How to plan and create high-quality content with AI

Thanks to the rising quality and availability of generative AI tools, marketers believe they save 5 hours a week on average on content creation and copywriting.

But beyond basic time savings, the right AI tools and techniques can supercharge your whole content strategy. These tools aren’t limited to coming up with highly relevant ideas and drafting posts. They can also help you with tasks like content calendar creation and identifying gaps in your content strategy.

We’re going to run through 5 ways you can use AI to strategize, plan, and create content.

Let’s take a look.

1. Use AI for topic ideation and inspiration

One of the hardest things for content creators is to continuously come up with new ideas. Generative AI is like Aladdin’s cave for creators—a never-ending treasure trove of idea gems. Simply prompt a tool like ChatGPT or Claude and it will return lists of relevant ideas in seconds.

You can also develop further by using AI to craft audience personas and then drawing on these to refine the ideas.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Prompt ChatGPT to generate blog post titles, based on a keyword. Include brief information about the audience, tone, and your business.
2. Choose the titles that you like best, and ask ChatGPT for more options along the same lines.
3. Get ChatGPT to come up with user personas for your target audience, asking for feedback on your top title idea, based on each persona.

This process is great for creating and fleshing out ideas that are sure to resonate with your audience.

2. Build a robust blog content calendar with AI

Many content writers find that planning out content and scheduling it ahead of time is more efficient than planning and publishing as you go. Knowing what you’re publishing and when can also ensure you meet your goals.

Take, for example, a blog calendar. Creating a blog schedule ahead of time will help you visualize the topics or themes your upcoming posts will cover, post consistently, and when to start writing so no dates get missed.

But how to create one with AI? It’s quite a simple process. Using ChatGPT and a database tool like Airtable, you can create a detailed content calendar that fits your business goals and constraints.

Here’s how:

1. Tell ChatGPT about your business and explain the key goal for your content (e.g. expanding your customer base).
2. Explain the key constraints for your content strategy. For instance, you might want to publish weekly posts, with each month having a broad theme.
3. Get ChatGPT to create a plan that includes blog post titles plus summaries (and any optional extras you want, like a monthly theme). Then, prompt the AI for any edits you want to the plan.
4. Once you’re happy with your plan, ask ChatGPT to turn it into a spreadsheet. Specify the columns you want (e.g. Week, Title, Summary, Theme).
5. Download the spreadsheet then upload it to your Airtable account to create a new Airtable base.
6. Add any extra columns you want in Airtable, e.g. a “Status” column to track the status of each post.

If you want to go even further with your content calendar, you could then use Zapier to create a weekly Zap that uses ChatGPT to draft each post. Zapier easily connects with Airtable and ChatGPT—and it can automatically email you the draft post.

3. Plan and draft high-quality content

AI can take the heavy lifting out of drafting blog posts and articles, offering tailored outlines, first drafts, or even polished, ready-to-go text.

To streamline your content planning and drafting process with ChatGPT:

1. Use ChatGPT to generate a detailed outline with sections, subsections, and relevant points.
2. Once you’re happy with the outline, ask the AI to turn it into a first draft of the blog post.
3. Get ChatGPT to read its own draft, with one of your user personas in mind. What feedback would that person have? What additional resources might they need? You can then use ChatGPT to incorporate these ideas back into the post.

4. Figure out your content gaps … and fill them

Is your content covering what your audience is looking for? Even if you’ve got years’ worth of content on your site, you might have some gaps.

With the help of AI tools, you can go through huge volumes of your existing content, pulling out key themes and figuring out where you might need to add new content to address specific interests or pain points for your audience.

To perform an AI-powered content gap analysis:

1. Create a Google Sheets spreadsheet of your blog content that includes the title, URL, and a short snippet of highly relevant text (such as the meta description).
2. Using Google Apps Script, connect your spreadsheet to OpenAI. You’ll need to generate an OpenAI API key and you’ll also need OpenAI credits.
3. Have OpenAI summarize the key theme of each post in a few words, automatically entering this into a new column of your spreadsheet.
4. Next, head to ChatGPT and upload your full spreadsheet. Give the AI a detailed list of your audience’s interests and pain points. Ask for a list of topics that aren’t adequately addressed in your current content.
5. Once ChatGPT has found those gaps for you, have it help fill them. Prompt the AI for a list of titles, grouped into appropriate categories, for fresh content that would plug the gaps.

5. Repurpose past content into new formats, using a custom GPT

Repurposing your existing content lets you get the most from it, reaching new audiences across different platforms. A blog post could become a YouTube video script or a series of social media posts, for instance.

One fantastic way to repurpose content and get consistent results is to create your own custom GPT within ChatGPT. Your GPT will remember the context and constraints you give it, so you can use it again and again without having to prompt from scratch each time.

To create a custom GPT, you’ll need to:

1. Login to ChatGPT and use the GPT Builder’s “Create” flow to give the AI information about what you want.
2. Confirm that you’re happy with the name and profile image that the AI suggests for your new GPT (ask for changes to them if you want).
3. ‘Train’ the GPT by providing your existing materials and explaining key constraints.
4. Try out your GPT to see if it’s working as you’d expect. Need to make changes? Use the Edit tab.

If you found this post helpful, you might also like:

• Using ChatGPT for SEO content creation
• The formula for landing pages that convert
• What are GPTs and how do I create one?
• Unlocking the full potential of content distribution with AI