I’d say at least half of our visitors to the Eureka Room come from online searches. I do a combination of Google Ads (generally terrible) and other local tourist sites (generally ok). I also have this blog that promotes things to do in Austin.
I finally started getting some decent stats on how much ticket sales comes from these channels. It has been a very long road and way more complicated than I had ever anticipated.
I can see that I get some hundreds of dollars of sales from the blog, per month. More content creation definitely seems like a good investment of time and money. Not only will I get more traffic, if I get an abundance then I can cut back on advertising and even possibly run ads for other businesses. But first things, first. How do I get the content?
Having been laid up with coved for over a week, I was good enough to watch lots of youtube videos, so learned a lot about ChatGPT and what it can do. I played around with other AI tools, but settled on ChatGPT3.5, which I thought was way faster than my paid version of GPT4.0 but really not much difference in the content I needed.
Sure you can just have it crank it out and paste it on your website, but I didn’t want to just bring a bunch of garbage into the world. I wanted to make something useful. So I have the following process.
- Gather Ideas. Use the tool to generate ideas for within the article. Since my articles are “Top X” sorts of lists, asking the tools to generate 50 ideas without descriptions gets me a list.
- Edit the Ideas List. I go in and pull out the top 20 or however many I want. Then I add any that I know of personally that aren’t in the list. This is important: You have to know your subject matter if you want good content. This will make it “your own” and keep the quality up.
- Have it generate blurbs on each list item. Work up a prompt that will give you about 50% more info than you need. Have the prompt format it so you don’t need to format it later.
- Paste the content into WordPress.
- Edit the content in wordpress. Clean it up and take only the best of the blurbs.
If you would have told me this process before I did it I would have thought, “Geez, I still have to do so much of the work, what’s the use in the tool? I’ll just do it all myself.”
But in practice it’s not just faster, but it’s also way less taxing on your mind. I don’t have to remember what things you can do at Zilker Park. I don’t have to think about how to word a sentence or check if I’m being redundant. Those tasks are costly from a willpower perspective. I don’t have to do much surfing the web to find facts, either. Which not only means I don’t spend that time, probably more valuable is that I don’t waste all the time getting distracted by other links, etc. I don’t go down rabbit holes. This is a huge savings, even for someone like me who can stay pretty focused.
I’ll be refining my process in the coming weeks, but so far ChatGPT has been an amazing tool for not just content creation but GOOD content creation.