go through and see if anything needs expansion, too. This helps you with quality control. So for example, part of the outline it delivers looks like this:

I. Understanding the Keto Diet for Weight Loss

A. What is the keto diet?

B. How does the keto diet help you lose weight?

C. What are the benefits of the keto diet?

D. What are the risks of the keto diet?

We can prompt AI by saying: “Under I. C. "What are the benefits of the keto diet," expand on that in outline form please.” It then gives us a comprehensive list that includes efficient fat burning, reduced appetite, improved insulin sensitivity, enhanced metabolic flexibility and more – 10 total.

You can go through and read what it plans to say about each one, adding them into the outline so that AI definitely includes them when writing the actual blog post for you. This ensures maximum reader satisfaction.

Next, you want to go section by section and have AI write the content for you. We’ll cover some additional prompts that will make that work in your favor, so read through that before beginning, but your basic prompts will be something like, “Write the content for the first bulletpoint of the introduction for me.”

By taking it little by little, you ensure that AI gives you plenty of content rather than skimping on the text it delivers, since it is restricted to a certain number of words and characters.

#5: Personalized Engagement with AI

When you have AI write your content, you can go the extra mile to have it include personalization that will go over well with your readers and endear them to you. AI can do this for you whether or not you have any stories to include of your own.

If you do have personal stories to include, you can simply prompt AI with the details, such as, “I have lost 80 pounds using the keto diet and I want you to write the blog post with some of my story in it. I gained weight after an injury and being sedentary and discovered the keto diet kept me satiated and cut my sugar cravings. It took 10 months to lose 80 pounds.”

You can also prompt AI to have the style and tone that you want. For example, you might say: “I want this blog post written in an empathetic and casual manner from someone who has been in their shoes and now wants to motivate and help others achieve their goal.”

If you don’t have any personal stories, AI can simply write it with personalization using your readers’ presumed stories. For example, you might say something like: “I want you to write about the readers’ personal stories that might include shame, guilt and frustration over having gained weight. Paint a picture of their situation and let them know I understand.”

AI can create your entire blog post to have personalization. Or, you might pick out a few sections of the outline where you’d like to include it and when you get to that spot in the outline where you are prompting it to write, ask for the inclusion of the personalization in that spot.

You would say something like, “Now write the section about tracking macros on the keto diet. Include some personalization about how this confused me a lot early on but now I understand how to use the information and I want to show them.”

It’ll add wording like this: “I'll be honest, it confused me a lot when I first started, but now I understand how to use this information effectively, and I want to share it with you. In the beginning, I struggled to understand why each macro mattered and how they affected my progress. But as I dug deeper and educated myself, it became clear that tracking these macros was the key to unlocking success on the keto diet.”

Make sure it has the style and tone you want. You can ask AI to be humorous, series, empathetic, motivating, and more. You can even ask AI what emotions your readers are likely to be feeling and have it match their energy with something they’ll respond best to.

AI can create anecdotes, too. If you want stories but don’t have any, you can say: “I don’t personally need to lose weight but I’d like to include an anecdote about someone who had to manage their expectations and stay motivated on a keto diet.”

It can craft a paragraph that you can include about determination and mindset using an example of someone who might need that type of direction on their own personal keto journey.

This type of personalization helps the reader build a rapport with you and trust in your recommendations. It also makes them feel as if you “get” their needs and goals better, so it helps to AI add it in if you don’t want to do it yourself.

#6: SEO-Optimize Content with AI

Now we want to optimize the blog content for technical and content SEO a bit more than just telling it to use certain keyword phrases. AI can automatically handle the SEO research and strategy for you.

This is another thing you can do before prompting AI to write or afterwards. For example, you ask AI what needs to be done to ensure that your blog content has a high ranking.

Some AI tools can conduct an on-page SEO audit for you once you’ve published the piece. It will check for keyword density, tag usage, interlinking and other factors. Your AI tools can also check for user experience.

Google and other search engines want to make sure that the pages they send their users to are going to load quickly and be readily available for viewing on multiple mobile devices as well as browsers.

If your site is lacking in any of these areas, the user will click out rapidly, and possibly begin to use a new search engine to get their results from. That's why it's very important to search engines that your site performs technically to the best of its ability.

There are some tools that you can plug in your URL into, and it will give you a site audit that includes all of the relevant information that you need to make improvements. Some even allow you to put a particular page or blog post URL into their system.

You can also have some AI tools perform an on page SEO audit of your site by specifying what you want it to check. For example, you can prompt your AI tool like this: “I want you to perform an on page SEO audit of the link below and tell me how I can improve my title tags and meta descriptions, header tags, URL structure, keyword usage, content quality and relevance, internal linking, image optimization, page loading speed, mobile optimization, and schema markup.”

Not only will it deliver results about what you are doing wrong, but it will also tell you what you are doing well. Then it will give you instructions on how you can make those improvements.

If there is anything that you don't have yet, such as your meta description or schema markup, you can simply instruct your AI tool to do this for you on its own so that you can plug it into your website with ease.

#7: Monetize Your Blog with AI Ideas

Believe it or not, there are many online entrepreneurs who go into this business intending on making money, and they forget to monetize the content that they are creating.

They are so focused on ranking their content in Google and other search engines, that when they are done that they forget to add any form of revenue stream to their blog. Other people simply don't know how to monetize their blog posts.

This is something that I can give you a lot of direction on. For example, you can prompt it like this: “For the blog post we just created about how to lose weight on keto, give me some ideas for monetizing this content. I want you to give me as many ideas as possible for that particular specific niche topic.”

AI is going to come back and tell you that you can consider the following, and it will give you very specific information with each listing:

• Affiliate marketing: including info products, cookbooks, meal plans, kitchen gadgets, supplements, etc.
• Sponsored content: collaborating with other brands who want to pay to be mentioned in your blog posts.
• Info product creation: sell your own online course that teaches people how to use keto to lose weight.
• Coaching program: offer individual or group coaching to people who want to use the keto diet to lose weight.
• Advertisements: integrate Google AdSense or other advertising networks that will display ads within your content where you get paid per click or impression.
• Meal planning services: offer to tailor a meal plan based on the keto diet to clients who would like you to customize their meals and shopping lists for them.
• Membership site or gated content: charge a monthly fee for people to access top tier information on your blog.

You can then ask AI more questions to shortcut the process, such as: “What are the best kinds of products on Amazon for the keto diet that I can promote as an affiliate?” It will tell you to consider keto cookbooks, snacks, ketone test strips, supplements, kitchen gadgets like spiralizers, and more.

You might use a current AI tool like Bard and ask it: “What keywords are people using when they search for ketone strips for the keto diet?” Getting that information allows you to take it back to AI and have it write a paragraph where it can add a mention about ketone strips using the keyword phrases it delivers.

Then you can link to a search results page or a specific product on Amazon that you can earn from as an affiliate. For example, one of the phrases is “best ketone strips” and you could tell AI to: “Write a paragraph using the keyword phrase best ketone strips that I can include in my blog post.”

It will come back with a nice paragraph talking about the importance of using ketone strips and how to find the best ones, so that you can quickly and easily place your affiliate link in the content to monetize it.

If you want to create an info product out of it, just prompt AI by asking: “Give me some ideas for an info product I can create on how to lose weight on the keto diet.” Or, if you want to create gated top tier content that they have to pay for, prompt it with, “What are some ideas for gated, premium content I could charge readers of my blog post about how to lose weight on the keto diet?”

For that idea, it would suggest having some video blog content that walks them through everything in deeper detail, with meal prep recipes and cooking tips. It includes the option to upgrade for more expert advice from a panel of experts you’ve gotten to agree to interviews with and more.

#8: Drive Traffic with AI-Backed Social Media

Getting traffic to come to your blog is going to be easy once you are able to achieve those rankings in search engine results pages. But until that happens for you, you can use social media to drive targeted traffic to your blog posts so that you can build a list and convert them into buyers.

AI can automate much of your social media strategy. For example, it's going to start by telling you which platforms your audience is primarily active on. We can prompt it like this: “Tell me which social media platforms have the most users searching for information about how to lose weight on the keto diet.”

It's going to return the results based on the data that it has, so make sure you are using something that has access to current information. It's going to include YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.

Then common you can ask AI to come up with a social media marketing strategy on each of these platforms so that you can specifically get traffic to your blog. Do it individually for each platform, rather than asking it to come up with five different strategies all at once.

So we will start by saying, “Create a strategy for me to use on YouTube to drive traffic to my blog, where people can learn how to lose weight on keto.” Some of the information will be generic, such as creating engaging and informative YouTube videos, optimizing your content, etc.

Redirect AI by saying: “I need specifics, not generic information.” Now it begins to get closer, giving you video topic ideas. You can then redirect it for more information about how to name your channel, what type of branding you should use, what kind of hashtags or keywords you need to be integrating, and more.

Once you have the basics down, you can ask AI the following: “Create a schedule for me for one week for a YouTube channel about how to lose weight on keto. I want you to also suggest the slants for the posts, what hashtags I should use, and how to get engagement and click throughs to my blog. Be very specific.”

AI will deliver information in the form of a table that includes the day, video title, slant, hashtags, and engagement statements like a call to action that will get the clickthrough for you like this:

• Day 1: "Keto Grocery Haul: Must-Have Items for Successful Weight Loss"
• Slant: Showcasing a variety of keto-friendly food items and essentials that support weight loss on the keto diet.
• Hashtags: #KetoGroceryHaul #KetoDietEssentials #WeightLossTips
• Strategy: Encourage viewers to engage by asking them to share their favorite keto grocery items in the comments. Include a CTA overlay promoting your blog post on "Top Keto Diet Staples for Weight Loss" with a clickable link.

All of this is done for you so that you don't even have to think about what you will be blogging about or sharing on social media in order to get traffic to your blog. It can even help you repurpose your content from one platform to another.

For example, using the day one option above, you can ask it to repurpose that into an infographic that you can put on Instagram or Pinterest. Not only will it tell you what to put for the text, but it can tell you what color palette to use, what icons to use, and more.

#9: Refine Blog Performance with AI Analysis

One thing AI is very good about that will help you rank high in Google and other search engines and enjoy automated blog success is monitoring and analyzing your site and its content for better performance.

It can keep an eye on your own site as well as those who are your top competitors so that you’re always staying one step ahead of them. This can be delivered to you in an automated report using paid AI tools, but you can manually do it using free tools periodically, too.

Some of the information you’ll get is going to be where your blog posts are ranking, who is outranking you (and how), whether or not your blog posts have any problematic issues that need to be resolved like a broken link, etc.

There are AI social listening tools that can keep an eye on trends and patterns in your niche. It will pay attention to user discussions and behaviors and this will allow you to freshen up your content, because search engines like it when bloggers take this approach.

Your AI tool can help devise a split testing strategy for your blog, too. This enables you to see which styles your audience engages with the most, whether it’s sharing your post, commenting on it or clicking through on something that brings in profits.

With AI by your side, you’re going to be able to hand over most of the blog tasks you had on your plate to a machine that can do the work for you – at lightening speed. This is something most of your competitors are not doing, which means you have a powerful advantage over them in no time.