Today, SEO expert, Lily Ray asked this question…

“By the time you’ve figured out the effective prompts to write “good” AI content, then employed experts to review it for accuracy and embellish it with unique insights…

I wonder if you wouldn’t have been better off just having the expert write the content in the first place.”

And, it got me thinking about the buzz that’s still out there about scaling content, especially with our new AI toys that we all have at the ready.

Is AI content really a shortcut? Are there really any easy, fast, cheap ways to create quality content?

While I love building efficiencies in our business, there are some things that you just can’t cut corners on.

Fast, cheap, and easy is not the way to build a lasting publication, especially when it comes to content.

In the past year and a half at Venture 4th Media, we’ve published almost 10,000 articles. But this year, we made a strategic decision to slow down our content publishing.

Why?

Content Quality: We wanted to maintain and improve the quality of our content. Content is our product, and while there are many things we cannot control, we can take full ownership of what we publish.

More Expertise: Working with subject matter experts takes time. Most of our SME writers are not full-time content creators, they are too busy doing the things they love outside the digital walls. It takes time to actually do the things as well, we needed that time and space to make our publications even better.

Our subject matter experts are involved in every part of content creation, which takes time and effort, it’s not as simple as pulling some data from a few SEO tools.

Time to respond to data: It might seem counterintuitive to say that slower publishing gives you more time to evaluate the data (because you have less data to evaluate) but it really can. Our approach to strategic content building has been to fire bullets, then cannonballs, which means we publish a few pieces of content, look at early data, then publish into the areas we see the most potential.

But the early data doesn’t always tell the full story, sometimes it takes time for a site to grow. We want to be able to publish into our ‘winning categories’ and not just publish a ton of content into the void.

I know a bit about scaling content, and I know that the only content worth scaling is quality content. I’ve seen firsthand the pitfalls that can happen as you scale content and learned a few lessons the hard way, that’s for sure.

The Pitfalls of Fast, Cheap, and Easy Content Creation

It’s easy to get caught up in all the AI/SEO hype out there. The allure of fast, cheap and easy content creation has always been out there — we’ve seen it in SEO for decades, but here’s the rub…

Creating quality content is not easy. It’s not cheap. And, it definitely takes time to create.

Here are just a few pitfalls for publishers who think the fast, cheap, and easy is going to work:

It works, until it doesn’t.

I’ve said this so many times, and it’s true. Just looking back at the history of SEO, and we can see this principle over and over again. For those looking for the cheap, the fast, and the easy, there are plenty of SEO ‘gurus’ out there that will share a growth chart, telling you how easy it was to grow this site, or scale this content strategy.

But, after rounds and rounds of Google updates over the years, where are these big gains?

For those of us who are in this for the long game, there just are not a ton of shortcuts when it comes to producing high-quality content at scale.

Even if you care about the content you are creating, hire the best experts and do all the best practices in SEO things, not everything is going to work. There are so many factors to actually building quality content and creating a long-lasting publication.

Creating content is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of business model. I’ve seen enough 'good’ content get suddenly hit with another Google update to tell you that it takes ongoing optimization and focus to grow and maintain a successful content brand. If you’ve published shoddy content from the start, you’ll be facing a much bigger hill to climb to turn things around. That’s going to cost ya!

You pay now, or you pay later in content.

The publishers that try to save money and time in the content creation part of the process often find that they are left with new problems to solve — I mean, how long does it take to review hundreds, if not thousands of mediocre, rushed content pieces? What is the true cost of those early ‘gains’?

In business and in life, I often say that the cheap comes out expensive and it’s so true in content creation as well. So, my advice — invest in quality content from the start and look for other ways to automate and save money in your business.

More content does not equal more topical authority.

I’ve heard this argument a few times in certain SEO circles and it’s one of those things that sounds like it might be true, but it really isn’t. Mass-producing thousands and thousands of articles on a topic does not mean you are going to have topical authority, there is so much more to building topical authority in a niche than that.

To create a site with real topical authority, you need to have some real-deal subject matter experts ‘in’ on the entire content creation process, from keyword and topical research to content clustering to creating content missions and writer guidelines.

Building real topical authority starts with living and breathing in a niche, outside of the SEO tools that most of us have at our fingertips.

With the onslaught of AI-creation tools, there are going to be a lot more mediocre content sites and publications that try to mass publish their way to topical authority, only to find that it’s much more complex than simply making sure a topic is covered on their site.

It can take months of topical coverage and building out a content cluster for a publication to be seen as a topical authority, even for well-established brands.

Developmental Editing does not come cheap but is even more important when the inputs are weak.

I think a lot of publishers underestimate the time it can take to actually fully edit a ho-hum piece of content. Even with better inputs, and lots of testing in AI tools (this takes time to learn and do as well), the outputs are not quite publish-ready.

Now, give that to a developmental editor. If they are good, it is going to take them more time to properly edit this type of content and that is going to eat into any cost savings in content creation.

A good developmental editor comes with their own niche expertise as well and it can be painful and slow to edit an entire piece of content that has not graced an expert, written by a generalist writer, or completely AI-created. Trying to save money in one part of content creation often leads to an unbalanced load of costs in other parts of content creation.

Weak, thin, or crappy content will bring down an entire site. 

This wasn’t always true. I’ve seen plenty of examples in my day of a site that had one or two outliers that would get 90% of the traffic on a site, but my friends, times have changed.

After the ongoing Helpful Content shifts, one or two stellar pieces of content are not going to bolster an entire site. For years, Google has been encouraging publishers to publish quality content. They have pushed these guidelines over and over again.

If you are relying on one or two stellar posts to keep your site going, you are literally building your site on quicksand. It will eventually crumble. So, even if you think you can save time and money on ‘other’ pieces of content to support your winners, think again. This is an outdated strategy that won’t work in the long run.

Human editors will take shortcuts too if the mission is getting more content out the door and published quickly.

When we were scaling our content publication, we had to take a hard look at both writing quality and editorial. Over the past few years, we continually re-evaluate our writing teams, making sure to only have the top subject matter experts + quality writers creating our content.

Same with editorial. I’ve experimented with several types of editorial over the past few years and I can tell you that if editors ‘feel’ like they need to push content out quickly, they will take shortcuts in their editorial. I call this the ‘editor checklist’ effect and it really does happen.

Even if an editor gets paid hourly, if the mission from the top is to push content out quickly, that’s exactly what they will do. To ensure that they are at least checking for the basics, editors will ‘check off’ certain key things from a checklist, but won’t take the time to look deeper or dig into real editorial improvements.

Anyone can become a checklist editor, but the quality of the content suffers. Editors become skimmers, rather than looking at the entire piece of content for flow, continuity, and uniqueness — quality signals take time to evaluate. I’ve had to remove a couple of checklist editors in my day and I can tell you that it takes a lot of time to go back and ‘re-edit’ this kind of content.

Writers who work with this type of editorial don’t improve and learn quickly that they only need to do the minimum to get pushed through to the next step in editorial. Writers don’t improve unless the editorial pushes them to improve - this takes time.

While the lure of quick, easy, cheap content will always be out there for some, the long-lasting implications come at a cost, and for us, that’s too high of a price to pay.

Some Things to Read and Ponder

Here are some dig-in resources that I hope you’ll love!

While Google scrambles to come up with an official policy on AI Content (and whether publishers should tell readers if something is AI-created or not), one thing is clear — it’s still about quality outputs.

While I am still a big fan of WordPress, I’ve been really curious about other CMSs, especially Webflow as I love the branding and design elements there! Thinking about switching? Check out this Weblow CMS Guide and find out if this is the CMS for you!

If you are not getting indexed by Google, could it be your content quality? To quote, “Unless you are publishing something utterly unique and something that people are actually interested in, it's pretty hard to get stuff indexed. That's because the internet grew to a size where it's basically not indexable in its entirety.”

My Favorite Tweets of the Week

Thank you again for reading! Would love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Cheers! Amy

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