Strategic Content with Pamela Wilson

In This Episode

• [02:51] – Pamela explains weaving AI into the content production process as part of adapting to the evolution of content marketing but still retaining the human touch.
• [06:15] – Pamela specifically discusses ChatGPT prompt creation and why she does not consider it and the other AI writing tool as a writing tool.
• [13:34] – The reason Pamela wrote her books, Master Content Marketing and Master Content Strategy.
• [16:49] – The number of times a brand or content creator should post to their social media, blogs, or YouTube channels.
• [22:12] – The best frequency for updating your content calendar.
• [29:35] – Pamela gives some tips on publishing evergreen books.
• [32:15] – The best way to prioritize and identify outdated content.
• [38:37] – Strategies for creating better content marketing.
• [44:19] – Stephan defines the evil twin strategy.
• [46:09] – Pamela shares her opinion on whether TikTok is a viable platform.

Jump to Links and Resources

Pamela, it’s so great to have you on the show.

I am thrilled to be here. There has been a lot of change in the content marketing world. I’m excited to talk about this.

Me too. I’m sure our listeners are dying to hear about how content marketing is evolving in the age of ChatGPT and everything. First, I want to ask you a bit about how you take the stuff that you’re telling clients and followers to do in the world of content marketing and content strategy and you apply it boots on the ground, for your own business or for a particular client that you’re working on. How does this get executed on a day-to-day basis?

Yes. My primary client right now is a business in the healthcare industry. They use content to make a lot of money for their business because it’s their primary way to reach prospects. I’m serving as their Chief Marketing Officer.

We’ve got written content and video content. We are weaving AI into the entire content production process, finding ways to make it useful, and yet creating content that comes from a very smart human. That’s what I’m excited to get into.

Awesome. When you say weaving AI, are you using tools like Jasper, Surfer SEO, ChatGPT, or other specialized tools? How are you weaving AI into content production without it just taking over and being a content farm, courtesy of ChatGPT?

One of the big challenges we’re all experiencing right now is that there are new tools every week for content writing and image creation. They’re just rolling out at a pace that none of us can keep up with.

I’m a big believer in choosing a piece of software, doubling down, and figuring out how to make the most out of that software before you bounce off and find something else, like a new shiny tool you want to try. When we’re always trying new tools, we don’t have the opportunity to optimize the results we get from them.

That’s the context for what I’m telling you: we’re doubling down on ChatGPT. We don’t have squeezed all the juice we can get out of ChatGPT. There’s a lot we can still explore. They’ve now added plugins. It can now search the web and give you real-time results. There are so many things that ChatGPT can do, and we’re still figuring out all the different ways we can use it. That’s the primary tool we’re using right now.

We have a full-time content writer and a full-time videographer with the client I’m working with. We’re fortunate to have very smart human content creators on the team. When we use AI, it’s more of a supplement and a way to generate ideas and get a smoother-sounding copy in video content. It’s mostly for that, but we can explain how everything works.

I’d love to hear how ChatGPT helps with the video process of ideating videos and topics and then turning that into a final piece of content for your YouTube channel. How do you incorporate AI into that process?

When we constantly switch to new tools, we don’t have the opportunity to optimize their results.

The way we work in this company is healthcare, so it’s very jargon-filled and technical. It’s important because of the audience we’re trying to reach and the business’ prospective customers. We need to speak their language competently and authoritatively.

What we’re doing internally is we come up with a topic that will appeal to prospects. The model is set up to bring prospects through content. They talk to someone on a sales team. The sales team closes, and that’s where the conversion happens.

Our primary goal with our content is to generate qualified leads that go to the sales team. They’re handed off, and the sales team takes the final leg of the journey. We’re primarily coming up with topics that will appeal to these people. We’re finding keyword phrases because we still want to rank in search engines.

We’re also focusing a lot on super long tail keywords because when using any AI tool, the prompts generally contain many different words you can try to target. We create an article where the content writer interviews internal subject matter experts. We have subject matter experts who work for the company and are very familiar with these business processes within this healthcare niche we’re trying to appeal to.

She interviews them, gets detailed information, and then turns that into a blog post. ChatGPT helps with all that because she can do things like putting in the transcribed interview with the subject matter expert and having ChatGPT summarize it, pull out key points, and give us ideas, not necessarily straight-out headlines, but ideas for headlines.

I want them to think about ChatGPT as Thesaurus on steroids. It’s not a writing tool. I’ve used some AI writing tools like Jasper and Writesonic. I wasn’t super impressed by the results. But if you think about them as a Thesaurus that’s just giving you ideas, phrases, and concepts that you can utilize as your human writes the content, that can be interesting. It’s an assistant more than a source of content.

Your prompt makes a huge difference regarding the output you get from ChatGPT. What would be some of the lessons and nuances of prompt creation that you’ve learned in this process?

The biggest thing I learned is telling ChatGPT a role you want to play. You can get creative with this.

For example, “You are a highly-paid, experienced copywriter in the healthcare industry.” You can tell it to play a role in responding to you. That can make a huge difference in the quality of the information you get from it.

That’s a great tip. What about getting to the limits of the amount of text it will generate? How do you get around that? It will output a certain amount of text, and that’s it? But you need more content than that for an ebook you want to write. How do you get around that?

When we use AI, it’s more of a supplement and a way to generate ideas and get a smoother-sounding copy in video content.

We haven’t used that much for ebooks. We’re using it primarily for blog content. We don’t see a huge problem with those limits. There’s always the ‘please continue button,’ so you can tell it to keep going. That’s always an option.

If you were creating an ebook and getting ChatGPT to create, I have this new word that I’ve been using lately because when you create content, if you read my books, there’s a process for creating content. You usually make some basic outline, create a first draft, and then edit it to have a more polished draft. Then you have something ready to publish. You’ve got these stages.

I have this new word, AI draft because AI has a place to write a draft. It’s never anything you’d want to publish straight out. It’s like a pre-first draft. You get the AI draft, you get something you can work with, and then the human creates the actual first draft.

The human needs to take what the AI writing tool creates and then put a human touch on it, eliminate things that are just not accurate or pertinent to the piece of content you’re creating, streamline it, add in human touch things like emotions, stories, history, quotes from subject matter experts, and then build something that’s an actual human-created first draft.

How do you fact-check or validate what is being churned out by the large language model (LLM)? Because it’s not always correct. It can usually lie to you.

Totally. It can go completely off the rails and make stuff up. We feed it facts and ask it to interpret those facts. We’re giving information based on our subject matter experts, who do know what they’re talking about. They’re giving us information that’s based on data.

We do not depend on it to do that kind of work. That’s too much to ask. AI means artificial intelligence. It’s not smart like a human. It’s artificial. That doesn’t mean there’s no place for it, but we need to know what that place is. We need to put it on the hierarchy below humans.

Yeah. Do you get different results when you prompt it, saying you are an expert content marketer versus an expert content strategist? Have you tried comparing and contrasting?

I haven’t tried that one. Typically, I wouldn’t prompt it as a content strategist to write content. The content strategist prompt asks, “What would you recommend for a website if you want it to rank for these terms? What are the kinds of content you could create to appeal to this audience?” It would be a strategy question more than a content creation question.

I have an unrelated AI question here for you. Why two separate books about content marketing and content strategy?

That’s a good one. I wrote the first book because I became a content marketer with very low confidence in my writing. I always tell people I came in through the design door. I came into marketing as a graphic designer and publication designer. I was designing ads and the whole visual aspect of marketing for people.

As I learned about content marketing and knew I wanted to use it, I had to figure out how to write. If I ever needed writing on a project I was working on, I would hire a copywriter and bring them into the project. I wouldn’t do the writing myself.

My mastery of content marketing opened a ton of doors for me.

I had no confidence in my writing ability, partly because of my design background. I started to see a pattern in content that performed well. I saw these elements that were always present in really great content. Part of it was because I started getting involved with Copyblogger. At that time, they were industry leaders in teaching content marketing and demonstrating what good content marketing looked like.

I started writing for Copyblogger and based my posts on these seven elements. I unlocked some secret code that helped my content to do well. As long as I included these elements, they accepted my posts, published them, and eventually asked me to write for them monthly, which was a big deal. I felt like being asked to perform at Carnegie Hall once a month, and then they asked me to join their team eventually. My mastery of content marketing opened a ton of doors for me.

I focused my first book on helping people understand those elements and figure out how to get content produced from start to finish, especially if content marketing was something they were doing in addition to all the other things they had on their plates. Once I did that and taught people that, the questions started.

The questions were always like, “How often should I post content? How can I create content that helps me to sell things online? What overall structure should I look at regarding my content plans for the month, quarter, or year?” And I knew I needed to write a second book.

The second one was all about strategy because it assumes you know how to create content. It’s like, “Okay, now that you know how to create content, what will you do with it? How will you harness the power of content to boost the revenue in your business?”

The more you publish, the more confidence you gain as a content creator.

She’ll answer some of the questions you asked as part of these two books. How often should our listeners post to social media, blogs, and YouTube channels? What’s ideal these days?

It depends a little, but there are some rules of thumb. One thing I discussed in the Master Content Strategy book is the concept of a website lifecycle. When you first bring your business online or build up that presence with content, you must focus on publishing more often.

There are two reasons for that. One reason is the more you publish, the more confidence you gain as a content creator. You get better content shops because you’re publishing more often. A lot of people have a lot of fear around showing up online, putting their businesses online, and talking about what they do. Publishing at a more frequent pace helps you to lose some of that fear.

The second reason for doing it is that in that first year, especially, you’re trying to let search engines know your business, what you’re an authority in, and what people can come to you for. That’s another reason to get out there and feed the algorithms with what you’re known for and about.

Once you get through that first year, it makes sense to start focusing on creating as you go forward with more in-depth content. Oftentimes, the first year is your publishing frequently. You may not have time to do additional things.

Let’s say you have a blog post. You could create a blog post with a video that you embed into the post, and you could make a content upgrade, something people can sign up for and download that complements the information in the post. All of that takes time.

What I recommend is starting in about the second year. Again, your mileage may vary. It depends on your overall business strategy. But beginning in that second year, if you have published more frequently, you can dial it back and focus more on content quality. Start building rich pieces of content that are multimedia, have lead magnets, and have all these other ways to keep people engaged.

That doesn’t mean you don’t do things like that in year one, but you probably don’t have as much bandwidth. Starting in year two, you can dial it back a little bit and focus on creating richer content because, theoretically, at this point, the algorithms know what you’re about. You’ve established that. Now you can focus on just having richer content.

There’s this other lifecycle stage. From what I have seen, it happens around year six. Let’s say you publish content consistently over time. You’ve been consistent about getting your content out into the world. Somewhere around year six, you need to start switching over and becoming what I call a reference librarian.

Focus more on content quality. Start building rich multimedia content, have lead magnets, and other ways to keep people engaged.

You can imagine having this library of content built on your site, your YouTube channel, or your podcast. You need to start going back and doing two things. You need to update outdated content with old information that’s not accurate anymore—republishing it under a new date, for example, with new, updated information.

You also need to focus on people that come to your site. You have a library full of content. How are you going to help them find what they’re looking for? You need to build in things like hierarchy so that people can find what they need. In some cases, even just category pages that combine content and serve as a reference.

You can use that table of content structure where you have a hub and spoke idea you create, like a content topic. Then you have a bunch of content that branches out from that so that people can dig in and find themselves lost in your website, YouTube video, YouTube channel playlists, etc. You want to keep them engaged in that way.

In the first year, you focus on publishing a ton of content. Somewhere around year two, concentrate on posting richer content. Around year six, I started pivoting to “I got to have mercy on people who come to all this content, help them to find what they need, and ensure that what they find is updated and usable today.”

Those are all great tips. How often do we need to update our content calendar or editorial calendar to go into the future, the next month, the next year? What’s ideal there about that lifecycle?

I like to plan things out. It makes a huge difference. It gives us peace of mind when we know where we’re headed. The closer your timeframe is, the more nail-down your plan needs to be.

In the first year of your content marketing, focus on publishing a ton of content. Then in year two, publish richer content.

I love to go into an annual plan and say, “Okay, this year, we want to start showing up online, in search engines, or on social media for these concepts. We want people to search TikTok and have us appear as experts on this topic.” That’s the annual plan, but then you get down to a quarterly plan. That’s where you can go month by month and, in some cases, week by week. This is what we will do this quarter to get to this annual goal.

Monthly, you’re looking at it literally day by day. “What are we going to put on social? What are we going to publish on our YouTube channel? What podcast episode is going out that week? And how can we ensure we’re telling a cohesive story between all those pieces of content?”

Think about it like a movie premiere. The studio generally focuses on that big blockbuster they’re trying to promote across all their channels. It may not be for many months, but often, for a week or two, it’s all we hear about, right? That’s done very much on purpose.

They’re trying to ensure that on every platform where they appear, they’re showing up to talk about that particular blockbuster they’re trying to promote. We can do the same things as content publishers if we look at all the places that we appear with our content, and we try to make sure that we’re all singing from the same songbook, no matter where we are online or where people find us.

Speaking of movie premieres makes me think about book launches, product launches, and things like that. What would be an example strategy or plan for the run-up to a book launch?

Book and product launches are very different, but they have some similarities. One thing that I like to think about is that the process has stages as well. There’s the pre-launch stage, the live launch stage, and the post-launch stage. Pre-launch, what you want to discuss is all the topics that will be covered in the book and how those topics impact people in their daily life.

Ensure that on every platform you appear, you’re showing up to talk about that particular product or service you’re trying to promote.

I just started reading this book by Lisa Bragg called Bragging Rights. In the run-up to that book, she talked about how people struggle to talk about their accomplishments in a way that helps them accomplish more in their careers and lives because they feel like they’re bragging. They feel uncomfortable about it.

She talks about that from all different angles. By the time the book was finally available, you were aware of the issue, and you had already spent a little time thinking about how that issue might impact you, your life, and the goals you’re trying to accomplish. That’s a perfect example of using the time in the lead-up to a book launch to create awareness around the issues that will be addressed in the book.

There’s a launch period, which is usually shorter, but it’s hyper-focused on what you’re trying to accomplish. In some cases, people want to hit some ranking. They want to get on the New York Times bestseller list. They want to be an Amazon pick. They’re very much focused on taking the actions that need to happen so that those accomplishments can be hit.

For example, if somebody wants to appear on Amazon, they will focus on getting testimonials. That may be content marketing via email marketing to a list of people they’ve built up. It might be social posts recommending that people add testimonials or reviews of the book. Depending on what they’re trying to accomplish, a week or so, the strategy during that book launch will be different.

There’s the post-launch period, which many people don’t have a plan for. Their plan is, “That’s when I’m going to relax and take a breather.” But considering the post-launch a distinct period, you’re still promoting the book. In the case of a book, it’s still available, so you need to have some strategy for what you will be doing on an ongoing basis.

Using that as a time when you plan certain promotions at certain points, you talk to people on podcasts to keep the interest and awareness of your book out in the world. You’re doing things continuously to keep sales up over time.

Have you seen a standout example of the post-launch period done by an author?

There’s not a single one that comes to mind. But I’ve seen authors who are smart about making the most of the pre-launch and launch periods to get what they need for ongoing promotion. A lot of times, that’s in the form of reviews.

In the pre-launch period, they might get book blurbs from very recognizable names, and then they can feature those blurbs. In this Bragging Rights book, she got a blurb from Seth Godin, and Seth is on the cover. I suspect that she will be using Seth’s quote continuously. That’s an example of something done in a previous launch stage that she will use in the post-launch period.

For example, if you want to hit an Amazon ranking, you push hard to get that ranking. In the post-launch period, you’re talking about certified Amazon best sellers.

Think of ChatGPT and other AI writing tools as a Thesaurus on steroids: AI gives ideas, phrases, and concepts you can utilize. AI should be your assistant rather than your source of content. Click To Tweet

There are so many different ways that it can go. Some people build a community, and they keep engaged with that community. Some people start social media groups, such as a LinkedIn group or a Facebook group, where they continue to talk about the topic continuously. There are lots of ways to do it.

What about a book that becomes dated or obsolete when it hits the bookstores because it’s on a topic? Let’s say ChatGPT or even content marketing. How do you keep a book fresh with a publication date and work that into your post-launch?

Honestly, Stephan, I don’t think you should write a book if you think it will get dated that quickly or not a traditional book. I wrote these books on content marketing. I’m actually in the process of updating them right now. They are seven and five years old. They are not old, but they are nonfiction books. Nonfiction books typically do need to get updated with new information.

Do things on an ongoing basis to keep sales up over time.

I did my best to make them evergreen. The bulk of the content in those books is still applicable, but we have this new tool called AI writing, and there are many ways to use it. That’s what I’m weaving in. I’ll be updating and republishing them in the fall of this year. But if it’s the kind of book where the day you publish it, it will be out of date, that information should live on a website where it’s more easily updated.

Let’s say you have a very old website with much content. For example, my Marketing Speak podcast has over 400 episodes. It has some blog posts as well. Each of those episodes has a long-form blog post-type show notes page. I created a ‘Start Here’ page. Is having a ‘Start Here’ page common or best practice? What are some standout examples if that is something you recommend?

What’s on your ‘Start Here’ page?

Let’s say somebody’s in a particular niche or they have a specific problem. They might be recommended certain episodes, depending on their role in the company or what they’re trying to accomplish.

Okay, it’s broken up so people can find what they need. That’s a great way to do things. It’s a good first step. You have more than 400 episodes. Congratulations, that’s impressive.

You created long-form blog posts to go with the episodes, which is also super smart because now, your podcast is multimedia. It’s audio and written. The hidden question is, “What do I do if some content is outdated?” 

Yeah. That is a great question. Why don’t you answer that?

Over that much content, there’s almost a guarantee. What I recommend that people do when it comes to updating content, especially if you’re in a situation where you have 400 pieces of content to review, that can seem like an impossible mountain to climb. In particular, if you are also publishing new content simultaneously, “How will I go back and update this old content? I’m trying to keep up with my current publication schedule. I don’t have the bandwidth.”

Prioritize by running a report and seeing which content is getting views. If you run a report over a long period and 300 posts have zero to five views in six months, you can ignore them.

Let’s say the other 50 are getting some views, and some are getting a lot. They’re getting a lot of hits. People are coming to your website and hitting those pieces of content. They’re listening to the episodes., looking at the show notes, and spending time with that content. I would take those 50 pieces of content and prioritize them from the ones that are getting the most views to the ones that are getting the least, and then start tackling that list from the most viewed to the least viewed.

Consider the ones that are getting a lot of views that you also discover are out of date. That’s the other thing. We can’t assume that all these content pieces are outdated. You need to go back and look at them, listen to them, and familiarize yourself with them again, like, “What did I cover in this episode? What did I talk about?” This should be easy for you because you have your show notes.

This is a perfect place to use ChatGPT. Now it can look at the URL, so you can give it a URL and say, “Please summarize the main points covered in this piece of content.” You can get a shortlist and quickly say, “Okay, this one’s outdated because I talked about Amp, Google+, or something has long gone.”

Many people fear their sensitive personal and professional data popping up online. When we publish frequently and our confidential information isn’t exposed, our fears disappear. Click To Tweet

If you do that kind of review, and you harness an AI tool to do it, you’ll be able to prioritize quickly, “This one’s getting a lot of views and traffic. It talks about something that doesn’t even exist anymore. This is a hot redo opportunity, and I must put it at the top of my list.”

You could record a new episode and replace the old one. I don’t know how it works in podcast land, but with written content, you can redirect the old content to the new and have people go to that instead of the old one. That’s a way not to lose the traffic.

It does. I would need to re-interview the guest.

Or find a new one. If the topic has changed enough, and you still want to cover it, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same guest. It could be somebody who could speak on that topic.

Right. How does the hub and spoke model tie into a website like this, where it’s podcast episodes, the subtopics are different each week, and you have some content getting more dated more quickly than other pieces?

Having a master index of all your content is one of the smartest things a content marketer can do.

Having a master index of all your content is one of the smartest things a content marketer can do. It could be a spreadsheet, but just having everything in one place. All the podcast episodes or written content, just having a running list of that. If you don’t have that in your 400 episodes, hiring a VA to put that together for you can be a great investment.

Thinking of ourselves as librarians to our content allows us to see what’s on the library shelves to respond to it. That’s the first thing, just having that index.

In terms of how a hub and spoke model work, the way to think about it is you, in the background, have this hub and spoke concept worked out. For example, I want people to come to me to learn how to master this hub topic, this one thing that’s in the middle of the wheel. They don’t have to be consecutive, and they don’t have to happen all at once. But over time, these are the spoken concepts I need to flesh out so that people see me as an authority on this hub topic.

That gives you a plan. It gives you a strategy like, “Okay, I will be known for this topic. These are the subtopics I need to flesh out.” Then on the public-facing side of things, you do something like what you’ve already done. You give people a ‘Start Here’ page or category page, saying, “Hey, do you want to learn everything there is to know about this hub topic? Visit these spoken pieces of content, and you can learn all about it.”

You could put it in order. Start with this piece, then move to this and this. You can even interlink between those to make that easy. People get to the end of the first piece of content, and you say, listen to the next one, listen to the next one. You keep them moving along. 

That breaks the model that most websites, at least those running on WordPress, follow, which is category pages based on the reverse chronological order. Ten per page, and then you get dozens of pages of pagination series.

We need to harness the power of AI, but only use it to help bolster our human-generated content. We should eliminate inaccurate data results and add human emotions, history, and stories to the content it creates. Click To Tweet

Yeah, totally. There’s a place for that. I don’t think the user finds that useful. Again, if we give ourselves the title of librarian to our content, what we’re doing is facilitating.

The category pages are the equivalent of sending someone to a computer database of all the books you have on a topic. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it puts the onus on the user to figure out what they need and in what order. If you create a page where you’ve done some of that thinking for them, and as the topic expert, you should be able to do this, sit down and look at all your content, and say, “Hey, if you want to master this, this is the content that can help you. This is what I can provide for you.”

I have a really good example page that I created on my website. That’s all about how to build your business online. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve taken all my content, I put it into business stages, I’ve helped people identify what stage they’re in now, and then I’ve given them pieces of content to help them with that particular stage and the kinds of issues they’ll come up against in that stage. It’s a good example because it’s graphic-heavy. It embeds a quiz so people can take it and understand where they are and what they may need. It gives the resources all there on the page. It’s all woven in with things that I offer. It’s an example of using a ‘Start Here’ page, but giving it a business benefit, making it a way to bring in leads for something you sell.

Are you big on quizzes? I just interviewed Ryan Levesque.

The category pages are equivalent to sending someone to a computer database of all your books on a topic.

They had this big moment a few years ago, and they’re not. People aren’t quite as excited about them as they used to be, but there’s a place for them. I think the more you can promise some tangible outcome for giving people a quiz. Think about it, Stephan, when we were in school, and the teacher said, “We have a quiz today,” was that ever good news for you? It wasn’t for me.

We have a quiz class. Get your pencils out, and that was never good news. I think there’s a place for quizzes, but I think we need to promise some results. Take this quiz, and tell people how long it will take or how many questions. Eight questions, and after you take this quiz, you’ll understand this, get this result, or you’ll benefit somehow and spell that out. You have to sell the quiz, but I think there’s a place for them.

Do you have a lot of quizzes on your site?

I wouldn’t say a lot. I have a few, and they’re in strategic places. The most important one right now is that quiz I just told you about. It’s called the focus finder quiz, and it helps people to figure it out. When you’re learning online business, and you’re trying to learn online business, you have this firehose of information that you have to navigate through and deal with.

People are like, “Should I be doing a quiz? Should I create a webinar? Should I get on TikTok?” They don’t know what to do. Depending on your stage, that focus finder quiz helps people figure out what they should focus on and ignore the rest.

I say that in the quiz, there are four main stages of building an online business; you can ignore the three you are not in. Just ignore information that has to do with any of these other three stages. Just focus on the stage you’re in and getting through the most important milestones in that stage. That’s the most important one on my site right now. 

Awesome. To create that quiz, did you use Interact or some other tool?

It was originally in Typeform, and it’s now on Interact. The tool is not that important, to be honest. It’s more important to think through the questions and answers, the main benefit you will deliver to people, and how you can set it up with some conditional logic, which most quiz software allows you to do some kind of conditional logic. When people are answering, you are changing what they see next so that it’s particularly pertinent to them and not showing them things that don’t apply.

Yeah, it makes sense. What about other kinds related to a quiz, a personality test, a self-assessment type of thing, or something more elegant or more involved than just a typical quiz? Are you big on those tools?

There’s going to be a place for those as well. The big thing that I recommend is that they don’t lead with the tool they want to use. They think about strategy first and then go to the available tools to see which tool will help them meet the strategic goals they have in mind.

A lot of people get excited about a tool. They want to figure out a way to use it. They want to figure out a way to weave it in. They let the tool lead, and that’s a mistake. We must determine what we’re trying to accomplish first and then look for tools.

That makes sense. We don’t want the tail wagging the dog. You have a lot of content on pamelawilson.com. Do you find it challenging to figure out whether it should get posted there or on a third-party site that’s an online magazine? Do you have a model where you create two versions?

Andy Crestodina has this evil twin strategy, where he does one version for his blog or website, let’s say, the ten best practices of leading whatever in the topic space, and then he does a flip of that where it’s the ten biggest mistakes or worst practices of the newbies in this particular topic space. It’s all based on the same research. One goes on his blog, and the other goes on a third-party site that may have a requirement that its unique content that’s not published elsewhere.

Right. I love Andy, by the way. You’re bringing up one of my favorite people.

He’s awesome. He’s been a guest on this podcast.

Yeah, and leave it to Andy to develop a title like the evil twin strategy. It’s so awesome. That’s a great strategy. I have not used it myself. I’ve always focused on making my website robust and have not explored publishing on a second platform.

When you’re on a tight deadline, you need a detailed content plan. Click To Tweet

That would be a great use for AI, though, getting a basic rewrite first draft of a rewrite done that would be different enough from the original that you could then go in and take that first draft and rewrite the AI version. Go in and smooth it out and add the human touch. That would be a great use of an AI tool. If Andy Crestodina recommends it, it’s probably pretty sound.

Awesome. I know we’re about out of time. Are you active on TikTok? Do you see a lot of opportunities there or not?

I’m not currently. The content team I’m managing is, though. I do see an opportunity. Amazingly, TikTok is a viable platform for the healthcare industry. 

Awesome. You may be there in a more active capacity yourself. Who knows? In the meantime, where do we send our listeners or visitors if they’re interested in learning more from you, working with you, and all that?

The best place to learn more about what I do is on my website, pamelawilson.com. There’s lots of good stuff on the homepage. They can use it as a taking-off point for everything they can find on my sites.

Awesome. Thank you, Pamela. Thank you, listener. Apply this stuff to your business, website, and social media, and we’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

Important Links

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Strike a balance between integrating AI and maintaining a human touch in my content production. Use AI tools such as ChatGPT as a supplement to generate ideas and refine copy.

Master a specific content marketing software tool before jumping to another tool. Remember, optimized results require focused effort.

Leverage written and video content to maximize my content production. By combining these two mediums, I can reach a wider audience and engage them in different ways.

Implement fact-checking and validation on the content generated by the AI tool. Ensure that the prompts fed on AI generate factual information.

Publish often on my platforms to gain confidence and signal search engines to my authority. Prior to focusing on in-depth content, it is important to create frequent content.

Create a long-term vision when planning a content calendar. Start with an annual plan and break it down into quarterly and monthly goals. 

Align my content across different platforms to tell a cohesive story. This is crucial to maintain brand consistency and to effectively engage audiences. 

Prioritize updating the traffic and relevance of my evergreen content, such as podcast episodes and blog posts. Focus on the pieces that receive the most views and ensure they’re still accurate.

Consider re-recording podcast episodes or replacing outdated written content when revamping content. Use AI tools to analyze transcripts and summaries to quickly identify obsolete information.

Create a master index of all my content, whether written or audio-based, to gain a comprehensive overview. Think of myself as a content librarian and strategically organize my content.

Learn more about Pamela Wilson, her content marketing expertise, and how she can help build my business online via her website.

About Pamela Wilson

Pamela Wilson is a marketing advisor, executive coach, keynote speaker, and the founder of PamelaWilson.com. She’s the author of two popular books on content marketing: Master Content Marketing and Master Content Strategy.