It costs 15 percent less to acquire customers with content marketing than with paid acquisition. But to succeed with content marketing you will have to publish a lot of content. 

This fact is not lost on marketers, 68 percent of whom create at least one piece of content per day. And thanks to AI, they can now publish a lot more content without burdening the business with a huge overhead or sacrificing quality.

With an AI writer, you can now scale content creation 25x faster than is possible with a human writer. The AI takes care of the content creation overhead, the eternal challenge of content marketing in an emphatic way.

But while AI writers have great benefits, they do not better the human writer in every way. This is why at Content At Scale we developed the AIO writing model which redefines the role of the human writer in the content creation process.

This article breaks down the CRAFT framework, the quality assurance tool the AIO writer uses to take the baseline the AI generates and make it more accurate, engaging, trustable, and truly helpful.

Let’s dive right in.

Table of Contents

What is AIO?

AIO – artificial intelligence optimization – is the process of improving content generated by an AI writer to make sure it reads more naturally, is concise, accurate, factually sound, and targets the right audience. It transforms AI content into AIO content.

AIO writing, therefore, is the sum of the work the human writer must do to produce AIO content: from crafting the prompt and customizing the outline, to the process of reviewing and optimizing the draft generated by the AI.

The AIO model re-introduces the human writer to machine-generated content. Yes, while the traditional SEO writer is getting obsolete fast, we cannot totally remove the human from the content creation process.

When you optimize AI content, you are improving and making sure it reaches and resonates with the largest human audience possible. AI content must resonate with readers because that’s how it will deliver on its conversion goals.

Why is It Important to Optimize AI Content?

When it comes to AI content, many people worry about two things:

Is the content detectable as written by AI?

Will the AI-generated content rank for its targeted searches?

You could argue that both are the same thing because the reason people worry about potential detection as AI-written is Google. But that actually shows the shortsightedness of creating content specifically for Google, which is apparently what Google is against.

For the avoidance of doubt, AI content can rank. Google has explicitly confirmed that it rewards good content however it is produced. What it detests is poor quality content that has one goal only – to rank in Google.

When you optimize AI content, your goal should not only be to remove traces of AI and make it undetectable as machine-generated. It should be mainly to align it with reader goals, tastes, and expectations.

After it ranks and gets that all-important click, your blog post must still make an impression on readers. 

Only when your blog post results in a sign-up for a free trial, purchase, subscription, or whatever your conversion goal is should that piece of content be deemed truly successful. Not when it ranks number 1 in Google. 

The content may yet fail to achieve its conversion goals if it does not catch and hold the reader’s attention. That normally happens because AI content tends to sound robotic, stiff, and too mechanical. To readers, that comes across as boring.

Optimization Humanizes AI Content for Engagement and Conversion

An AI writer is 5-25x faster and more adept and efficient at producing a quality blog post than the average SEO writer. What AI lacks, however, is emotion, lived realities, and personal stories that make written content truly evocative.

It’s our individual idiosyncrasies, the one-sentence paragraphs, one-word sentences, and the many grammar rules that we intentionally break that make human-written content truly unique. That’s what engages readers and what, at least currently, AI writers aren’t trained to do.

The question then is how do you optimize AI content?

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. 

How to Optimize AI Content and Make it Better

AI writing technology has advanced so much that AI writers can now completely take over the draft phase of the writing process. And that’s great for many reasons, including:

• The quality of the content is a lot more predictable.
• It is now cheaper and easier to scale content creation.
• The hassle of managing large writing teams can be eliminated.

Those are compelling benefits of switching to AI content. Only for the small part of making sure that content performs to its assigned goals. 

For that, at Content at Scale, we designed the AIO model where a human writer takes the draft the AI generates and makes it better for both search engine algorithms and human readers. An AIO editor oversees the entire content creation process in the way a traditional editor works.

The AIO model works great as a guide to produce better AI content, but without a framework within which to work results will still not be as predictable. To fix that we developed the CRAFT framework.

Want to learn every step involved in our C.R.A.F.T. framework? You’re in the right place. To learn more about AIO and C.R.A.F.T, read our individual guides:

• C – a full guide on cutting the fluff
• R – a full guide on optimizing your content for SEO
• A – a full guide on adding blog images and visuals
• F – a full guide on how to fact-check
• T – a full guide on how to trust-build in your content

Additionally, subscribe to our blog, watch our C.R.A.F.T. and AIO tutorials on our YouTube channel, and read this blog to understand the AIO model.

The CRAFT framework lays down a series of steps the AIO writer must take to transform an AI draft into a polished piece of AIO content that a publisher can confidently put their name behind. 

Each step of the CRAFT framework is a pillar that the blog post relies on to rank, attract clicks, convince readers, and activate the actions that you want readers to take. All 5 pillars work together, with each doing one specific job.

Using the analogy of a building, if one pillar is missing or is weak, the whole structure can’t stand. Let’s go over the CRAFT framework, one pillar at a time, and see how they work in action:

1. Cut the Fluff

Fluff in writing is unnecessary words and extraneous details that do not add any critical information to a piece of content. It includes redundant language, phrases, and extra words that if removed will not affect the meaning of a sentence.

A piece of writing is also fluffy if it overuses adjectives and other forms of overly descriptive language. Unnecessary information that does not enrich the main argument an article is making is also fluff.

So why should we eliminate fluff from AI content?

Fluff is bad for all written content but especially so for web content. The modern consumer is busy, with so many things competing for their attention. So it’s important that when you write content for them that you get to the point FAST.

Fluff makes your articles longer than they need to be, which risks them tuning out before they get to the important parts of your article. 

Importantly, removing fluff makes it easy for readers to find the information they are looking for. All those irrelevant details will obscure the facts readers need to take the actions you need them to.

Cutting the fluff is the first task when an AIO writer sits down to optimize an AI draft. That’s because AI content is not immune from fluff and redundant language. 

So how do you remove fluff from an AI draft?

Here are some of those tips in greater detail:

Customize Your Outline

An outline helps to organize your main points for an article. When you are writing the draft yourself, it guides your writing and ensures you stay on topic.

The advantage you have with the Content At Scale AI writer is it will write the outline for you. All it needs is your keyword for the article and a few sentences of additional context.

Even more convenient is that the AI writer allows you to customize the outline it generates if you feel it missed important points. This helps you to ensure the AI only covers sub-topics that are relevant to the article, which means you have less unnecessary information to chop off.

Don’t Skirt Around Your Points

You will avoid adding unnecessary words to the article when you get straight to the point when writing. 

AI writers also fall into the trap of over-elaborating their points. So it’s your job to identify every unnecessary word and chop it. Be ruthless about this as any such words only serve to buff the article and waste the reader’s time.

Use Simple Words

The less sophisticated you try to sound when you write, the easier it will be for readers to understand your points. 

Identify every big word and, if possible, replace it with a simpler one. That will not make your article that much more concise but it will make it less intimidating for readers, which should be your goal.

Jargon has the same effect on readers as big words. Unless you are writing to an audience of professionals, replace any words that only people in a specific profession will understand with simple, everyday words.

Read the Draft Aloud

You will inevitably miss some instances of fluff and redundant language when you first sit down to optimize your AI draft. To catch all the unnecessary words you missed, it helps to read the draft aloud one last time.

Removing fluff from your draft article makes it more concise and more approachable for readers. It makes the information easier to digest, which is what content needs to succeed. 

Read this article for more tips on how to remove fluff in AI content.

2. Review, Edit, and Optimize

If your goal is to attract organic traffic from search engines, it’s essential that you write on topics that people are searching Google for. You have to target specific keywords with your articles.

Targeting a keyword with your article requires you to follow on-page SEO best practices. This means using the primary keyword in the URL, title, introduction, headers, body content, and in meta title and description. When you do this, you make it easy for Google to understand what your article is about.

 One of the great perks of using the Content at Scale AI writer is that the AI does most of this work for you. Your job is simply to review and make sure that the target keyword is in all the right areas, a task that the AI also simplifies. 

The Content at Scale app has a tab that collects all the keyword data from the article, showing you how many times the target keyword and those the AI researched were used in the article.

Not just that, but below that data, is an on-page SEO checklist that highlights the elements you have not optimized. You simply attend to each element you have missed until everything is green-ticked. Read this article for a full overview of how to optimize your content.

3. Add Images and Media

They say an image can speak a thousand words. It can actually do a lot more than that, especially when you consider that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.

So adding images ensures that readers actually understand the points you are making. It adds context and makes the more complex parts of your message easier to process. The effect of that on the success of your content can’t be over-emphasized. 

Images also break up long text passages, making the piece of content more scannable, less intimidating, and easier to read. 

Do you want to get more social shares for your articles? Images can do that too. They can even make your content more credible by helping to validate your claims.

You will have to source and manually add the images to your post. The process of uploading those images to your draft, however, is a breeze. The Content at Scale app also adds the alt text as a default feature, which means less work for you to do.

Learn more on the importance of adding images to AI content and how to optimize and add images to your post within the Content at Scale app in this post.

4. Fact-Check

Unfortunately AI content has come in for a lot of criticism for its tendency to make up facts. That is more of a challenge with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, but you still have the responsibility to verify all the facts cited in the article and evaluate the sources of that information.

Pay attention to all statistics, dates, and people and place names. The use of expletives like ‘first of its kind’, ‘ best’, and ‘cheapest’ can also weaken your content if you don’t support them with data. 

You don’t want to have readers fact-checking your claims as that can ruin your credibility as a publisher. The risk is once you lose the reader’s trust you may never get it back. 

This post offers an in-depth tutorial on how to fact-check AI-generated blog posts. It also shares tips, tools, and other resources you can use to fact-check your draft and evaluate the sources referenced in the article.

5. Build Trust

When done right, content builds trust between the publisher and the reader. It does not just convey information. 

It is the goal of AIO writing to make sure that each piece of content published sends the right trust signals.

To successfully sell your ideas, you need to gain the audience’s trust first. In fact, when they trust your content, your readers can set aside their doubts. They are more inclined to give you a chance.

To optimize an AI draft to gain the trust of readers, you must ensure that the article speaks to them directly, using accessible language. The content must address their needs in a way that shows empathy and a desire to help, not sympathy.

So you have got to make the draft sound less impersonal. You have to humanize it with personal stories. Show honesty by making claims that you can support with hard data and research. In other words, stick to facts and avoid generalizing. 

Instead of telling readers how to do something, tell them. Do this by embedding videos and adding images as we do with our guides, like this one that goes into deeper detail on how to build trust in blog posts.

How to Make Content Better – FAQs on AIO Writing

Can Google detect AI-generated content?

Google has not indicated that it can detect AI-generated content. It’s probably because it is not too concerned with how the content is produced. Google only cares about the quality of the content it indexes. 

As long as you are not using AI to game Google’s systems or solely to satisfy its algorithms and not readers, your content will perform well on search.

Why are images important in an article?

Images help to break up text and make your blog posts more scannable. Easier to process for the human brain than text, images also help to contextualize your arguments and help readers understand the content. They also make your articles more shareable.

How do you build trust through content?

The best way to build trust is by making sure your articles are truly helpful to the reader. Addressing the reader’s pain points directly and in language the reader understands also helps. So does putting yourself in the reader’s shoes to show that you understand their thoughts and feelings.

Scale Content Creation Without Sacrificing Quality with the AIO Writing Model

AI has effectively replaced the human from the draft phase of the writing process. It can write much faster and more efficiently than the average SEO writer. What it cannot do, however, is completely remove the human from the writing process.

For the purpose of ensuring quality, accuracy, and infusing personality in AI content, it’s essential to retain the human touch in the writing process. 

The AIO model and the CRAFT framework in particular standardize the process and give the AIO writer a checklist to guide them. It’s especially handy when you are creating lots of content, which should be the goal with access to a tool like Content At Scale.