Quick and Dirty 5: AI little help here?

To make your website content creation as quick and effective as possible, combine our Quick and Dirty method with some careful use of AI to speed things up while coming up with the most engaging content.

A Call for Help... Unanswered?

When you’re in trouble, it’s natural to reach for a helping hand. If you fall, it’s likely anyone around you will help you get back on your feet, and feel great about it. Unfortunately, the situation may be different if the thing causing you to stumble is the fact that you need to come up with all the text for your website.

In that situation, you may find that people who’d bend over backwards for you in any other context are reduced to the same sorts of quivering bowls of jelly as you are at the prospect of having to write something down. Writing’s hard, but fortunately, today AI can give you a helping hand, and it won’t even complain about having to do it.

Back in the Day

Back in 2020 we gave you what I think is the gold standard for producing the text content of your website. I called it the Quick and Dirty method of content generation, and I still think it’s the best method for producing really engaging content for your website. I said following that method would be difficult, but worth it. That’s still true, though now with all generative AI has to offer I think you can power through the steps more quickly and easily, and still produce a great result.

I encourage you to go back to the original 2020 series first to learn the steps . To read through those four posts should take you under fifteen minutes, and then you can come back here to find out how to get a little help from your AI friends to do much of the heavy lifting. [cue the Beatles for some background listening]

AI Update

Before we get into the application of the Quick and Dirty steps, I’d like to take some time to update my recommendations from my later post, On the AI Takeover, from a couple years ago. In that post I argued that AI was good at producing a lot of fairly middling copy, but had a long way to go before it would threaten the livelihoods of all the copywriters out there.

I still think this is mostly true, though the quality of the copy coming from AI does continue to improve. One thing that has not changed in the intervening time is that anything written by AI still needs to be carefully scrutinized and edited by a thoughtful human before being used.

This advice was echoed by Harvard Business Review about half a year after my post. They said that to “use generative AI effectively, you still need human involvement at both the beginning and the end of the process” which is as true today as back then.

Nine months after that, a different part of Harvard, the department of Information Technology, issued some guidance on creating good prompts for AIs to get them to generate the text you want. It’s good advice, and you should read over it before trying to use an AI to help you with your Quick and Dirty process.

Quick and Dirty Update

If you’ll follow Harvard’s tips, and my warnings, I feel pretty comfortable predicting you'll be successful if you use AI to follow the Quick and Dirty steps, in a hopefully even quicker and maybe less dirty way than before. So let’s jump into it!

Step 1: come up with the questions to answer in your visitors’ minds

The goal of your website is to get your visitors enough information that they feel comfortable engaging with your business. Because of this, you need to be sure you answer for them their key questions, ideally without their having to ask you or even articulate those questions.

If you think about it, you know the questions they need to know the answers to even better than they do. They might be the same questions you resolved for yourself that lead you to open your business in the first place. Listing them out is an important step.

In my original post, I suggested it should only take you two minutes to brainstorm these questions, but in all likelihood it might actually take you a good half-hour to articulate the questions. This may especially be the case if you’re like me, and spend a good chunk of time staring at that blank page before deciding where to start. If so, you might as well avail yourself of an AI to do it for you.

Your AI of choice (mine is Claude) will probably come up with most of the questions you’d arrive at anyhow, and then you can review the list and consider whether there are other questions it didn’t come up with. You’re the expert, so you’ll probably come up with a few it’ll miss, but at least it ought to get your juices flowing…

Step 2: answer each of the questions as fully as possible

Asking your AI to expansively produce the answers to your questions is probably the greatest time saver in the process, but also the one that will require the most oversight from you. Because AIs are trained on a lot of data from a lot of different places, it’ll likely say things in its response that just aren’t true about your business.

On the other hand, it will probably only take your AI seconds to produce a pretty robust response to each of your questions, and it will probably match your company’s practices and values fairly well, though maybe not in every particular. If there’s something in your AI’s response that doesn’t fit your company, you can just ignore it (you’re not going to be using the whole responses anyhow), or ask your AI to rewrite the response without that aspect.

Step 3: cutting back

Cutting your text back to pithy statements that include your golden phrases will likely still need your primary involvement. AI is good at producing a lot of text, and thoroughly exploring an idea. It can even do a passable job at summarizing writing to be more concise.

But the point of the expansive answers in our Quick & Dirty method in the first place is to give you plenty of material to sort through for those golden nuggets that resonate with you. You’re looking for some key surprising phrases that really make things come alive. If those phrases resonate with you, they will likely resonate with your visitors. It really is kind of like panning for gold.

Your AI won’t be able to pick out those golden phrases for you. You’re the one who’s going to need to select them from the text that your AI produced.

Step 4: final formulation

Once you’ve got your golden phrases, you can ask your AI to weave them back into paragraphs or phrases that’ll go into your site. Remember that on the web, less is more as you race against the clock to get info to your audience. Initially you want the AI to write expansively so you have plenty of material to choose from, but then what you’re actually going to put on the web should be pretty concise.

AI little help changes everything

Some people take weeks to come up with their website content. Ideally you’ll have your website content already in hand as you approach a dev agency about a new website. When that doesn’t happen, it’s a continual frustration at SeaMonster Studios. That's why we put together the Quick and Dirty method in the first place.

Using our original Quick and Dirty method might cut down the time it takes to produce your content to a single afternoon, but using a friendly AI to help you out might even cut your time down to a single hour.

So before you start your next web project, make sure you call for a little help from the AI of your choice to use the Quick and Dirty method of content generation.