Ben Goodey from How the Fxck how he uses chatGPT

Ben Goodey from How the F*ck on how he grew his podcast + the future of SEO after chatGPT

I asked Ben Goodey from How the F*ck on how he grew his podcast to be able to leave his full time job as a Head of Demand in a startup, how he uses chatGPT  + the future of SEO after chatGPT – a super-insightful episode, dig in &. grab his prompts to speed up your content-scaling process!

Ben Goodey from How the Fxck how he uses chatGPT

📹 👉 Watch this episode on YouTube as well. 

How Ben grew his How the F*ck podcast so he could leave his job and focus on it full-time? 

Ben started his podcast early 2020 and his first interview with April Dunford (!) instantly went viral on Hacker News, bringing in 30,000 views, but it wasn’t until December 2022 that he decided to quit his full-time job and focus on growing the podcast alone. In the meantime, during the pandemic, he was feeling burnt out and put a pause on the podcast, working as a Head of Demand in a startup in the meantime.

  • The name: Initially, the community wasn’t about SEO, it was about how (the F*ck) people achieve results.
  • First episode success: The first episode was with April Dunford, who Ben had reached out to after reading her book “Obviously Awesome.” It went viral on Hacker News and received 30,000 page views overnight.
  • The drive: to learning marketing by asking successful industry experts “How the f*ck they did it”: Ben started the podcast because he wanted to learn marketing. He would ask guests how they achieved their results to learn from their experiences.
  • Niching down: After a few episodes, Ben started to focus on SEO, specifically content and scaling content.
  • Going full-time: Ben went full-time on the podcast in December 2022, after doing it on the side for enough time that it was making enough money to take the jump.
  • Head of demand burnout: Ben took a year off from the podcast to work as a head of demand for a SaaS marketing company, but he felt burnt out and didn’t want to continue doing both.
  • Monday.com case study: The Monday.com case study (which he released on the day he quit his job!) went viral on the day Ben quit his job. The paid subscription to the podcast grew from 30 premium members to 100 in a couple of weeks because of the case study.

How is Ben promoting his “What the F*ck” podcast now?

  • Personalized questions: Ben specializes in content and SEO and taps into his personal experience with the challenges in a particular field. He asks questions that are relevant and resonate with the target audience, making the conversation more engaging.
  • LinkedIn growth: SEO is super-saturated, so Ben focuses on growing his podcast through LinkedIn. He repurposes interviews into different insights, stories, and soundbites, which he shares on LinkedIn. Every week, he writes up a case study on how a company did something or focuses on a specific topic and does a “drill down” on it based on his experience and extra research –  he focuses on one insight that someone mentioned on the podcast (not necessarily the main topic of the episode!)  and then he goes and expands on it – finding a lot more info on it, adding a specific template etc.
  • Twitter case studies: Ben creates case studies based on his podcast episodes and shares them on Twitter.
  • LinkedIn carousel: Ben used to write case studies on Twitter and then turn it into a LinkedIn carousel. This is really time-consuming
  • YouTube: While YouTube is not the main driver of traffic for his podcast, Ben has experimented with creating videos based on his podcast episodes. However, he notes that creating videos can be time-consuming and may not be the best use of his time.

How is Ben using chatGPT? What are his prompts for the different use cases?

  • Simplifying “wordy” sentences in articles: Ben uses chatGPT to rewrite wordy sentences. He asks chatGPT to give him five different versions of a sentence that say the same thing but are more concise and simple.Ben uses chatGPT to rewrite wordy sentences

    Prompt: “Simplify this sentence and provide me with five different versions of the same sentence that are more concise.”
    Ben Goodey using chagtGPT - extra value

  • Adding extra value to blog content (uncovering “missed ideas”): Ben uses chatGPT to generate ideas for what else (that he might have forgotten) he could add to his blog content. He provides an outline or paragraph he has written and asks chatGPT what topic he has missed that would make it more valuable or complete. ChatGPT comes up with ideas that Ben may not have thought of.
    Adding extra value to blog content (uncovering "missed ideas"):
    Prompt: “Here is an outline of my blog content. What topic(s) have I missed that would make it more valuable or complete?”
  • Keyword clustering: Ben uses chatGPT to cluster keywords, which helps him categorize keywords and find related topics to cover in his content. ChatGPT doesn’t have access to SERPs, so it mostly categorizes keywords rather than clustering them in the sense of removing overlap and preventing cannibalization.
    Ben uses chatGPT to cluster keywords,
    Prompt: “Cluster these keywords and categorize them into related topics for me.”
  • Cleaning up podcast transcripts: Ben uses chatGPT to clean up his podcast transcripts by removing filler words like “ummhs” and “aahs.” This helps to make the transcript more readable and professional.
    Ben uses chatGPT to clean up his podcast transcripts by removing filler words like "ummhs" and "aahs.
    Prompt: “Clean up this podcast transcript by removing filler words like ‘ummhs’ and ‘aahs’.”
  • Extracting “key takeaways” from an interview + Repurposing content into different formats: Ben repurposes his podcast transcripts into different formats, such as LinkedIn posts, by asking chatGPT to give him the key takeaways from the transcript.
    Extracting "key takeaways" from an interview + Repurposing content into different formats

    Prompt: “Give me the key takeaways from this podcast transcript so I can repurpose it into different formats.”

  • Whole article creation: He breaks it up into headers and rewrites sections to turn it into an article. However, he notes that chatGPT doesn’t necessarily produce high-quality articles.

Ben Goodey uses chatGPT to create the first version of an article from a podcast transcript

  • Prompt: “Create an article from this podcast transcript by breaking it up into headers and rewriting sections.”
  • Top quotes (from a podcast transcript) generator: Ben asks chatGPT to give him the top 10 quotes that are interesting for his audience. However, he notes that chatGPT can sometimes make things up and randomly generate quotes that are not even in the transcript, which he calls “hallucinations.”Prompt: “Provide me with the top 10 quotes that are interesting for my audience from this podcast transcript.”
  • Full article creation: Ben used chatGPT to write an entire article on “How to block YouTube.” He fed it fragments from other articles, asked it to rewrite them into instructions and make them plagiarism-free, verified the instructions, added screenshots of the steps in action, and was able to produce the article in two hours.

👉 Ben used it to write an entire article on “How to block YouTube” – Ben fed it fragments from other articles, asked it to rewrite it into instructions and make it plagiarism free, verified the instructions, added screenshots of the steps in acton and was able to produce the article in 2 hours.

Prompt: “Please create an article on ‘How to block YouTube’ by rewriting fragments into instructions and making them plagiarism-free. Please add screenshots of the steps in action.”

What will the future of SEO be with AI and chatGPT?

  • Advancements in AI: While GPT4 is not yet good enough, there is potential for GPT10 or later versions to be better than every content writer out there. This raises questions about how to differentiate from AI when it can have real experience and insights.
  • Job security for SEOs: As long as there are search engines like Google, there will always be a role for SEOs. However, the nature of SEO may change as AI and chatGPT become more advanced.
  • Brace yourself for the changes, but don’t panic and change your SEO strategy just yet: Ben thinks that SEO will change significantly in the next few years as AI becomes more advanced. But there’s a short term and long term view – the situation hasn’t changed that much yet, so Ben wouldn’t recommend changing your SEO strategy completely yet.
  • Doubling down on authority and brand (mind the EEATs!): Doubling down on authority and brand, as well as offering more value and authority, can be a key differentiator when we can no longer trust search engines with AI making things up.
  • Leaning into content types AI is not good at: Ben recommends leaning into content types that AI is not going to be good at, such as personal stories and unique perspectives.
  • Short-term and long-term view: While the situation hasn’t changed that much yet, Ben wouldn’t recommend changing your SEO strategy completely yet. However, if the barrier to creating mediocre content is lower and lower, we need to get better at being outstanding.

Overall, the future of SEO with AI and chatGPT is uncertain, but SEOs can take steps to stay ahead of the game by focusing on authority and brand, leaning into content types that AI is not good at, and continually improving their skills to produce outstanding content.

Full podcast transcript (unedited): 

Okay again. Ben, how are you? Hi, how are you? Good, good. Awesome to have you here again.

Like today I’m going to be asking Ben a few questions about how do you pronounce it? Do you pronounce it how the FX CK or do the same? It’s how the fuck you just got right. How’s the fuck. I’m super curious how you came up with the idea.

And basically I had to look at your LinkedIn profile. So it seems like you had mostly growth and demand gen experience. Right. And then SEO as well. Yeah, I’ve always worked in startups, in marketing roles like software companies.

And when the podcast and community first started, it was not about SEO. So now it’s like dedicated to SEO, but it was more about just general. How did these people that I see and want to achieve results like them, how did they do it? Hence the name, how the fuck. How the fuck.

And that just kind of came to me one day and I was like, why not? Let’s do it. Let’s call it that. And then basically I just started interviewing people. My first ever episode was with April Dunford, who was like, wow, exactly.

It went from me being in a small startup with no real resources to having an hour call with Chris Walker and April Dunford and all these people. How the fuck did you do that? They’re so hard to get on events. Yeah, April Dunford, I had messaged her about her book. I was reading that positioning book she has, which and then I just emailed her like, I’m thinking of starting this.

Do you want to take a chance on a brand new podcast? And she was like, yeah, sure, why not? And that episode got like it went viral on Hacker News or something. This is like the first ever episode accidentally went viral on hacking. Someone else submitted it on Hacker News and then it got like 30,000 page views overnight, which is just insane and still the best podcast that I’ve done.

But anyway, yeah, so I started doing that. Mostly it was because I wanted to learn marketing and learn from the best people how exactly they did it, and ask the questions I wanted to ask and share that with the world. And then kind of over time it became I started niching down into SEO and bringing much more focus on search content and scaling content in particular. Increasingly it went towards that. You’re doing that full time now?

Yeah, pretty much. So I went full time in December, and I do like SEO consulting and content consulting stuff on the side. I don’t know which is on the side anymore. Both are like my full time thing. But yeah, I was doing this podcast on the side for so long and eventually it was like, it’s making enough money that I don’t have to just do it on the side.

I could just go full time and try to really grow it and yeah, took the jump and really happy about that. That’s really fast because you started when did you start? It was last year as well. So when was that? I think honestly, the first ever episode went live, like April 20, early 2020, I think.

Oh, really? Okay. It took a while to grow it to the point where you could make the junk rather than just I thought this was like this one of these instant success stories where you got April Dunford and then it just went viral. And then you had to quit your job because suddenly.

It was just like a really windy path because the first 30 episodes were like very general marketing. I took like a year off and that’s when I was like head of demand for a SaaS company. I couldn’t do both. I was kind of burnt out from the pandemic and all of that, and I was just like, I’m not going to do both. And then I started to realize I shouldn’t have given up the podcast because I loved it.

I’m learning so much. Like, I it was, you know, it’s a really cool thing and enjoyable thing for me. So I just started up and then it went then it did go start going really well. And then the day I quit, another post went viral, which was that Monday. Monday.com, like how they scaled 1000 articles in twelve months case study, which was like, yeah, it was a nice little confidence boost from the day I quit to like, suddenly it went from like 30 premium members to like 100 in a couple of weeks just because of that case study.

Yeah, that’s huge. But yeah, that case study is also, like, getting the right people on the podcast who have something that is really inspiring to share and they can walk your audience step by step through it. But I’m also curious how you used your quite diverse experience, right? Because there is a bit of SEO, there is a bit of growth, there is a bit of demand, how you used it to grow your podcast. Did you kind of rely on these spikes or do you have a plan how you’re promoting it and stuff like that?

Yeah, good question. I think, yeah, like, my my background, I feel, has always been like I’ve been handed, like, grow the revenue of this company by the by the founder of a startup. And so that’s always led me down the content marketing SEO kind of route. So it just made sense over my career that’s the area I got more and more and more expertise in. So it just made sense that I started focusing on that.

And that really helped helped me now kind of bring that to the questions I ask and the guests I get on and kind of ask them all the questions that I know that the listener is having. You know what I mean? I’ve actually tried to do this before, and I know how difficult, like, with you, for example, when you’re on it. Luckily, I’d actually tried with Webflow to do programmatic SEO before for a company. And so I kind of knew the bit that I found difficult.

I really wanted to ask you that. How did you do that? What’s the kind of tricks of this? Because I know, like, someone going fresh. I knew already the questions that I have anyway.

So to your question about how I grow it, actually, I use social every time. That’s really the growth channel. There’s a few techniques or a few kind of different attempts at maybe growing the search traffic that are going on in the background, but I just haven’t had time to actually kind of do it. I think SEO is very time intensive. Yeah.

Especially in this niche, right? That’s like super saturated. Yeah. God, it’s the worst. Like, trying to find an uncompetitive kind of opportunity in the SEO keyword niche is really difficult, but I have found some but it’s slow on that side.

So, yeah, most of my growth comes from LinkedIn, and I’m kind of honing a process of kind of repurposing the podcasts into different kind of insights and different stories and things which help grow my LinkedIn. Basically, that’s how I do it. And so every week, I will either write up the case study that we talk about the whole playbook of how Monday did this or how type form did this, and just really try to give the best stuff from the podcast. Or I’ll focus on, I don’t know, like one specific thing, like how to hire templates to hire writers easily or something, which is like something that someone mentioned on the podcast. So I’m just going to take their insight and then turn it in, like, expand on it myself and go and find way more about it and turn it into so I’m kind of like pulling topics from things that I found interesting about what someone said and then being like at the end.

If you want to hear more about this, go to the podcast. So content repurposing, essentially. Yeah, not just like straight repurposing, but just kind of listening to what other people are finding interesting about an episode and then expanding on it. Yeah, gosh. Especially that you do have this experience.

And as you said, you’re asking questions that you know, people are struggling with and that kind of shines through. Like with this example of programmatic SEO in Google Sheets versus Webflow, I really loved your write up because it actually included insights from your own experience so you could get like a more rounded view. Yeah. So mostly LinkedIn. Do you use any other socials?

Yes, to varying degrees. Like, before, I would write a case study on Twitter and then turn that into a LinkedIn carousel. But it takes so much time. All of it takes so much time, it’s crazy. I’ve been experimenting with YouTube at the moment, but again, I know I’m like cutting a clip to make into a YouTube short and it gets like I think one of them had like 200 views.

It’s not like massive, but it’s 200 views. It wouldn’t have got otherwise, so why not? Yeah, it helps. But also, as you said, it just seems so easy. Right.

Because, you know, kind of the path from A to Z, but it’s actually time consuming just to do the stuff. And often I tried out for saying that kind of thing to VA and sometimes I would end up spending more time fixing things after them than I would have done otherwise. So I think I don’t have a good system for a bunch of things. Yeah, I think if you are a content writer or like a content manager by nature, you know what good content looks like. It’s really hard to just outsource it.

It’s really hard to get from your head to someone else what you think is quality because you end up being quite perfectionist. And there are so many variables. Right. When I was writing this last post about how AI content compares to human person content, like go content, say ahrift level content. Yes.

What does it actually take, right, that makes a difference. And it’s only when you really analyze it pretty much paragraph by paragraph that you see the differences. It’s very hard to explicitly communicate or teach people what the difference is.

But that kind of brings me to the question of this. Well, Episode is not a podcast, it’s kind of like more and different content types what I’m doing. Yeah. Chat GPT, are you using it currently to help you with your content or you think it’s not there yet, so then what you’re using it for? I am really torn on this topic, but I agree when you did that breakdown of good versus what Chat GPT wrote, that’s what I’m seeing as well.

It’s not that good. Honestly, if you really want it’s kind of obvious, even if you tell it to not be obvious, it’s okay. But it’s a little but I think just it only so far from my experience delivers something that feels surface level and not really expert or something like that. Doesn’t mean it’s not good for some audiences. But for me, when I’m personally learning, I do really value experience and expertise.

That being said, I do use it and I use it in different ways. So I can just tell you if you want different ways I use it. One of the ways I’ve been using it recently is when I see that I’ve written a kind of wordy sentence like say in the middle of an article or something, I just can’t be bothered to sit there and think through every word or I don’t have time. I will do, for example, I’ll put it in Chat GPT and say, give me five different versions of this sentence that are more simple and concise, but same thing. That’s really good because it just speeds up your writing.

Kind of gets off when you’re trying to be really concise. It works for LinkedIn posts too, when you’re feeling like you’re being a bit wordy, just like cutting the sentence, getting different ways of saying the same thing. So that’s one way that I actually find it useful on a day to day basis. Another way is I often ask it like, what have I missed?

I’ll go, here’s an article I’ve just written, or here’s an outline that I’ve written. What have I missed? Like, what would make this better than other content? Like, what topic have I missed out in this when talking about this subject? Yeah, I think that’s been pretty useful because it’s just like an idea generator, basically.

It’s like come up with something that I haven’t thought of that’s been pretty useful. Another way it’s been useful when I’ve been working with some clients has been clustering keywords. That’s actually been kind of a manual task that I’m just like, here’s a massive load of list of keywords, can you just put them into categories for me? And it would do that pretty well. Oh, wow, that’s a cool use case.

Yeah, typically. Well, I’m just curious how accurate that is. Right, because when you’re using these clustering tools, it takes them forever to do that when you have long list. Well, long can mean like, okay, 1000 keywords to cluster them because they are supposed to compare them against the terps. Right.

So I’m just curious if it does it based on probability or yeah, probably because it doesn’t go into the SERPs. Maybe that’s a good point. To clarify, it doesn’t actually say something like these should go in the same article. It will just categorize say like the one I did the other day. Here’s everything on the topic of like crypto.

For example, can you categorize these keywords? And then it will put it all into like, okay, here’s all of the keywords on regulation, law, legalities, like legal white papers. And it doesn’t have to include the word legal or law, but it will kind of understand the keyword and categorize it into the law space and then I can from there maybe break it down into blog posts, which makes sense and that kind of thing. So it doesn’t fit the steps. Yeah, makes sense.

Well, clustering in its own right is like super difficult and sometimes even when I get the output from the clustering tools, I’m like not sure this is very helpful because a lot of them are just variations of the same. So pretty obvious they should go into the same article but with the other use cases. That’s definitely interesting how, like you also mentioned when we were talking about it last time that you’re using it to use the transcripts of your podcast recordings and clean it up. That’s been useful for sure.

It’s great. Basically, if I can give it a dump of a transcript, it can clean up all of the filler words like the UMS and r’s and things. It will just smooth that out and make it a readable thing. So if I put that in my content, I don’t have to go and correct it all. And for that, for podcasting, actually it’s really good.

There are some ways you can say, here’s the transcript, can you tell me the top ten topics? And you can use that as your key takeaways or describing the podcast or anything like that, really. It’s really good. And if you want to, it depends how you could get a really good version, one of an article basically, and say, here’s the transcript. Can you just turn this into basically add headers to this content?

Like break it up into headers, like rewrite sections, basically turn it into how you can put expert insight into it, turn it into an article. But it doesn’t work that well. It’s like any content, it might actually have more substance because it’s from a podcast, but it doesn’t necessarily write it in a way that you find perfect or natural or what you would have said. It works the same for quotes. Like sometimes I’ll have a podcast transcript and I’ll say, can you give me the top ten quotes that are really interesting for this audience?

And then it just pulls out things. That aren’t really that interesting, makes things up, right? Like hallucinations are a thing I found it useful for, as you said. Like if there are kind of multiparties in a transcript or even in an article, right, I want to kind of say summarize a roundup article and walk away with the quotes by the author or quotes by different authors on a specific topic. Then it will sort of sift through it and reorganize it quite nicely.

But you still need to watch for these hallucinations because sometimes it adds something. Extra from itself so random that it does that literally if you ask it anything. Like, I can’t remember what it was I did the other day, but, oh yeah, I was writing an article on SEO testing experiments and I was like, can you give me five examples of experiments? And it was like, yeah, sure. Like, John, something at HubSpot did this and then I went to the internet and there’s like, no, like nowhere has that been done.

And it just completely made all of the examples up interesting, but didn’t use those, obviously. But I actually used it this week to write an entire article for the first time and for a client. Anyway, I was testing, they came to me and they’re like, should we use AI? And I was like, no, I don’t think so. But I’ll test it and it basically did like, I wrote an article in like a couple of hours rather than, I don’t know, outsourcing it for like dollars or whatever it would be.

And it sped it up. And the thing that really worked was, like it was it was a big, like, how to like how to block, like, YouTube, the website on and then it was, like, on mobile on like each of the sections were how to block it on Mac, Windows Mobile. And they’re, like, really easy, step by steps, like step one, step two, step three. So I would literally take those step by steps from somewhere else on the internet, put it into Chat Be GPT, say, Please rewrite this, make sure it’s plagiarism free, because the steps are the steps. And then I then went through and verified, like, I tried to I tested that out.

Is this how you actually block it? Made sure it’s accurate, added screenshots of showing that in action? Yeah, it was pretty good. But I did correct and add in my kind of human elements. Not perfect.

My ultimate goal was, like, I’ve got ten of these to write or to get someone to write. Can I just automate it all? But I just so far I just don’t think that’s possible. Yeah, again, it’s about the process and kind of sort of separating all the small variables that go into actually improving the output. So I had the same experience with the test I ran recently.

It was also about a process, and at some point I was using Surface SEO, so I wasn’t using Chat GPT to generate the content. So they have this now. It’s in beta, but it’s coming out like end of May. So essentially you just put in the keyword and the prompts are on the back end, so it takes like 15 minutes and then it spits out the whole article. Really nice.

Yeah, and that was pretty good. But it was something like related to how do you build links using roundup posts? Right. And then you had the step by step instructions of how to find the right resource pages in ATRIS. And I was actually comparing it to the ATRIS article.

So the instructions were just you couldn’t follow them because they were incomplete. But then I took the fragments that were incomplete and pasted them into Chat GPT and asked it to actually edible steps so the process becomes more clear and easy to follow. And it did that. So then it’s like, oh, I just need some screenshots to illustrate that now. Exactly.

I think if you can take a pretty good step by step guide and just put it into Chat GBT and just say things like, make it more simple, make it more useful, make it more actionable, make it more clear, like add the steps that are needed, that’s super effective. Yeah, definitely. It can definitely save time and also money on outsourcing because sometimes you outsource it to kind of like a mid level writer and they still don’t do the job, so they have to wait a week to send it back. Well, with AI as instant, so I think that’s the biggest advantage, actually. Yeah, that’s very true.

Yeah. What do you think with all this considered? Obviously, super early a year ago, we weren’t even talking about short Jupiter in terms of content creation, so I feel like the landscape has changed completely. I’m going to Brighton SEO with my team this week, so I’m super curious what other SEOs have to say about this, but I wanted to hear your take. What do you think the future of content will be with AI?

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s kind of a question that I’ve now started also asking every guest that I bring on, because I’m like, this is so important. I had, like, a kind of a freak out moment. Who didn’t? I was messaging someone like, what do you think about this?

Because this is like, my industry, like, SEO and content. And I think, if not, if not now, like, we talk about it, it’s not that good. It’s not good enough. But this is, if you think about it, only GPT, four GPT-3 was only, like, a month ago. So could we be like, I don’t know what happens when we’re at GPT ten and it’s incredible and it’s better than every content writer out there, and is that where it’s going?

Then I’m like, okay, if that becomes the case, how do we really differentiate? If it gets incredibly good at genuinely having experience and feeding off real insights and doing that itself, then I kind of worry about what will be the future of content marketing? How will Google respond? Will ultimately they need to protect their search engine from AI content or not, I don’t know. But I think as SEO, we’re always going to have a job.

As long as there’s search engines, it might change dramatically. That like, you know, I don’t know, it might change, but either way, like, we’re going to need to help people be found on Google. Like, however Google does start to look, there will always be a role for SEOs. And I think also content is always going to be important for building trust and authority and educating your target audience, but I honestly don’t know how.

I do think it’s going to change a lot, a lot in the next few years. What do you think could be that differentiator? Because I’m also thinking, like, okay, if it’s based on probability, and it still will be, it’s kind of conjuring up the next most likely set of tokens, basically in a sentence. So that can lead to a lot of misinformation. And if we start, like, publishing tons of AI generated content, will we kind of get into this rabbit hole of fake news, feeding off fake news, right?

Yeah, I think that’s how you can differentiate and offer more value is like being, I don’t know, like a more credible trustworthy source for people to learn from. I don’t know how that plays out in search. Like do they care increasingly about these like Eeat, things like that are going on? Should people be doubling down on their authority and their brand and making sure every article comes from appears like it’s coming from a person at least.

I think maybe leaning into content types that AI isn’t going to be good at is something I would recommend. But I don’t know, it’s like there’s a short term versus long term view here as well. I still wouldn’t recommend it hasn’t changed that much yet.

I don’t know. But I think over the long term, focusing on those topics that do require more experience or at least making sure your content doesn’t look like a bit rubbish now, especially quality is important now. I think if the barrier is like in the next two years, if the barrier to creating an average piece of content becomes lower and lower and lower because of Chat GBT, then I think we need to get better at being outstanding kind of thing. Yeah. So I think the content writers who can ultimately become editors and are able to turn these mediocre pieces of content into something outstanding because they understand what outstanding is.

And this among the content people that I’ve worked with, it’s incredibly rare. I’ve had a few stellar content writers that can produce really amazing pieces out of nothing, like on seemingly boring topics. But these are other exceptions than the rules. So I’m curious, will fewer people work in content? I probably would say that their entry barrier will be much, much higher because there won’t be enough to write mediocre content.

You will have to have the inside the skills to turn mediocre into exceptional. Yeah, exactly. But where do you learn how to make exceptional without going through the kind of bad stage of writing as well? Right? I don’t know.

Yeah, it’s a tough one. I think if I had to give trying to think what advice I would give, I’m kind of worried someone would be listening and freaking out. But I think that learning what quality is I almost think building experience and expertise in an area or a topic would be good as well. I think good content writers are really good at researching and things like that, so it doesn’t matter which area they’re in. But also if you are able to specialize and get experience, I would recommend I think it’s probably a good idea at this point.

Undoubtedly you would be good at writing about marketing and that kind of stuff. And probably because of your time at User Pilot, obviously you develop some expertise in product, but if you now became a freelance writer and started writing about other areas, maybe you’d have less. Same with me, like less authority or less to offer on that topic. It’s kind of like specialize a little bit so then get quality. It takes long time to gain enough of this like tacit knowledge to see the opportunities to enhance something and I see that with our junior editors in house.

At first they just don’t get why this piece of writing is wrong. Because it was just flat. It wasn’t explaining things in enough detail to make the process actionable for instance. But since they haven’t actually followed through of the steps yet they were unable to tell that. Yeah, totally agree.

Personalization will become more important. Well, thank you so much Ben, that was incredibly interesting insightful. I’ll be sharing that shortly. Do you think there is anything I should have asked you that I didn’t? Maybe something interesting, an interesting project you’re working on you would like to share?

I think we covered it pretty much pretty well. Yeah. Thank you. It’s been a great interview. I’m trying to think what else am I working on?

No, not really. No. I have to ask you, maybe separately to this interview, like, different tips and things, but yeah, I’m kind of forming how the fuck from content community into more of a community community where people can talk to each other and ask questions. And I think that’s for me, like, the future of it, that would be really cool. Yeah.

To have a platform to chat with other broken marketers. Yeah, definitely. I think that’s kind of like specialized LinkedIn where you can actually talk. Yeah, it’s very distributed across a lot of WhatsApp channels and Slack channels.

It’s slack is interesting when I can’t decide if it should be Slack or Circle or like there are community platforms but yeah. Have a great rest of your day then and yeah I’ll thank you when I post that shortly. Cool, sounds good. Cheers, have a good rest.

Posted in AI, chatGPT.

Emilia is a passionate SaaS marketer specializing in content marketing. She's currently the Head of Marketing at Userpilot, a Product Growth Platform for SaaS.