How to edit AI content

Hi Penfriends,

Tim is doing the most meta of meta things.

He’s editing an article generated by Penfriend about how to edit AI written articles…so that one day those articles rank, bringing us customers who’ll use Penfriend to generate AI written articles…who’ll then need help understanding how to edit those AI written articles.

Are you still with me?

We’ll never tell you to publish Penfriend articles straight to your blog because articles written by AI just aren’t good enough yet. Even ours.

Today, our job is to get you 90% of the way there, saving you time, money, and fulfilling the productivity promise AI made to you.

Every day we’re working on things that should push that 90% higher, making your job on the other side much easier.

But, there’s still some tweaking you can do, to make the article YOURS.

Let’s break down what making an article YOURS means. Whether you use Penfriend or any other AI writing tool, this should help.

Y = Your voice

Voice and tone. My copywriting nemesis. I’ll save my rant about tOnE oF vOiCe guides for another day, and cut right to the chase.

Language is entirely subjective.

What’s conversational and chatty to one reader is embarrassing and cringey to another.

Which means, we’ll never nail tone* by prescribing characteristics to an array of choices like “casual”, “formal”, or “direct”.

And while our series of prompts somewhat dictate the tone of the articles, you’ll still need to tweak them to fit your style.

*We actually have a few ideas on how to do it well, but that’s a 2024 thing 👀

O = Optimize

You can optimize for two things:

1. Ranking

2. Conversion

Today, Penfriend generated articles can't be fully optimized for SEO and there are things only you know about your customers that will tempt them to convert.

A tool like Surfer can help you increase the chances your Penfriend article will rank. It gives you a content score out of 100 and indicates things like:

• how many times you should use certain words

• which keywords should be in headers

• how many images you should use

I say indicate because there is no tool that can guarantee ranking.

That’s why Tim advocates for getting the Surfer score to 75, publishing, and seeing how Google treats it.

When I put this one in, straight from Penfriend, the score was 72. It took 10 minutes of tweaking to get it to 85.

U = Update

You’ll need to check all facts and quotes Penfriend adds to your articles because of AI hallucination.

It’s natural to think AI hallucinations are a fault of either the LLM, or the prompting user. In fact, hallucinations are part of the AI trade off.

There are ways to mitigate the hallucinations, which we do for your Penfriend articles, but it’s incredibly difficult to completely avoid them.

So, you’ll need to meet Penfriend in its dream world and occasionally bring it back to reality.

R = Relatable

The internet is awash with generic content written by inexperienced people. And experience is something Google really cares about, to the point where they’ll ruin a perfectly good acronym E-A-T with another “E”.

• E = Experience

• E = Expertise

• A = Authority

• T = Trust

That must have been painful.

What’s more relatable than one human guiding another through their real world experience? It means adding things like:

• screenshots of the tool you actually used

• quotes from the CEO you actually interviewed

• actual pictures of the actual shell-crab-thing from the actual Maldivian island you visited

  

  Go ahead and relate to shell-crab-thing

S = Strengthen

You can strengthen your article by understanding your low-attention, low-energy reader is also a looker and a watcher.

Walls of text turn even the most dedicated of readers off. We humans are nothing more than monkeys in clothes. We need stimulating!

And, people consume content better in tonnes of ways. Alex Hormozi talks about 25% of his audience coming from his books. The other 75% come from other things like his YouTube videos and his podcast.

Here’s Tim’s own rule:

This quote is a good meta example of breaking up the text in this email. As were the screenshots, crabby pic, and colourful blocks beginning each section.

We’ve designed Penfriend to suggest when something in your article could be enhanced by other media. We call them Manual Checks.

I’ll link to Tim’s blog in an upcoming newsletter because he’s still tweaking it, but hopefully you found this helpful in the meantime.

Have a great weekend!

John, Tim, and Inge