How I use AI to write blog content that is actually worth reading

I write a lot of blog content. Some for clients, some for myself. Some of it ends up on LinkedIn. And lots of it is drafted with the help of AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

What I have learned, after a fair amount of trial and error, is that AI is a brilliant collaborator and a useless oracle. The quality of what comes out is almost entirely determined by the quality of what goes in. Which means the actual skill is not in the writing. It is in the briefing.

Here is the method I use, step by step.

Step one: decide what the post is for

Before opening any tool, I write down what the post needs to do. Not in marketing language. In plain terms.

A post that exists to rank in Google for a specific search is a different post to one that exists to be shared on LinkedIn. A post written to attract new clients is a different post to one written to reassure existing ones. A post designed to be cited by ChatGPT when someone asks about a topic is different again.

Pick one. Write it down in a sentence. Something like: "I want this post to rank for people in the local area searching for grey blending, and I want it to gently move readers toward booking a consultation." That sentence becomes the spine of everything that follows.

If you cannot write that sentence, no AI tool in the world will help you, because there is nothing to help with yet.

Step two: write a brief, not a prompt

Lots of people type a single line into ChatGPT and call it a prompt. A line is not a brief. A brief is several paragraphs.

A useful brief always contains four things:

The business. Who you are, what you do, what makes you different from the next one along.

The location. Where you operate. Even for online businesses, geography shapes language. A salon in a market town in Sussex writes differently to a salon in central Manchester.

The reader. Not the demographic. The actual person. Their age, their stage of life, what they are worried about, what they have tried before, what they want.

The outcome. The sentence you wrote in step one.

Then, and this is the bit lots of people miss, tell AI what to ignore. If you leave the brief open, the tool will drift toward whatever the internet tends to say about your topic. That average is exactly what you do not want. So I usually add a paragraph that says something like: "Do not write generic salon content. Do not cover topics already covered well elsewhere. Stay inside the moment a client is deciding to switch."

A rough rule. If the brief could have been written by any business in any town, the post will be too.

Step three: get titles, not drafts

I do not ask AI for a finished post on the first pass. I ask for ten title ideas based on the brief.

Titles are cheap. Drafts are expensive. If you go straight to a draft, you end up editing a thousand words to fix a flaw you could have caught in a ten-word title.

Ask for titles. Read them. Cross off the ones that sound like AI wrote them. The remaining three or four are your shortlist.

Step four: validate the titles in Google

This is the step almost everyone skips, and skipping it is why so much AI content sinks without trace.

AI can confidently invent questions that no real person has ever asked. The titles will sound plausible. They will scan well. And nobody will ever search for them.

So I put every shortlisted title into Google. I look at the "people also ask" box. I scroll to the bottom and read the related searches. If my title sits comfortably alongside what is already there, it stays. If Google looks confused, I rework it until it reads like something a real person would actually type.

A good blog title sounds like a spoken question. A bad one sounds like a headline.

Step five: decide where the post is sending the reader

Every blog post should link to somewhere else on the site. A service page, a booking page, another post that goes deeper. The blog is the path. The thing you actually sell is the destination.

I decide the link before I write. Not at the end when I am tired. At the start, so the whole post leans toward the right place by the time the reader reaches the bottom.

This is also a thing AI cannot do for you, because it does not know your site map, and even if you gave it one, it does not know which page you most want to send people to.

Step six: ask for a draft, but specify the shape

Now, and only now, I ask for a draft. The prompt looks something like this:

Using the brief above, write a draft of "How long does grey blending last?" Open with a short, honest answer in two or three sentences. Then go deeper into the factors that affect how long it lasts. Include a section on what a client can do at home to extend it. Close with a soft line about booking a consultation if they are unsure which approach is right for them. UK English. Around eight hundred words. Warm but expert tone. No filler phrases. No "in today's fast-paced world" openings.

Notice how much of the post is already decided. The opening shape, the sections, the close, the tone, the word count, the things to avoid. The AI is doing the typing. The thinking has already happened.

Step seven: finish it in your own voice

The draft will sound like a draft. It will be slightly too neat, slightly too polite, and slightly too willing to use words like "elevate" and "leverage."

Your job is to make it sound like you. The opinions you would only put in writing, the way you actually talk to clients, the local detail nobody else would know, the things you can say that no AI can. If a sentence could have come from any business, rewrite it until it could only have come from yours.

The bit most people skip is the bit that matters. A draft is a draft. A published post under your name should sound like you wrote it.

The seven steps, in one place

One. Decide what the post is for, in one sentence.

Two. Write a brief that names the business, the location, the reader, the outcome, and what to ignore.

Three. Get titles, not drafts.

Four. Validate every title in Google before committing.

Five. Decide where the post is sending the reader before you write.

Six. Ask for a draft, and tell the tool the shape you want.

Seven. Finish it in your own voice.

The whole thing usually takes me about an hour per post, of which the AI saves me maybe twenty minutes of typing. The rest, the thinking, the briefing, the validating, the editing, is the work. That has not changed. The tool has not removed it. It has just made the typing faster.

Which is fine, because the typing was never the hard part.