I was recently on the Beyond the Story Podcast with Sebastian Rusk, a renowned speaker, digital storyteller, and author of Podcasts SUCK (If You Don’t Have One). We talked about how AI is revolutionizing long-form SEO blog writing — which is exactly what Content at Scale was built for:

AI-powered SEO blog writing. 💪

As Sebastian noted, AI is everywhere, and marketers are using it for everything from content moderation to ad targeting, email marketing, social media listening, and even image creation. 98% of marketers now acknowledge AI is important for their job.

In this episode, we zeroed in on blog writing and discussed how Content at Scale is the perfect example of how AI can help scale and even improve your blogging efforts.

I also shared the story of Content at Scale — from its early development to what is now a game-changing app that’s helping content agencies, startups, and even freelance writers support their businesses.

Follow the recap of the conversation below to learn more about AI-powered SEO blog writing and why it’s the future of content.

Early Attempts at Using AI Software for Scaling

Back in 2008 when I started a digital marketing agency, we were using article spinners that would automatically rewrite existing articles by changing words or phrases with synonyms. The results were utterly ridiculous.

Article spinners were the first AI “rewriters”, and they were awful. (Image source: Seobility)

Fast forward to 2014, I launched my first SaaS company, which was an outbound sales tool but was focused exclusively on content marketing to drive traffic.

With advancements in AI, I thought we could maybe do this article spinning in a legit and proper way.

At first, we launched a done-for-you service where we used AI to write our content. At that time, we didn’t realize we were the only content agency offering this. 

Initially, it brought in around $30,000 a month in recurring revenue.

Turns out, the AI wasn’t quite ready, so we had to pause these accounts and went back to writing all of them from scratch.

It took a lot of remodeling and tweaking to get the AI to do what we really wanted, but finally, in September 2022, we successfully launched Content at Scale.

What is Content at Scale? AI-Powered SEO Blog Writing

Content at Scale is a self-serve platform that generates ready-to-publish blog posts, offering companies a more efficient and effective solution than traditional freelance writers. 

It’s not a general-purpose AI writing assistant like ChatGPT or Jasper. While those tools are great for writing emails, product descriptions, ad copy, essays, snippets, and tweets, they’re bad at long-form content.

Enter Content at Scale. It specializes in long-form content, specifically informational articles that cover a particular topic more in-depth. And since my background was in SEO, that became the focus of our product.

Google back then was against AI, and passing AI detectors was a big thing for AI-generated content. We knew we couldn’t just take the output from AI and publish it to a blog. It had to go through multiple layers of editing to be undetectable.

But with the explosion of ChatGPT and its integration into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Google finally reversed its stance on AI content.

Nonetheless, we developed our own AI detector tool to make sure our blog posts appeal to readers.

How Does Content at Scale Work?

Content at Scale was built expressly for AI-powered SEO blog writing.

One of the best things about it? There’s no learning curve. Once you sign up, you get access to the app and start entering your keywords. No complex prompts required.

After you enter a keyword phrase, the machine will start crawling Google and identify all the top-ranking content. We’re running natural language processing (NLP) to identify all the keyword entities and things that need to be included in those articles, and the machine puts the content together based on all that.

In a few minutes, you’ll have a 2,000-plus-word article with an SEO title, meta description, introduction, table of contents, headers, key takeaways, and call to action — ready for polishing on a text editor right within the app. No need to copy-paste to Word,  Docs, or WordPress to make final edits.

With the release of Content at Scale 2.0, the tool now automatically adds high-quality links sources so the information is all research-backed.

You can upload 100 keywords all at once, and minutes later you have 100 blog posts ready to go.

Another cool feature that came with 2.0 is that you can now input YouTube URLs and podcast episodes (like this) and turn them into blogs. Just run them through Content at Scale, and you’ll get a long-form informational blog post written based on the audio or video.

And these are not mere media transcripts. It’s a much deeper and more insightful way to repurpose your existing content.

Do you have a competitor who’s crushing it? Take their URLs, run them through Content at Scale, and have fresh content written on the same topics.

Challenges: Freelance Writers vs. AI-Powered SEO Blog Writing

Hiring freelance writers is a popular way to scale content because they’re cheap and are available on demand. But this comes with its own set of challenges:

• Time-consuming: Finding skilled writers who understand your niche can be time-consuming and the output may require multiple rounds of revisions before you get satisfactory results.
• Inconsistent quality: The quality of work produced by freelancers can vary greatly depending on their expertise and familiarity with the subject matter.
• Limited scalability: Humans can only do so much so it can be difficult to scale up if you’re relying solely on your content team.

In contrast, AI-generated content offers several advantages:

• Faster turnaround times: Advanced algorithms are capable of generating well-researched, well-written long-form articles within minutes, not days or weeks.
• Predictable quality output: Because machine learning models are trained on vast amounts of data, AI-powered platforms can consistently produce high-quality content.
• Scalability: As AI-driven tools don’t suffer from the same limitations as human writers, you can easily scale your content production up or down without any hassle.
• Avoid plagiarism issues: Using artificial intelligence helps ensure originality in every piece since it generates unique text based on extensive research across various online resources rather than just spinning existing material.
• Better readability: Advanced NLP techniques create content that is not only well-structured but also easy to read and understand for your target audience.
• Affordability: Hiring an army of freelance writers can be expensive, especially for small businesses, but with Content at Scale you only need to spend $15 per post.
• In-depth research: The ability of these tools to crawl the web and analyze vast amounts of data ensures comprehensive coverage of your topic – something that may not always be possible when relying solely on human writers who have limited time for research.
• Easier editing process: With AI content already formatted and structured logically from the outset, you’ll spend less time editing and proofreading it before publishing.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, you can grow your online presence quickly while maintaining consistently high standards. Embracing change and taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies like Content at Scale is the only way businesses can stay ahead and enjoy greater success in content marketing.

So, What’s Holding You Back?

Implementing new technology can be challenging for any business. Here are some of the obstacles some of our clients have encountered:

• Lack of understanding about how artificial intelligence works and its potential benefits.
• Doubts about whether AI-generated content could match up with human-written quality standards.
• Fear that adopting new technologies could lead to the displacement of human writers.
• Budget constraints.

Let’s address these issues.

We already covered the benefits of generating content with AI — speed, convenience, consistent output, fewer errors, and affordability.

But what about quality?

Why should businesses use a platform like Content at Scale versus hiring a freelance copywriter?

Here’s the thing. Before AI, we had 40 freelance writers doing everything manually. We had to let go of 36 of them because they just weren’t good enough.

So when people say they want content that’s human-written, well, human does not always mean better. Quite frankly, our app does a better job than 90% of freelance writers out there.

Quality and consistency aside, AI also takes care of management. 

With a freelance writer, you have to do all the research, put together a brief, send it to them, and then edit their work. AI eliminates all of the headaches associated with these tasks.

The old-school publishing goal was typically one blog post per week, or four a month. But it’s just not enough anymore.

According to a study by HubSpot, companies that were publishing 20 posts a month received almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that published only four or fewer monthly posts.

AI takes away all of that time commitment so you are able to focus more on promoting that content and building links right.

If you’re worried about the cost, there are multiple plans available based on how many blog posts you need. As you upgrade, you get a better rate.

What’s in Store for Content at Scale in the Future?

The speed of this whole industry is just crazy. You miss what’s going on in a day and you’re already way behind.

Just last March, there were 1,100 tools that joined the AI craze.

For Content at Scale, we’ll soon be writing in different native languages. We’re also launching plugins for seamless integrations with popular platforms like WordPress and Shopify to make it easier than ever to scale your business.

Bottom line: AI is not a fad. It’s here to stay. So you have two options: adapt or get left behind. 

Free Resources to Train Your Writers into AIO

I’ve been personally training agency owners and teams and helping them convert to the AIO way. Want these? You’re in luck – we’re giving them away.

Free Guide

We put together a full guide for AIO’s – an AIO writer’s worksprint, a job template to hire and find yours, links to our best tutorials and training, and more.

Want this awesome resource? It’s called the AIO Writer’s Worksprint. Download now for free.

Free Step-by-Step AIO Training Course

Additionally, after months of putting AIO and C.R.A.F.T. into action (over 40M words are produced each month by our users at Content at Scale, and our Done-for-You client side is another 500,000 words/month! Talk about AIO at scale 🤯 ) – we put together a step-by-step AIO C.R.A.F.T. tutorial.

Ideal for you, your writers, and any content creator ready to adapt to the CRAFT methodology and the AIO way.

Enjoy!

New to the idea of AIO and CRAFT? Read this to understand the innovation behind AIO. 

Want a written guide that has all the CRAFT steps from the YouTube video? Your wish is our content command. Step-by-step AIO writing tutorial, blog version.